7/8/25: Alex Jones Cries Over Epstein, Glenn Greenwald On Trump Fascism, Peter Thiel Antichrist, Texas Floods, LA ICE Invasion

25:09I'm just a little bit doubtful that it's worse than other previous presidents, especially ones with very strong kind of personal charisma like Obama had, who I think did inspire similar things. But at the end of the day, whether it's more or less or whatever, I agree with you that directionally, that is what's going to happen.

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27:02All right, well, let's talk about some of the people and the company specifically that has done very well under the Trump administration is clearly playing this game very effectively. And that would be Palantir and some of the affiliated personalities around that, including billionaire Peter Thiel. Let's put this up on the screen to sort of set the stage. I think this is still the case that Palantir is the top, it's certainly one of the top stock performers in the Trump 2.0 era. It has soared 74 % this year alone. No surprise, there's all sorts of linkages, first of all, between Palantir and this government, including through the vice president, J.D.

27:42Vance. And also, they have been a beneficiary of significant contracts from the federal government. This is something that you have covered extensively. I also want to get your reaction to some recent comments from Peter Thiel, who's a billionaire investor in Palantir specifically. But before we get to that, you've done such great reporting on Palantir and on this relationship and on what it means for individuals and privacy in this country moving forward. So if you could just lay out a little bit of what you found here for people, I would love to have you explain some of that. Sure. So in March, on March 20th, exactly two months after being inaugurated, Trump issued an executive order basically consolidating all data and intelligence that every individual agency collects under the auspices of Palantir.

28:33Essentially saying Palantir will be the kind of overseer technologically to make sure that this information doesn't remain siloed. I actually prefer that information be siloed when the government collects it about us because then it becomes more protected and less capable of creating this comprehensive picture of us. But this executive order basically destroyed any of this attempt to keep it isolated. You know, here's financial information with the IRS. Here's, you know, health information with HHS or CDC. Here's other stuff with Homeland Security. It's all now being consolidated under Palantir under the justification that it's necessary to track illegal immigrants.

29:08It's necessary to attract criminals. And, you know, the interesting thing here, Crystal, is back in 2002, there was this really creepy agency that was created under Donald Rumsfeld called the Total Awareness Information Office, Total Awareness Information. It was led by John Poindexter, a big figure in Reagan and Bush. And that was when Palantir was founded in 2002. And one of the first things it did was met with Poindexter and tried to convince him that Palantir was situated, Peter Thiel and Alex Carp, who now runs it, to oversee this total information awareness department, to basically be the sole contractor that has the sophistication and technology necessary to collect it all, analyze it all, put it in one place.

29:48Even in 2002, the phrase total information awareness was too creepy. It was a bridge too far. It never really happened. We know it eventually happened. That was the Snowden reporting. But now it's happening even more aggressively all under one specific contractor, Palantir, who was run by not just founded by Peter Thiel and a billionaire investor, but run by Alex Karp, who has some of the most twisted sociopathic views of the world of what American power should be about, how it should be exercised of anyone I've ever seen. And for a movement, the Trump movement MAGA, that claimed to be so alarmed by deep state power, by unconstrained spying domestically on American citizens to watch this consolidation all under one company in the name of obviously keeping us safe, et cetera.

30:31The same thing, the Patriot Act and all the other warrantless eavesdropping programs that we were subjected to was ushered in on that same justification. It is alarming in the extreme. But I understand why it's not being talked about that much because it is a little bit complicated. You have to dig into these orders to how the government is structured. But Palantir is a very dangerous menace to essentially all of our basic rights. And the power that they have now is at the highest peak. Another story that you highlighted that I'd like for you to dig into for people a little bit is the army turned four big tech executives, including one from Palantir, I believe, into officers.

31:09And so you had this direct merging of the world of big tech with the military, like direct merging. And of course, we're not Pollyanna here. We know how close and symbiotic that relationship is. We talk a lot about the military-industrial complex. This seems to me to be another level, and it didn't get nearly the attention that it deserved. It was so interesting. I, of course, have been very critical of some of the excesses of democratic rhetoric when it comes to Trump. You know, you're throwing around the word fascism. I think a lot of people throw that word around without ever giving much thought to what it actually is and what it means.

31:45One of the defining hallmarks, though, of fascism, if you study it, you know, like in a scholarly way as developed by Mussolini or whatever, is the merging of state and the private sector all for one unified cause. So there's no tension between the private and the public sector. It's all one nation. Everything merged for some national purpose. And so to take the top executives of Palantir, OpenAI, Meta, and several others and commission them into the U.S. Army as lieutenant colonels so they now have an oath to serve the military, they talk openly and proudly about how they now have this obligation to do so while at the same time running.

