I want to step back and give you a framework for thinking about the moment we're in. All right? And I'm going to take you way back. I'm going to take you all the way back to 1935 because in 1935 something dramatic happened to the United States government and that was under President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt, a Democrat during the Great Depression. Congress passed and the president signed into law the Social Security Act. And what that did is it changed the relationship between individuals and the government. that is the government took on a responsibility for making sure that the elderly and children and differently aabled people and so on had some support. And what that did is it really reoriented the government in a pretty dramatic way. That is, you know, the elderly suddenly um didn't necessarily have to worry about being on the street or, you know, this actually came from somebody watching two elderly ladies eating out of a trash can. and you know if they still lived with their children they would bring a paycheck you know or or a social security check into their families. So it reoriented the country in a in a fairly dramatic way. But some other things also happened under the new deal. One of those was the idea that the government would try to treat um everybody in America all the men in America similarly and there were also gau gains for women as well. Now, that didn't actually happen. Certainly, black Americans and brown Americans and certainly indigenous Americans were not treated the same as white men. But there was this this devotion to that idea that it would want that America's laws would once again or would once be colorblind the way they had been designed to be after the Civil War. So, you got that, but you also got the federal government beginning to invest in infrastructure, for example, in the Tennessee Valley Authority, um, in in making sure that people had electricity in in making sure that people had access to decent roads. Now, that's going to take off after World War II. But what I'm trying to lay out here is the idea that government starts to be involved in the American uh, society in a different way than it had been before. And it also quite crucially begins to regulate business. It begins to step in and say to business people, hey, you know, you can't do anything you want. You can't do things like, for example, put your workers on a bus and drive them into the middle of the desert and push them off uh and make them make their way back to a town without any water to prove to them that they better do as you say. That actually happened um in Arizona. So um so that mattered a lot but what it also did is it was enormously popular. People really liked this government. It stabilized the country. It stabilized the economy. Gave people a sense that they could work their way up and the the country especially after World War II when the United States is one of the few countries that hasn't been completely destroyed by that war. So the economy booms. It really convinces people that this is the kind of government we need. And it's called the liberal consensus. Liberal meaning the idea that in order for individuals to be able to to to have the um opportunity to create their own futures, you need to have a government that makes sure they're not going to get squished by big business or um or by starvation, that they get educations, that they have access to health care, that there is a way to protect the individual, the the libre the individual person in um in a society. So there is this sense that this is the way America is going to be and Americans since then of all political parties for an overwhelming majority of them have liked that system. Now they don't agree about what the laws should all look like or how much infrastructure there should be and so on but they did agree that they liked that kind of a government and many of them thought it wouldn't go anywhere that this was here to stay. So when when um people uh when Democrats used to say, "Well, you know, the Republicans are trying to take away social security," there was a lot of people saying, "Oh, that's just ridiculous. You're fear-mongering. They'll never do that." Right? Okay. So, what happens is that beginning in the 1930s, but really taking off in the 1950s, you have a group largely made up of wealthy businessmen because entrepreneurs like that system. They like that level playing field. But more established businessmen don't like it because they don't like the idea either of business regulation. That's what they really don't like. And they don't like the idea of the taxation that is required to do things like pay for roads and schools and hospitals. So they begin to argue that this system is a form of socialism. Remember, you've got u the real fear after World War II of communism spreading across Asia and across uh from the USSR, from the Soviet Union. But they argue partly that it's socialism. They also make a big stand against the idea that it is being caused this this large government that provides these benefits for all Americans is coddling black people, brown people, and women. And that really takes off after the Brown. It takes off a little bit before that. It takes off as early as 1948 under um President Truman because he begins to desegregate the military, for example, and he puts together this this committee of people to talk about how civil rights really matter in America. But it really takes off after 1954 with the Brown versus Board of Education decision in which those people who object to business regulation and object to the idea of uh the taxes that that do things like underpin a social safety net and infrastructure um that that they don't want to pay those taxes. And they start to argue then that the whole point of there being this government, this government that does all these things, is to funnel the tax dollars of hardworking Americans, you defined usually as white men in in the literature of the time to undeserving people of color, black America and black Americans. Women are going to come in the 1960s, late 1960s, 1970s. That idea that the government that is serving everybody