32:23The companies that are collecting all this data about us that are developing AI in ways we really don't fully understand and not just having a partnership between public and private. There is always some tension still, but actually a formal explicit integration. I'm not saying the commissioning of all these five guys is a big deal in and of itself, but it's very illustrative of the trend in which this is going where there is really no separation. There's no tension. There's no impediment. And everything is sort of being employed and utilized for this unified national vision. And that is a hallmark of fascism is always classically studied and understood.

33:03I'd love for you to elaborate a little bit on that, Glenn, because I think you're someone who weighs your words carefully. And so for you to say that, I think, is extraordinary. And it's obviously not a word that you have just thrown around to your willy nilly. And so not only do you have that merging of corporations with the military, you have the shipping of people with no due process to SECOT. You have the calling up of the National Guard in L.A., thousands of troops, the deployment of the Marines in L.A. I mean, there aren't even anti-Ace protests there anymore. Like, the pretext of that is just preposterous.

33:37You have the kidnapping of college students who dared to, say, write an op-ed that was critical of Israel. and holding them on grounds that are, you know, protectual and a basic assault on the First Amendment that are extraordinary. You now have an effort to target actually naturalized citizens as well and to denaturalize them. Those are just some of the things, you know, that we could throw out there that seem to be, you know, fascistic in nature. How are you thinking about this administration and that conversation about whether this is, this administration is pushing at its core a fascist ideology.

34:18One of the problems I've had with the way Democrats often think about Trump is I think people try to depict him as some radical aberration from the American tradition, whereas to me, he always has just been a natural extension of everything that came before. So everything that you're describing here, all these powers of deprivations of due process and denials of free speech. This just didn't appear when Trump got inaugurated. These are things that have their roots. I mean, there was a censorship program that the Biden administration practiced very aggressively to coerce and pressure and threaten big tech companies to remove dissent.

34:51A lot of the due process deprivations go back to the war on terror, which never went away. This was never dismantled, this machinery that was constructed after 9-11 that we were just talking about. The intelligence surveillance state didn't disappear, even though we unveiled it and uncovered it after Snowden. So the foundations have been laid on a very bipartisan basis. That said, I have been very vocal about many of the genuinely grave attacks on core liberties. And now instead of justifying it in the name of terrorism, it's typically justified in the name of immigration, but also still terrorism when it comes to people who are accused of terrorist group alignment or allegiance simply because they're criticizing Israel.

35:30So a lot of this has long extensions over the last 25 years from both parties, but it's kind of on steroids now because the project of the Trump administration in the transition was to figure out what they did wrong in the first term that made them too weak and to eliminate all constraints on their ability to do what the president wanted. And I think they actually did a much better job than a lot of people assumed they were capable of doing. And you're kind of seeing the manifestations of that in ways that I do consider extremely alarming. I think that's all very well said. And the putting on steroids of the previous trends is certainly the way that I view this administration as well.

36:10Not to say, I mean, if you look at the one big, beautiful bill, right, the priorities there of gutting the social safety net to give a giant tax cut to the rich while funding a massive expansion of the surveillance state and national security, that is at home with any Republican administration in my entire lifetime and some of the Democratic ones as well. But the extent that they take it to, both with that and the assault on liberties is what, to me, puts them in somewhat of a different category than the things that I've seen previously in my lifetime.

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38:12$15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. I do want to get your reaction to these Peter Thiel clips that have been circulated. This is from a Ross Doubt that interview last week. And the reason that Peter Thiel is important is not only because he is a billionaire, but he is someone who is very influential. He is very ideological. He is very influential specifically in terms of this administration. So this is a person that you really should be listening to the things that he has to say. And so Douthat asked him some pretty interesting questions.

38:49Peter Thiel has been talking about his view of how the Antichrist might arise. And his theory is effectively that someone like a Greta Thunberg, as the example he specifically uses, would come in and claim that they're trying to save us all and, you know, create peace and safety and unity and save us in this instance from the climate crisis. And they would use that as a way to create a totalitarian, one-world government, and that would be how we get the rise of the Antichrist. And Douthat sort of flips that on him and says, well, isn't it possible that the tools you are creating and helping to create through entities like Palantir for mass surveillance, isn't it possible that that could be the means by which the Antichrist rises?

39:36Let's go ahead and take a listen. This is D2 to that exchange. My very specific question for you, right, is that you're an investor in AI. You're deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance, in technologies of warfare and so on, right? And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to sort of impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you were building, right? Like, wouldn't the Antichrist be like, great, you know, we're not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far, right?

40:24I mean, isn't that a concern? Wouldn't that be the, you know, the irony of history would be that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?

40:40There are all these different scenarios. I obviously don't think that that's what I'm doing. I mean, to be clear, I don't think that's what you're doing either. I'm just interested in how you get to a world willing to submit to permanent authoritarian rule. Well, but again, there are these different gradations of this we can describe, but is this so preposterous, what I've just told you, as a broad account of the stagnation that the entire world has submitted for 50 years to peace and safetyism? This is 1 Thessalonians 5.3. The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety. So, Glenn, what did you make of that answer?

41:29And what do you personally put the odds at that Peter Thiel is himself the Antichrist? I mean, I guess if you were to force me to place my money in a casino on any one individual of the 8 billion people on earth being the Antichrist, he would be one of the top two or three people I might consider. Yeah, same. But I do think, yeah, but there was another interesting part that's very related where I'm sure you saw this and I actually did like a 20, 25 minute, we do a Q &A on Friday night, someone asked me about it, I did like a 25 minute response on it, where Ross Too Fat asked him, do you actually favor the continuation of the human species?

42:03Like, do you favor the survival of humanity as it is? And he basically was saying no. He refused to say yes. He was stuttering around like, you know, way more than he usually does. It wasn't like an autistic stuttering. It was like, really, he was struggling with that question. And Ross was like, that's a very basic question that should be an easy yes. Like, I'm asking you, should humanity survive? And he basically described this trans. Yeah, that's something we should all have. That's like the warm up question that I think we should all be able to answer quickly. But he couldn't because he has this very transhumanistic vision that is shared by a lot of Silicon Valley tycoons like him.

42:39They basically view themselves as transcendent beings, as kind of the Ubermensch. And there's a lot of reasons why billionaires become accustomed to thinking that way. They're surrounded by people who treat them that way. They have the kind of power that makes them believe that they're uniquely capable of doing that. Mark Zuckerberg talking to a Rogen show about merging technology and robots and artificial intelligence with humanity to create a different form of human, a superior form of human. and a lot of them have this vision that is essentially, in my view, so anti-human. It's like a kind of vision where our efficiency and our utility is going to be maximized, even if it means the elimination of all the things that we think about as being the essence of humanity in a way that would destroy whatever you think about as the soul or the spirit or whatever.

43:26So if you want to talk about the Antichrist and coming and attacking humanity with the intention of destroying it, I do agree with Ross's premise that it seems like a lot of what Peter Thiel is doing is way more likely than, say, Greta Thunberg, who has spent the last 18 months protesting the genocide in Gaza, not very Antichrist-like to me, in order to do that. And I think the fact that, you know, obviously the Antichrist comes and poses as a noble and benevolent figure. And there he is saying safetyism. The whole point of Palantir is based on safetyism. Let us spy on you to keep you safe. Like the projection there is so remarkable.

44:00Well, and also actually put D4 up on the screen here, guys, because, you know, he's invested in AI and they haven't almost, I shouldn't even say almost, they have a religious belief around what AI will do for the world and will do for, you know, effectuating this outcome of transhumanism and allowing them to live forever like they are literally gods. You know, it's complete with like, you know, the story of redemption and forces of evil that are trying to stop them. And they are in the driver's seat in terms of the direction of AI regulation or lack thereof. You can see here that Americans are deeply opposed to just letting a rip with AI.

44:45This is overwhelmingly bipartisan sentiment of like, we need to be thinking about what all of this means. And even if you don't subscribe to some of the more apocalyptic possibilities of basically like the AI taking over and like killing us all, there is going to be significant. There is already significant disruption from these technologies. And people like Teal have made themselves, you know, very influential in this administration. And again, the alliance with with J.D. Vance, I think, is very significant here as well. They have really gotten what they've wanted in terms of we're just going to race forward with this thing.

45:21We'll figure out the consequences later. We got to beat China. China's developing AI. We got to be first to get to artificial general intelligence. And it's very much at odds with how the vast majority of Americans want this to be approached. And in Thiel's ideology, he talks a lot about stagnation. He has this view that we've sort of like stagnated technologically and we haven't been innovating in the way that we previously had in this sort of transformative way. And I haven't thought that deeply about it to say whether I think that is true or false. But as an antidote to that, he believes that we should just race forward with this technology, come what may, and has this.

46:03And again, I don't think this is just Peter Thiel. He's very influential, but many of these Silicon Valley titans have this same view that effectively, you know, there's a, you know, there's a faith, like a religious faith that this technology is what we have to pursue. And it's going to actually create this bounty and this sort of utopia that they have in their minds. I absolutely agree with you that they have this utopian vision of what AI is that is obviously in their interest to foster and perpetuate because of how heavily invested they are in it and because they're the masters of the AI. So they want to get people to believe that it will just lead to bountiful, abundant, loving futures for all of us.