is a reflection of the the the demands of undeserving sort of unamericanish people of color and as I say later women really takes off after 1965 with the um uh voting rights act of 1965 which guarantees that people of color can vote and that that law is going to get expanded later on with the demand that we provide um ballots in a number of different languages. For example, then in the 1960s and then in the 19 into the 1970s under um Richard Nixon, those people who are objecting to that government for different reasons, and mind you, this is a fly driveby of American history. I mean, I should do I should stop and give you 10 hours on basically each sentence here, but um there is the the argument beginning in 1972 7172 before Row versus Wade that women who want to work outside the home known as women's livers by those people who don't like them are trying to destroy the American family and trying to to insist on um uh benefits from the federal government uh to to give them benefits that they don't deserve and that they want to use benefits for things like abortion. And this is where abortion starts to become a really big rallying cry for that reactionary right-wing movement because it begins to pull into that Republican coalition that stands against business regulation. religious traditionalists who um really begin to talk about abortion not as having anything to do with fetuses, but rather with freeing women from traditional marriages and from traditional hierarchies. And that's going to be really key because going into the 1970s then you're going to see um a a re-emphasis or an emphasis on traditional hierarchies of race and hierarchies of gender getting linked together to this idea of getting rid of that government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure and um uh protects civil rights and also works in the international level to to create all these alliances. I won't talk more about that today. Um, you see all of those things coming together in this idea of reinstating a hierarchical system that got overturned all the way back there in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act, but even before that in 1935 with the Social Security Act. Okay, you didn't come here for a history lecture, but that's a really important baseline to have because what you see in the 1980s is the rise of that radical right in and their takeover of the uh the White House and Congress under Ronald Reagan. And Ronald Reagan is the first president really to embrace this theory. And mind you, he he he does it more rhetorically than he does in in real life. He actually governs very differently. This is why everybody can find a Ronald Reagan they like. He talks one way, he governs in a very different way. But he embraces these ideas and this idea that the way that you create a a good America again is to go back to the time before we had this new kind of government back before 1935 is really part of his argument for and and again I'm broad brushing this here but part of the argument for the idea of getting rid of business regulation and getting rid of taxes. remember all that emphasis on getting rid of taxes because what Reagan and his people argue and mind you at the time not a lot of people believe this and that's again another rabbit hole I won't go into. You might remember George Bush I talking about voodoo economics. What they argued was that if you got rid of business regulation and you got rid of taxes, what that would do is it would free up investment capital for investors, for those big businessmen to pour back into the economy. And when it did that, they argued what would happen was that everybody's lives would get be better because the economy would grow so dramatically. And when that happened, you wouldn't need things like a social safety net and and private industry would invest in infrastructure and you certainly wouldn't need business regulation because those people who had all this money would be investing it in businesses that worked terrifically well. What they were essentially arguing was that the United States should go back to a fantasy version of the 1920s, which on paper for a while looked really good. Um but then of course it turned out that the benefits of the economic growth of the 1920s were not going uh widely throughout society. They were only going to a very small group of people and as a result you're going to see in October of 1929 the great crash. All right. So this was the idea and what you what you have seen though is that from the very beginning in the 1980s American voters didn't like this. They didn't like the deregulation. They didn't like the union busting. They didn't like the cuts to the social safety net and to education. And so in order to stay in power, that reactionary group of the Republican party, because this is this going to be very important that this is not the original Republican party or the Republican party of the 20th century. This is a faction that's going to take it over, especially in the 1990s. What they began to do was to focus on the idea of concentrating power in the executive branch. And you see this under Ronald Reagan when um his attorney general Edwin me says, you know, we're going to stack the courts so that no matter what voters do, the we are going to be able to stay in power. And you see it in 1986 with the idea of ballot integrity. They're going to start to they the Republicans are going to start to argue that the only way Democrats win office is by um by cheating. And so they say we've got to get rid of some of this Democratic voting. And you can see them trying to concentrate power with this very small group of of of people in the executive branch with a very strong president. And part of that and part of staying in power to do that at a time when people really don't like what they're doing is constantly to hammer on the idea that black Americans and brown Americans and women who want to work outside the home and later on they're going to argue um uh uh uh LG LGBTQ plus people that those are individuals who are demanding tax dollars without deserving them. And that's a really important construction because you can see the constant dog whistles in the 19 um 80s, but then by the 1990s, you're quite quite visibly going to get that coming much more to the surface in politics through things like the Willie Horton ad under George Bush um in in the uh the uh election where he uses that that hideously racist and misleading ad to try and turn white voters away from the Democrats by arguing falsely that it was uh Michael Dukakus, the Democratic nominee that year who had let this murderer and rapist out. That wasn't actually at all what happened. But you see increasingly this focus on black Americans, brown Americans, and women who want to work outside the home as people who want something for nothing, as people who are socialists. as people who are, as Rush Limbboy used to say, feminine Nazis, as people who are embrac embracing socialism or communism. And that focus on uh voters telling their voters that they must stick with the Republicans and their tax cuts and their deregulation to create this system that is going to work for them. Goes on for a couple of a couple of decades, a couple of generations even. And you end up in 2016 with the rise of Donald Trump who very clearly turns that sort of uneasy marriage between the very wealthy uh businessmen who want tax cuts and and deregulation to that marriage to the racism and the sexism and the homophobia of the base that they have created. So, and then, you know, I've talked about this before, how Trump actually gets rid of the establishment Republicans who have been um uh in power and basically courting that base without expecting to give them power and he actually gives power to the base and so on. Now, the reason I gave you that very long history there was because if you have that background, an awful lot of what is going on right now makes a lot more sense. All right. So, now with that back there, let's get into the questions you asked about today. And when you see how all over the map they are, I think it's going to be easier to see where they belong with now that I've given you the light bright outline, you can plug them in where they belong. So, one of the questions that I think is important to deal with here is and a lot of people asked about what is going on with the corruption, the extraordinary corruption of the Trump administration and why the magaz aren't really paying much attention to it when they were all over trying to invent corruption for uh former President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. Now, plug that into the system that I just explained to you and look at what you've got. You've got a Democrat, Joe Biden, who has been defined by the Republicans for two generations as a socialist or a communist who is trying to destroy America. By definition, he should be corrupt, right? So, they're madly searching for that and believing those stories about him, including the ones about him, you know, being part of um the sex trafficking ring and so on. I'll come back to that. But at the same time, since the 1980s, you have been seeing growing in the rhetoric of the Republican party the idea that, you know, some people really are just better than others. And that's that whole hierarchical idea, the idea that, you know, white men really are better than the black and the brown men and and and men really are better than women. And, you know, there's this hierarchy. And that hierarchy, which by the way is the same kind of hierarchy the United States saw in the 1840s and the 1850s about elite southern slavers. It's the same thing you saw in the 1890s with the rise of the robber barons. And it is also the same concept of hierarchy that you see in concepts of fascism, for example, and that the Nazis relied on. The idea that some people are better than others. Well, if that's the case that some people are better than others, Trump has made it very clear that he thinks he and his family are better than other people. You know, they are the ones who should run everything. They're the ones who can solve all these wars. They're the ones who can solve all these business problems. Regardless of what the State Department does, for example, sure, throw Steve Whit in there. He's like a billionaire, right? He's the one who knows how to run stuff. It doesn't matter that he has no training and doesn't speak Russian or whatever. These people just know how to get things done. Right? So, you can see that idea of some people are better than others and have the right to do these things because they should be the ones in power. They should be the ones calling the shots. They should be the wealthy people. All right? So I think that's where you can see where this concept of corruption and and you know we don't really have to do anything about that because this is really the way the world should be comes from. But I'm going to keep on going here. Um the uh let me see. So so I'm going to keep on going on that. One of the other things that I'm I'm not sure you asked about but that you ought to have because it's a really big deal is the extraordinary power here of tech bros. the the um technology billionaires who are calling the shots in a lot of American society right now. That too makes sense, right? They make a lot of money. Trump and his ilk think that they should the ones who should be running things and they have a right to extract resources from our country. And so you have what seems to me something we should all be paying extraordinary attention to these data centers that are taking extraordinary amounts of energy to power um this the AI to power AI um that is you know doing things like um collecting information on all of us and that they are in hopes that we are all going to become reliant on. You also see, let me see if I have more of those. Um, you also see um um another question that you asked about this. Um, you see the the the ways the many ways in which these very wealthy people who are on the ins with Donald Trump are not paying the penalty for breaking crimes. I mean, Trump is pardoning people right and left. Uh, but there there are certain kind of people, right, that he is pardoning. There are people who uh for some reason he has decided to pardon. There are certainly