46:48So there's a lot of propaganda with that. But also one of the reasons why I'm so concerned, and I do think – I'm very of many minds about AI. I want to understand it better. I want to really – I don't think any of us really understand it, including the people who are unleashing it. Correct. And I think that we need debates about what kind of safeguards are needed. The problem is that it's not just what you've described, which is this kind of transhumanistic narcissism that the people in control of this technology possess and really do believe in as a religious faith. But it's also the competitive aspect.

47:23You know, as nation states now, we're told, oh, China has it and China does have it at least as advanced as the United States has. And that was that deep seek trauma to the American mind that it seems like they even might be ahead of us in terms of technology. And so the idea then becomes, well, if we limit it, the Chinese never would or the Iranians never would or all the bad people or the terrorists never would. And that is the really that to me is the biggest danger, this idea that for our own survival, we can't really allow any limits on AI because if we place limits on it, others won't and they will come to dominate us.

47:57Trump named as AI czar David Sachs, who's one of the co-founders of PayPal with Peter Thiel. He was the chief financial officer. I know David pretty well. Well, you know, he's I think there's I don't think he's like this Bond villain, but he definitely is somebody who really believes in the urgency of going forward with AI. Trump believes in that. Everyone around him believes that. And we're barreling toward a future, which I don't think people really understand without any kind of contemplation or debate for all because all the incentives of powerful people are to just barrel forward with it and have it unleashed with with zero restraints of any kind or even debate about whether we should allow that to happen.

48:36Yeah. Glenn, last question I have for you, and thank you for being generous with your time this morning, is, you know, I have long thought that we shouldn't have billionaires, that billionaires are sort of inconsistent with the democratic society. Because when you do amass that amount of wealth, the amount of commensurate power and disconnect from just like what ordinary people are going through really does create a challenge. It's almost an impossibility to have a truly sort of like democratic representative society when you have that much money, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few.

49:10But if I had any doubts about that view, those doubts have been swept aside by what I've seen in this era of Trump 2.0. I mean, first you had Elon Musk buying, you know, buying his ability to have this whole of government mandate through Doge, buying Twitter and making it his personal playground for whatever it is that he wants to do politically at the moment. You've had the specter of Bill Ackman, who's out there right now, you know, workshopping in real time how to intervene and get his candidate of choice. And to think specifically Zoran Mamdani, who won overwhelmingly in a Democratic primary.

49:42And he's trying to he's out there saying, I've got hundreds of millions of dollars available to a candidate who wants to come forward to try to defeat Zoran. You have Peter Thiel, as we've been discussing, and, you know, the influence of Palantir and what that means for everyone and the extraordinary access that he has. and, you know, the links with David Sachs and with J.D. Vance, et cetera. Where are you on this question of whether or not billionaires should exist and are consistent with a democratic representative society? Well, let me say this about that, which is there was that Zoran interview where he said, I don't think billionaires should exist.

50:16And everybody acted like, you know, that was like from the bread book of Mao or like, you know, right out of Lenin. And if you go back and look at the founders, who definitely were capitalists, they didn't believe in. I mean there was no sense of communism then, but they believed in capitalism. They were very wealthy. They were landowners, et cetera, and they wanted to preserve those prerogatives economically that they thought was their birthright. Nonetheless, they talked openly about how if economic inequality becomes too severe, it will inevitably spill over into political inequality and will undermine and subvert all the principles they're trying to create of nobody being above the law, of everybody being subjected to the same political rights.

50:52And so this is intrinsic in the idea of the American founding that, yes, you're going to have political equality and economic inequality. But if that economic inequality becomes too grave, too lopsided, the political rights will become purely illusory. And I think that's exactly what we've been seeing and what we're seeing even more so now. I mean it's hard. I've gotten to know some billionaires, and I think that it's hard to express what it does to people's minds. You know, we've seen that with fame, you know, how people who get too famous, too wealthy end up sick and ill and they die early because it's just too much for the human brain to handle.

51:30Being a billionaire is that times a thousand. And to have those people with that kind of mental outlook exerting almost unlimited power in our democracy, nothing good can come from that. I think that is well said. Glenn, thank you so much. Great to see you, my friend. Always good to see you, Crystal. Take care. What it sounds like when you road trip to the iHeartRadio Music Festival in the all-new Hyundai Palisade Hybrid. Wow, this is really nice inside. The Palisade Hybrid has more luxury than ever. Whoa, this sound system is awesome. Turn it up. More tech than ever. Sweet, you got the available built-in dash cam?