suspicions that there is some been something in it for him. He's pardoned more than 1,500 people during his time in office. He's creating this idea that some people are really better than others and have the right to rule. Now, on the other side of that questions you asked about were the extraordinary out in the open racist and dangerous um actions that we have seen against our neighbors. Um and a lot of people called out Trump's absolute rant in the Oval Office, I think it was yesterday, about Somali Americans, especially those living in Minnesota. and you know 95% of whom are US citizens 50% of whom were born in the United States and who are like all other immigrants to the United States uh uh com you know um contributing to the economy starting small businesses they commit crimes at a lower rate than nativeorn Americans that's a truism across American history um but but in his mind by virtue of the fact they have dark skin they by definition are looking for a handout And he talked about that. Remember he talked about the billions of dollars that they had stolen from the government. Um, you can see that that rhetoric that has become baked now into the kinds of policies that a lot of people asked about. a report today from Amnesty International that was reported about five hours ago in the the Guardian talking about allegations that there was essentially a torture box at the um facility in the Everglades that I refuse to use that cutesy name for in which um the state of Florida set up a a detention center for apparently for undocumented immigrants. Although I personally always thought it was quite murky who they were holding there. Um that that uh there there were allegations recently about specific um facilities for torture. And yet um we knew we've known all along from other observations that the conditions in that place were horrific. And and not just there by the way in a number of other detention sites as well where the administration has refused access to Congress people for example to oversee those places. When do you treat people like that? When you don't think they are equal to you when you think you have hierarchies of society and those sorts of people don't matter. And and that's I cannot tell you what a slippery slope that is because that is absolutely the road to wars on people. The dehumanization of people. You know exactly where that's going. And one of the reasons that people like me have been screaming about it now really since at least 2015 is because we don't like where that's going. But you can also see it in something else you asked about in the idea that the that the administration has reclassified a number of professions as no longer being uh professional degrees. And they did that because that will make it harder to borrow money in those degrees. But anybody who looked at them recognized that what they had done is they had singled out professions that are dominated by women with one interesting exception. uh professions that are dominated by women with the idea really that they're saying those women who want to work outside the home, they're not really professionals. Those are not really professional degrees. It's very much a way to denigrate women in the same way that they have been firing women from federal go uh from the military and from federal offices and the same way that they have been going after men of color and black men and and black men, black women and women of color as well. you can see that whole attempt to put in place that idea that some people really are better than others. So, um you can also see the emphasis on uh a strong executive on saying, you know, okay, Trump's bonkers, but we don't care because what we really want to do is to make sure we have such a strong executive that it doesn't really matter what the people want. you know, as the Supreme Court said in July of 2024 that the president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties. That's that's that if you read me, you know that I said that is the most important thing that has happened since the founding of this nation because it destroys the concept on which this nation was founded. So when you think about all the the craziness going on right now, I think it really helps to have in your mind that this is not ping ping ping ping unrelated that these pieces are all pieces that fit into a larger story of the overturning of American democracy in favor of an oligarchy or what now is pretty clearly a kleptocracy. And I'll tell you the difference between those two things in order to enrich a very few people. Now an oligarchy is a government that is overseen by a very few people uh that uh that rule over everybody else. A dictatorship is one person. But uh a kleptocracy is a little bit different than an oligarchy or a dictatorship in the sense that it is a small group of people who deliberately use the functions of the state of the government to enrich themselves. So through contracts, for example, through um through things being funneled their way, through insider information, through oh, I don't know, a negotiation of a peace deal between say Russia or Ukraine. Um you you get this group of people who are using the resources of the state to funnel money and power into their own pockets. And crucially, there will be in the state somebody who makes sure that they do not pay penalties if they get caught breaking the law. And that obviously in this scenario is Donald Trump, who's been pardoning people who have broken the law. So, we seem very much to be going toward uh a kleptocracy that is using the levers of the state to grab as much money and as much power as is possible. And here's another question somebody asked. By the way, I think I'm hitting a lot of your questions here. Um, another question somebody asked is, "How much is all this costing the taxpayers?" A lot of money. Let me tell you, the fact that these people, uh, the radicals that are in charge of the government have been complaining about the cost of, say, SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or Veterans Benefits, or the Social Security Act, or Medicaid. the fact they're complaining about those things and then turning around and just pouring money into things like Christine Gnome's um advertisements of her riding a horse. At this point, I think her budget has been $220 million through that initiative, not for one single ad, which was quite expensive, but through that set of contracts. Um it's just you think about what we could be doing with that money, it it kind of makes my head explode. So you you see here, I think, this attempt to use the the the the wealth of this country to put cash into the hands of a very few people. And that's a really important concept. And then I'm going to go on to Venezuela. But one of the things to think about when you're thinking about where we are right now, and this is this is actually sort of what keeps me up at night, is the United States of America is a fabulously wealthy country. It is a fabulously wealthy country, but it's wealthy not just in bank accounts. It's wealthy in the sorts of things that make our lives uh secure and um and and protect our families and give us the security of things like education and religion and all the things that and communities. All the things that make you feel um like you're comfortable, like you're happy in your life. Those things are wealth. They're expensive, too, but they're wealth. Like, knowing you can get in your car and drive to the supermarket is so common place in America, you don't think about it. But you go to some countries and that's not an option. Here's the one that hit me just the other night because I grew up um you know, with with a lot of people who didn't have running water or electricity. you know, I have running water, which again, in in the United States, we don't tend to think a lot about that, but the fact that you can just turn on your tap and have clean water and hot water is a freaking miracle and you can flip a light switch and there's light. Again, you you think of so many countries in the world where those things are absolutely unimaginable. And then think about all the things in your life that make you able to do that. What the reason we have those things are because of our investment our as a nation investment in the infrastructure in the education in the roads in the hospitals in those pieces of a society that give us those things. So you can just throw your clothes in the washing machine and walk away from it as opposed to having to, you know, haul the water and heat the water and and and do the things that used to take extraordinary amounts of time and energy which gives you a lot of time to do other stuff. That's wealth. That's that's what matters. But what I think we are seeing in the United States under this current administration is an attempt to take that wealth, and I don't just mean that. I mean I mean our um our extraordinary intelligence services that keep us safe and our military that can get tires on trucks, which is no small thing, by the way, you know, to to have the checklists and know where the spark plugs are and all that. We have this extraordinary system of um infrastructure that is a kind of a cocoon around us. And what I think we are seeing is a very small group of essentially kleptocrats taking that wealth and trying to privatize it and sell it for cash for themselves. And that is worth thinking about as you're thinking about the ways in which this administration is essentially pissing away our money. I'm sorry about that word, but who knocks down the White House and says, "I'm going to rebuild it to the point that the architect quit today." Said he didn't have the capacity to handle the project, but it's pretty clear he wants distance from it. or, you know, sells off our um our murals from the New Deal that were in the original social security building or um you know, I just I just don't even know where to start. Tries to privatize our weather service. Um tries is is privatizing our um our the you know, all these contracts that for the extraordinary sums of money that are now going to ICE, those are going to private contractors. So that is those are our tax dollars going to these individual companies and the people who are wellconed in this administration. And so I think it's worth thinking about this moment as the destruction of our wealth in order to enrich other people with cash because here's the news flash. Cash and wealth are not the same thing. Um certainly cash can buy you wealth, but that's different than having a society that enables you to live a fulfilled life. All right. So if that's the case, um there's some things specific things that you asked for and that's um a discussion of what's going on in Venezuela. And here um I think it's going to be really important to to recognize a couple of things. The Trump administration is once again insisting that this is about drugs. It is not about drugs. This is again an attempt to take people of color and label them for Americans who are not paying terribly close attention as bad guys. They're drug dealers. They're murderers. They're rapists. How many times have you heard that? And the same thing is true with these immigration sweeps where it turns out the vast majority of the people they're sweeping up have not been convicted of crimes. Um there this is an attempt on the part of people like White House um Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller to to to get rid of uh people who are not white in the United States. And that's a whole different story that is it is thoroughly anti-American. But they they are not going after drug dealers. And you know this for a couple of reasons. If you listen especially to White House uh press secretary Carolyn Levit, she talks about drugs and then she switches right into talking about illicit fentanyl. Um but in fact the boats that they are striking in primarily in the Caribbean come from Venezuela or at least they allegedly come from Venezuela. and Venezuela um the the the the traffickers um out drug traffickers out of that region of the world first of all mostly use the eastern Pacific. All right? So if you look at a map you see they mostly use the eastern Pacific. Venezuela does not produce fentanyl. In fact Mexico produces fentanyl and it comes into the United States