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52:44and even floors. When my kids go all in, I say go for it because I've got OxyClean to get the stains out. It's not clean unless it's OxyClean. You're the best field operative I've ever had. You were born for it. In 81, the embassy went down. We go 25 million in the wall. Where? Hotel Tehran. This is bad. Like run for the hills, man. Do it now. I don't have the money, but I've got something more valuable. you shall know the truth. The truth? They'll make you free. The Fix, in theaters September 11th. So we continue to keep our eyes on Texas, where the death toll from those horrific floods there in the Hill Country has risen now over 100.

53:34We still have a number of people who continue to be missing as the search and rescue effort now enters its fifth day. At the same time as that effort is ongoing and as huge questions remain about what happened with the National Weather Service, about these vacancies, about whether the cuts to the National Weather Service impacted the ability to properly forecast this extraordinary event, whether it impacted the community warnings that were received. But even as those questions persist, we now have a new question as we enter this phase of recovery. Kristi Noem, of course, the head of DHS. FEMA is under DHS.

54:19And this administration has really aggressively gone after FEMA. I mean, Trump has floated, getting rid of FEMA altogether. And they have sort of consistently pushed this idea that a lot of the recovery efforts should be, if not all of the recovery efforts, should be pushed to the states. So I wanted to start by focusing in a little bit on Kristi Noem here, whose role is going to become increasingly significant. Let's take a listen to some of her statements over the past several days as she's been asked to respond to this tragedy and potential federal government failures. For decades, for years, everybody knows that the weather is extremely difficult to predict, but also that the National Weather Service over the years at times has done well.

55:01And it At times, we have all wanted more time and more warning and more alerts and more notification. That is something and one of the reasons that when President Trump took office that he said he wanted to fix and is currently upgrading the technology. And the National Weather Service has indicated that with that and NOAA that we needed to renew this ancient system that has been left in place with the federal government for many, many years. And that is the reforms that are ongoing. They continue to elevate and up their notifications. You know, when your notification hit your phone, sir, I'm sorry, I can't speak to when that is, but I do carry your concerns back to the federal government and to President Trump.

55:40And we will do all we can to fix those kinds of things that may have felt like a failure to you and to your community members. We know that everybody wants more warning time. And that's why we're working to upgrade the technologies that have been neglected by far too long. So a couple of things that she says there. First of all, she says, well, weather's hard to predict. True. But, you know, you would have a better shot at an accurate forecast if you didn't just have Doge take a chainsaw to the National Weather Service. Something that was a plan that was laid out, by the way, in Project 2025, as Emily and I talked about yesterday.

56:17So this has been an ideological project of the conservative movement, not just of some, you know, Elon Musk freelancing here. This was an intentional plan for two reasons. Number one, primarily two reasons. Number one, they just don't like the federal government and would like to privatize a lot of that weather collection, weather forecasting. Number two, they feel that the National Weather Service and NOAA are part of what they call the climate change alarm industry. And so since they're revealing data that is inconvenient for the narrative that climate change is fake and we don't need to do anything about it, they just want to take an axe to it.

56:54So she says, well, you know, weather forecasting is hard, number one. The other thing she says there is that they're working on some new technology to improve the warning systems. People, reporters and people who are familiar with these agencies said, we have no idea what she's talking about. Like this appears to, maybe there's something we don't know about, but this appears to have just been made up to cover for the fact that what they've actually done is significantly degrade the capacity of this agency to be able to properly forecast and to be able to communicate those forecasts and those warnings to the community.

57:30So that was her cover-up. As I said before, we are now shifting into a recovery phase. And so you had possible failures on the front end of the forecasting, the warning, the communications with the community, which we covered yesterday. Now you have questions of potential failure of the FEMA response, given that FEMA has also been severely degraded. by this administration. Let's go ahead and put this as some independent reporting from an outlet called The Handbasket up on the screen who's been speaking with FEMA staffers about how this response is unfolding versus how under previous administrations the response would have unfolded.

58:08So the headline here is FEMA response to deadly Texas floods delayed and deficient with Kristi Noem in charge and staffers are sounding the alarm. This reporter, Marissa Cabas, says that disaster struck and then goes on to talk about how at this point normally you would have hundreds of staffers on the ground from FEMA and that right now they have, quote, barely any staff that's been deployed. And the acting administrator, David Richardson, is, quote, nowhere to be found. Per one source, if this is how they are going to do a major hurricane response, People are fucked. That's according to insiders at this agency, at FEMA, who say this is not going the way that it previously would have gone under other administrations that took disaster recovery more seriously and didn't have this ideological war on federal emergency management.

59:02So as the recovery unfolds, this is another thing we really need to keep an eye on and see how effective it ultimately is. We know that this administration has been, in this instance, they put in the emergency declaration so people can apply for female assistance. In other instances, I covered these horrific floods in West Virginia. And unfortunately, these extreme weather events, of course, with climate change are coming faster and more frequently and are more devastating. And they delayed for weeks that emergency declaration, which severely hobbled the ability people who are struggling and suffering, trying to put their life back together and recover from being able to get the assistance that they needed.

59:42In other cases, I know in a case in Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders had to go and use her personal relationships, which fortunately she can petition the king, to go and beg for that emergency declaration. So that has been a consistent pattern, not to mention the threats from this administration to effectively weaponize federal emergency assistance against states like California, where they have a political beef. Now, Texas is one of the states in the country that has the sort of largest, most developed state response. So it's a relatively large state. Obviously, they're familiar with natural disasters, including flooding.

1:00:18This is an area that is prone to flooding, although this is the worst flooding disaster anywhere in the country in a century or rivals some of the worst in a century. So Texas does have some state resources to be able to respond. But even in a place like Texas, you still are very dependent on the federal government being able to come in with money and staffing resources to be able to help. So that is something to continue to watch for and appreciate this report from the ground because I haven't seen anyone else really talking to the staffers from the agency and getting the scoop on how this response compares to previous ones.

1:00:52At the same time, we had Caroline Levitt being pressed on questions of the administration's response and whether the cuts to the National Weather Service here contributed to an increased loss of life. So more young girls in particular dead because of these chainsaw cuts to the National Weather Service. And Noah, let's go ahead and take a listen to E3. They gave out timely flash flood alerts. There were record-breaking lead times in the lead-up to this catastrophe. There is ongoing flood monitoring, and these offices were well-staffed. In fact, one of the offices was actually overstaffed. They had more people than they need.

1:01:32So any claim to the contrary is completely false, and it's just sad that people are pushing these lives. So I don't know what she's talking about there because those offices and the union that represents those workers, say, and all of the reporting before prior to even this tragedy unfolded says that these office were understaffed, that there were significant vacancies. And one in particular we talked about yesterday was the guy who was supposed to be, you know, who's meant to be in touch with the community and sort of spearheaded that was a veteran that people in the area really knew and trusted who had a lot of depth of expertise.

1:02:05He took that fork in the road resignation offer. and because you have a blanket hiring freeze, that position has not been filled. So not only did you lose, you sort of like pushed out this guy who was really impactful in the region, very knowledgeable in the region, exact sort of person that, and now he's a private consultant, exact sort of person you actually want in federal government. Not only do you lose that guy, you don't replace him with anyone. So there will be a lot of reporting in the days to come about the failures here on every level and whether those cuts had an impact. And whether or not we can pin down exactly whether there was an impact here or not, you have had significant warnings from all of the previous NWS heads who said, if you make these cuts, you are going to degrade the ability of the weather service to do its job and it will lead to increased loss of life.

1:03:05So those warnings are there as we head into the peak of hurricane season. Last piece I have to get to here. This is so, this is wild. I don't even know what to say about this. Put E2 up on the screen. Ted Cruz, Senator from Texas, known previously as Cancun Ted because he was caught in Cancun while a horrible natural disaster was unfolding in Texas. I believe that was when they had the electricity loss, power loss, and a deep freeze. People were literally freezing to death and he was in Cancun. Well, this time as disaster strikes, he's in Greece, caught vacationing in Greece as these floods hit.

1:03:48Now you could say, okay, well, how could he know, right? He couldn't know in advance. This came on very rapidly. You would have no way of knowing in advance that these floods were coming and that it was going to be devastating loss of life. But not only did he, was he there when it happened? Okay, we could forgive that. But he stayed. He was caught by tourists who were in the area who snapped that photo of him sightseeing days after the floods had hit as the search and recovery effort was ongoing. So he apparently didn't leave his vacation in Greece until Sunday to come back. So just absolutely extraordinary.

1:04:26This man once again caught vacationing while his own residents and constituents, his own constituents, suffer through one of the worst natural disasters, one of the worst flooding disasters that we have had in a century. All right, let's go ahead and turn to this unbelievable shocking images coming out of L.A. with this ice raid. All right, guys, so I was talking to Glenn Greenwald earlier about whether this was a fascist administration or not. And we certainly had a performance of fascism in L.A. Park that unfolded yesterday. Let's go ahead and put these images up on the screen of heavily armed, military-kitted-out immigration agents, including some on horseback.