in a different way. the countries that produce um uh what's the cocaine uh you know the argument is that these these Venezuelans are are producing these drugs that are killing Americans and they're implying that that's fentanyl but in fact these these boats if they are carrying drugs are almost certainly carrying cocaine cocaine does not come from Venezuela primarily cocaine comes from from um Colombia and Ecuador so hitting these boats which are small boats boats that are almost a thousand miles from the United States border is going to do absolutely nothing to actually address fentanyl issues of fentanyl and those boats are almost certainly not headed for the United States. They are probably headed elsewhere. So if that's the case, what is going on here? And I think there is there are a couple of things going on and I don't think you can discount one of them which is this idea coming out of the United States and this thing that I just this this ideological construct I just described that some people are better than others and the image of that was always the American cowboy. You know we're going to hit first and we're going to think later because we're the guys who really understand how to do things. We're better than everybody else. We're just going to flex our muscles. And you see that in I think in a really big way with defense secretary uh Pete Hegsith who's made it clear he believes that the laws of war for example or the Geneva conventions are wussy that you can't really fight a war unless you unless you just can do anything to your opponents. And I have to say it's a bit of a digression, but there was uh a man in in my profession, a historian who had been an interrogator in World War II. And really interesting because he was dead set against this whole torture stuff, this whole we're going to flex our muscle stuff because he said the way you got information out of the Nazis was you got them to trust you over things like playing chess or something and I and I'm going to make this part up. You know, you would say something like you'd play chess for a while and you'd make a move and I forget who the guy was that he got information out of, but he said, you know, and he'd laugh and he'd say, "Oh, my son did that once." So, you'd know he had a son and you'd know his son played chess, you know, and just things like that that that's how you extracted information. It was an intelligence game. It was not a I'm going to hurt you so badly you're going to say whatever I tell you to. Well, this idea that we're going to throw the first system out and and resort to this, you know, swaggering I'm going to inflict harm system is, I think, at least in part what we're seeing with this idea we're simply going to blow people out of the water rather than stop those boats and take those people back to the justice system where they can be interrogated among other things. Um, which is what we've always done in the past. And one of the things that we have done by blowing these people out of the water is we have made Colombia, which had been very cooperative in trying to stop shipments to the United States, stop sharing any information with us. So that's not helping, right? You also know this is not about drugs because of the fact that Trump just pardoned a convicted drug dealer in the United States who had been bringing uh lots of cocaine into the United States. Um, Trump just pardoned him and he's pardoned two other major drug dealers as well, including Ross Albrich, who was the guy who came up with the Silk Road dark uh dark web. Um, so you you know, it's not about the drugs. It's partly about flexing muscles, but it's also about something else. And this is the piece that I'm watching in a way that um that I may be wrong, absolutely may be wrong. Um, but I'm really interested in it because it certainly seems to me as if the Trump administration is throwing overboard the postworld war II that America needed alliances that the way you kept Americans safe, which you can never forget or you can never forget is the primary reason that we have governments to keep us safe. We tend to forget that in the United States because we have been so safe. But that's why you institute governments in the first place. And then he does other stuff as well. But that's number one. And after World War II, there was this idea that uh you created safety for nations. First of all, by sharing intelligence. I talked to Senator Warner, Senator Mark Warner from the intelligence committee this morning. It's it's recorded on YouTube and here on Facebook. Um it was really very interesting about what he had to say about the intelligence communities. So you share intelligence and you also develop peace time that's really important peaceime um treaties defensive treaties so that for example the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO was the organization is the organization where countries say we're all banded together you especially so uh especially Russia but other countries as well. So if you think you're going to whack one country, you just so you know, we're all coming for you. You hit any one of us, we're all going to come and hit you. And as a result, those NATO countries don't get hit, or they haven't in the past. Now that Trump is pulling back from them, you're seeing Russians wiggle into places. Um they just blew up a train line in Poland. It's a NATO country. And there were just a couple of drone attacks on a plane that um Wimir Zalinski, the leader of Ukraine, was in today. You're seeing them um creating uh trouble in other NATO countries, clearly pushing the envelope to see whether or not the United States and other NATO NATO countries will step up. So, I think you see Trump backing away from that and putting in place something different. And that something different appears to be from a speech that uh Marco Rubio gave shortly um after Trump took office. Marco Rubio now being the Secretary of State, an emphasis on what they call the Western Hemisphere. They seem to be deciding that the United States should control the North America, which explains some of their hostility toward Canada. Like one of our best friends, Canada. I mean, Canada tracks Santa Claus, right? Um, and and Greenland uh and which is a a Danish um uh uh related uh nation u island nation. Um you see that and you also see them really putting pressure on a number of different countries in South America. So, not just although you're we're all paying attention to Venezuela right now where the leader Maduro is not a good guy um but you're you also saw Trump bailing out Argentinian president um Javier Malay to the tune of at least 20 billion with a B dollars and quite likely much more than that. There was also uh another major payment and a backs stop set of loans um to make sure that he got reelected. And we have played around in another election recently. And of course, one of the drug dealers that Trump just pardoned was the former president of Honduras whose party is running for reelection as well. And it certainly looks as if the real pressure that Trump is trying to put in Venezuela on Venezuela is not really about drugs. It's about trying to create enough pressure on Maduro with the idea that the United States might go in and and do land hits as well that they will overthrow him and put in place a government that is amenable or more amendable to American investment in that country including you know where this is going into its oil. That idea of reorganizing the c the the world the globe along along the idea of spheres of influence is one very much embraced by u Vladimir Putin of Russia but what it also does is it takes us back again to a world that looks very much by the way we're in a wicked windstorm here I might lose connection but it takes us back to a world of the 1890s the 1890s the 19 a period when very few people ran the United States of America and the United States of America wasn't really interested in the world at that point. So there isn't really a parallel there to the way America was reacting to the rest of the world. But it takes us back to an idea really before we had a government that was based in the idea of democracy, in the idea of de democratic movements, and in the idea of alliances that could protect us around the world. All right. So, there's my sweep through American history and what this particular moment looks like is going on. But before I finish, and I've gone on way too long today, but before I finish, um, what is going on then in the short term here? We have a president who clearly has mental acuity issues. I'm sorry, I'm not a doctor, but you don't need to be one. Just watch anything that he does. And remember when you see him that that's him at his best these days. That's after they have done whatever it takes to make him coherent. Um, him falling asleep in meetings is the best it gets. Not the worst, the best it gets. So, at the same time that that's happening, you also have him acting more and more erratically. And a lot of people have asked what's going to happen with Hexith after this double tap strike on this uh boat on September 2nd, which by the way happened before the administration had said it was going to be doing these attacks. So these people on the boat had no idea what was coming. Um what's going to happen to him? Well, I think that we are, as I said when I started out, heading into a really, really unsettled period in the United States in that um Trump can't really let Hexit go. If you think about it, first of all, he doesn't want to admit defeat, but second of all, who's going to take his place that the Senate will put up with? I I think that's a hard one. On the other hand, between the this double tap strike and the signal gate crisis, um exit is looking pretty bad. You also have um Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services now cutting into more vaccines, including the HEP B vaccine that has protected infants and people in America so thoroughly since it got introduced in the into the vaccine schedule. You have Attorney General Pam Bondi now up against the wall with the pending release of the Epstein files on December 19th where a number of members of Congress are saying, "Listen, we're watching you." That was a letter that came out yesterday. I paraphrase, that's not what they said, but that was the message. You have um FBI Director Cash Patel in real hot water with a recent report that came out and now his announcement that he has found the bomber from January 6th. I'm going to hold that one boy with a major grain of salt because it certainly looks like it was an attempt to make himself look good when he his star was falling. So you what you're seeing is a lot of really desperate people theoretically overseen by somebody in the Oval Office who clearly is not a on not on top of what's going on and um they're all trying to grab whatever they can. Now, at the same time, you have Congress starting to show a flicker of life and suggesting that, hey, maybe it wasn't okay to be bombing these these small boats. And wait a minute, what about Signal Gate? And wait a minute, what do you mean you're going to mess with the vaccine schedule when you promised up and down under oath that you wouldn't? So, where I'm going to go with this at the end here is a lot of you seem incredibly unsettled by the craziness that is coming at us and you should be. The reason I gave you that big framework, you know, I was talking about light brights. The reason I gave you that, by the way, somebody sent me a lightbrite last year. Thank you very much for that. I totally appreciated it. I had never had one before. um that once you recognize that this is where we are, we're in the endgame of a 40 to 50year movement that was designed to get rid of American democracy and get rid of a government that reached for that worked for all of us. And we're reaching the end of that where you have this all powerful president who has lost it and all these people who think they're better than the rest of us trying madly to to run a system that they don't understand and doing a terrible job of. What that tells you is that this is the moment for Americans, for people like you and me to say enough and to to take our country back. And what that means is not somebody said, "I'm ready to march anywhere." Marching is good. Protesting