1:05:09You can see these sort of fortified vehicles rolling through the streets, sweeping through the park in what appears to have been. And Ken Klippenstein was able to get leaked documents as to the purpose of this operation. appears to have been a show of force to demonstrate to L.A. and to other cities and localities around the country that they can operate effectively with impunity wherever and whenever they want. Mayor Karen Bass of L.A. came down to that park to confront agents and try to get them to leave. Let's go ahead and take a look at how that unfolded, sort of a chaotic scene where she asked to talk to their boss and to tell them they needed to move on.

1:05:57Let's take a listen. My comment is they need to leave and they need to leave right now. They need to leave because this is unacceptable. Who did you speak with? Just wait and see. Mayor Bass, who did you speak with on the phone just now? Unknown at this time whether they actually even made any arrests or whether it was purely just, hey, let's march through this park and show how big and bad we are for the cameras. You can put the LA Times reporting up on the screen here of the way they covered it. Their headline is, heavily armed immigration agents descend on MacArthur Park in LA. They say dozens of immigration agents, some on horseback, others carrying rifles in armored vehicles, sweat through MacArthur Park on Monday.

1:06:39An extraordinary show of force at the heart of LA's immigrant community. heavily armored border patrol officers with a fleet of white minibuses partially blocked the streets surrounding the park, which has become a source of crime and drugs in the area in the last few years. Activists with megaphones were able to warn locals at the park before the contingent arrived, according to police sources. The move comes days after President Trump signed a budget that will provide a mass infusion of funds to the Department of Homeland Security to ramp up its immigration enforcement to levels unseen before in the United States, L.A.

1:07:14has become the poster child of Trump's mass deportations plan as more than 1 ,600 people have been arrested between June 6th and June 22nd. Go ahead and put Ken Klippenstein's report here up on the screen because he actually got the leaked documents of what this operation was truly intended to do. Great reporting here from Ken. So he says exclusive Operation Excalibur in L.A. was a show of force. leaks from the military's LA deployment reveal Coca-Cola versus Pepsi rivalry, sweaty guardsmen, an abject failure. He goes on to write that today's homeland security operation was a mere show of presence.

1:07:52Internal army documents I've obtained say, ICE and customs agents dressed in military garb assaulted the park, which the documents describe as a hotbed of historic lawlessness and the founding location of MS-13, the Salvadoran gang. News media is describing the operation as an ominous crackdown, but National Guard sources tell me it was a botched laughingstock. The military aspect of the operation, codenamed Operation Excalibur, has not been previously reported. And there were some eight different, I believe, federal government agencies. Let me see here. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 different agencies that were involved in this show of force in this L.A.

1:08:36park. They were all codenamed different colas. That's why he says the Coca-Cola versus Pepsi rivalry. So the ATF was A &W. The CBP was Canada Dry. You had the FBI was Coke. And the LAPD was Pepsi. So this mass operation to march through the park and, as I said before, effectively demonstrate fascism for the cameras. You guys likely know the context and the backstory here. As was indicated in the L.A. Times article, L.A. has really become their sort of demonstration project of what mass deportation looks like. They love the fight with L.A. because you've got Karen Bass, the Democratic mayor. You've got Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.

1:09:18And you had those anti-ice protests, which turned violent at times with some throwing of water bottles at police officers, some torching of Waymo cars, some graffiti. That is all over. But they use as a pretext to call up thousands of National Guardsmen in a very legally dubious, by the way, operation. And so they federalized the National Guard in California. an absolutely extraordinary action that we've just sort of like moved past because it's been so crazy, everything else that has been going on. And not only that, not only did they federalize the National Guard, they also called up active duty Marines to come in to L.A.

1:10:02to deal with what ultimately was pretty run-of-the-mill protests. Those National Guardsmen, at least, I'm not sure about the Marines, they are still there. They're still there instead of doing any of the many other things that they could be doing, including continuing the recovery from the horrific fires that you had in and around L.A. So this is some of what they're doing with them. Mass show of force in a park planning these operations. And according to Ken, you know, many of the National Guardsmen that he was in contact with are humiliated by it. They say this is an embarrassment. Like, this is not the way that we are supposed to be operating.

1:10:45There was also, you know, some indication that, oh, well, maybe they would have the National Guardsmen start to cover their face and mask in the same way that the ICE agents have, which has contributed to the sense of rogue lawlessness of that agency. Oftentimes they show up in plain clothes, completely masked, looks like a kidnapping, indistinguishable. They won't identify themselves, sometimes won't show a warrant, won't indicate what law enforcement agency they're with, etc. So they wanted the National Guard to adopt some of those tactics. And apparently there was pushback on that because their view is we are in the community.