is good. Boycotts are good. All those things are good. But what is really good right now is speaking up. speaking up to your neighbors, speaking up to your circle, speaking up to your friends, but but above all speaking up to your elected representatives at the local level, at the state level, at the national level, and doing it again and again and again and again because they do pay attention to phone calls. They keep a running chart of what people say and um and also of letters. Emails are less effective and certainly cutting and pasting emails is not that effective. But what you're doing, as Senator Warren said today, Warner, I'm sorry, said today was you're telling Democrats who are care about these issues that they should move these issues up on their list of things to emphasize and you're saying to Republicans who might say that they're against these things in public that maybe they shouldn't expend political capital on them. And that is how you start to change the narrative. And if you don't believe that that works, take a look at the disarray in the Republican party right now after the elections at the beginning of November that went so heavily for the Democrats and after the special election on Tuesday in Tennessee in which a Democrat came within nine points of winning an election in a gerrymandered district that went 22 points for Trump and for Senator Marshia Blackburn just a year ago. All of a sudden, you've got, you know, the knives out for um House Speaker Mike Johnson. You've got people talking about resigning. You've got people talking about retiring. You've got people running for different offices. You've got real chaos over there because people are speaking up. And as they speak up, people say, "Hey, you know, maybe you're right. Maybe maybe maybe immigrants are good for the country like we've always thought. And maybe we shouldn't just be bombing people randomly in the Caribbean because Trump says so. And one of the final things I will leave you with is somebody asked me, "What do you do about you have a an elderly relative that you love, but they still vote MAGA? What do you do?" And I'm going to suggest to you um that um I'm sorry, the somebody is saying Facebook is down. Um it may just be the wind here. I don't know. But I'm going to finish this here. It may just be um that you know if you think about the way a society works, the way I think about it is always that if you got 10 people, eight people just want to get along. They they just want to have dinner with their families and enjoy their work and you know look at the stars and play play crisage. But there are two people in those 10 people who want power. They want power and they want money in the United States. And the way they're going to get that power and money is by getting six of those people in the lower eight to turn against two of those other people. And most of those six people again aren't paying deep attention. They just don't want to be the bottom two that everybody's going to turn against. So they tend to go along with whatever those people at the top suggest they should. They may believe it, they may not believe it, but they tend to just keep their heads down and parrot whatever they hear around them. Now, the way that you change the way they think, again, I would love to say that this is all you got to do is make a good argument, but for a lot of people, what they need to do is they need to hear people around them changing what they're saying. They need to hear, "Hey, it's not okay to call my Somali neighbors garbage. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to buy from a company whose CEO stands behind the president and smiles when he says that, you know. Um, they need to hear those things. They may believe them, they may not believe them, but the way to get them to go with the crowd is to make sure it's clear the crowd does not agree with what those two people trying to garner power are saying. So, the more you speak up, the more you say, "Hey, that's not okay." the more you say this is not the country I want but this is articulate a positive vision of what you want and I did an interview yesterday with um Zoran Mdani from uh from New York City in which he said you know public service is a is a good thing it's a gift and we should um we should enjoy it and we should try and do what's good for people and what's right for people and get more people involved because we will have better and better ideas if we do that and that's our job right now is to articulate those things and to insist on those things now before the midterm elections of 2026 and then before the presidential election of 2028 because we don't know who those candidates are going to be yet. It's way too early for us to decide who we want to back for president. But the way we're going to create politicians that we want and who represent us is by articulating what we want them to do. And as we do that, more people listen to us, might disagree, say, "Richardson, that's a stupid idea, and I'll shut up about it." But if they say, "Hey, you're right. You know, we'd like universal health care. We want universal child care. We want navigational buoys." You know, it's my thing. You know, the more we do that, the more we are likely to be listened to. And the more we can reverse this 40-year slide away from democracy and remind our elected officers that this is our country, this is a democracy, and that we are the most powerful and incidentally the most wealthy when we work together to create the best society for all of us. And that um that's our job going forward. So, I hope you keep the faith. I know it's a lot. I'm exhausted. Exhausted from today and the idea of looking through the news and writing tonight, I may not even do it. Um, it's a lot coming at us all the time. But I'm heartened by the fact so many people have woken up and are taking our democracy seriously again, recognizing their agency and recognizing that democracy is not a spectator sport and we got to be in it fighting for it. And I look around me and I see it happening. The more pressure we put on our elected people, the more likely it is that they're going to do what we say.