1:11:19We're meant to be here to help and serve our fellow Californians. And when you think about the typical assignments that they'd be receiving, things like helping out with recovery, That's the orientation that they are used to when they're engaging with fellow community members. So absolutely insane. And it does fit with, you know, broader plans from this administration as announced by Tom Homan, who is, you know, spokesperson for the most aggressive enforcement and most aggressive and cruel tactics that this administration has deployed when it comes to mass deportation. And he's threatening these type of operations everywhere in the country.

1:11:57And with the passage of the funding from the one big beautiful bill, they are going to have the resources to basically do whatever they want. Let's go ahead and play F5 and take a listen to Tom Homan. President Trump said it two weeks ago. We're going to double down, triple down the sanctuary cities. Why? Not because we're a blue city or a blue state, because we know that's where the problem is. So where we're going to send our assets, we want to send them where the problem is. Sanctuary City. So I've said it before, we'll flood the zone of sanctuary cities. If they don't let us arrest a bad guy in the county jail, they're going to arrest him in a community.

1:12:33We're going to arrest him at a work site. So we're going to increase community operation. We're going to increase work site enforcement operation. We're going to get the bad guy. So they don't want to help get out of the way. We're coming to do it. We're coming to do it. Flood the zone. And, you know, what he's saying there about going after immigrants at job sites, It's actually really significant. It has major implications for the distance between their rhetoric about immigrants and the reality of who immigrants are and the type of operations that are being conducted here. because there has been a Stephen Miller-directed focus on job sites in places like the Home Depot.

1:13:09That means that you have fewer resources actually to go after the genuine criminals because it's easy to just roll up on a Home Depot. It's a lot more difficult to find and locate and identify gang members who aren't just going to be there hanging out at the Home Depot. So if you're shifting resources towards we're going to chase down farm workers in the field, we're going to go to the Home Depot, we're going to go to the garment factory, which was another place that they went in L.A. that helped to kick off those anti-Ice protests, that means you're focused on that regular, most often law-abiding immigrants who may or may not be documented.

1:13:53and there's also been a lot of racial profiling here, you're focused on that and you are actually not focused on resources on finding and identifying and tracking criminals. So that is the effect of what these policies have really meant. Let's talk a little bit about the ICE funding, which is just, it's hard to wrap your head around the amount of resources that are about to flood into this rogue lawless agency. Put this up on the screen comparing the ICE budget. And again, this is not all of immigration enforcement. This is just ICE. $37.5 billion. Now it will be bigger than most of the world's militaries.

1:14:34So rivaling the military here of Canada and coming in significantly above places like Italy, Israel, Netherlands, Brazil. So you've got a massive budget here. You had one analyst who said once they get this budget amount into their coffers, over the next four years, they're going to have more money than the budgets of the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, the U.S. Marshals, and the Bureau of Prisons combined. This will be the largest, best-funded federal law enforcement agency in the history of this country. They're trying to hire 10 ,000 ICE agents. And I was just reading yesterday a piece on how we have previous examples, in particular during the Bush administration, of trying to staff up some of these law enforcement agencies really quickly.

1:15:30And what happens is, number one, You get, you know, because you're just trying to take whoever you can, you get huge issues with corruption. Number two, you get huge issues with complete lack of any sort of experience. And number three, think about the type of people who would be applying to do that job of getting kitted out in military gear to march through a park where moments earlier children were playing and sending people to alligator Alcatraz or shipping them off to Seacott with no due process. Like, just think to yourself about the type of people that that job would apply to, would appeal to.

1:16:10Those are probably not really the ideal people that you want doing what is already, you know, sensitive and intended to be, you know, under the Trump administration, certainly an absolutely cruel job. So that's the direction that we're heading in. This, you know, what we're seeing in this park in L.A., what we've seen in L.A. more broadly, what we've seen with Alligator Alcatraz, with Seacott, with the raids that we've seen across the country. They're just getting started here. And now they're going to have the budget with mass detention facilities built out by private prison contractors with huge influx of ICE agents with money to do basically whatever they want to do.

1:16:55This, what we're seeing now, is just the tip of the iceberg. All right, guys. Thank you so much for watching today. We are going to have actually a bro show tomorrow. Sagar and Ryan. Sagar will be back from recording with Tucker. I'm looking forward to seeing how that interview went. I think it dropped this morning. I'm not sure, but I haven't taken a look at it yet. And then be back to me and Sagar on Thursday. So hope everybody has a fantastic day and I will see you soon.

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