Raging Moderates: Trump's Deportation Plans Backfire as Dems Hit Record Low
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Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway. And I'm Jessica Tarlov. Jess, so this is going to be like every other show. You're going to have to carry it. I got home at about 2 a.m. last night from Mexico, very jet lagged, was up till 4, took a Xanax, and I woke up about 10 minutes ago. Cool. And I'm feeling, I'm feeling a little, I don't know, I feel like a Democratic member of the Senate. I don't know where I am. I just want soup.

and I'm looking for people to do my work for me and I have just absolutely no understanding of my surroundings or the current situation, so

Back to you, Jess. What's going on? Okay, well, do you want to do a whole show about what it was like with little kids this weekend? Since you don't have the strength to fight me on this, and I can tell you about having my first fight with my husband about parenting in front of other couples with kids the same age. Did you guys ever do this? It's very uncomfortable.

And they probably think we're getting divorced. So uncomfortable fights are just part of it? Yeah, just lean in. Yeah, just lean in. And what was the... Let me help. So I'm very good at running other people's lives. Give me the situation. I'll tell you who is right, who is wrong, and what you need to do. Okay. We're in a public place. It is quiet. But...

People are eating. So we're in, like, the cafeteria part of a Whole Foods having lunch with three 3-year-olds and their respective parents. The kids start being really loud, disrupting other people. For sure, there are other kids there, but they're not making noise. They're younger than ours are. So they're, like, in strollers just kind of chilling, but people are working. People are having fun.

Low conversations. Anyway, they start doing Ring Around the Rosie real loud. My husband has a very low threshold for this. He also reflexively hands over his phone for screen time. I feel like he pushes screen time on my child. But we're also with two other families that don't do screen time at all.

So he starts offering up his phone to my daughter. I'm pushing back saying, you can't do that because these other kids, you can't even give one kid a snack that the other kids can't have. Anyway, it got bad, you know, and the dads were intervening saying, you know, you can't do this. We distracted them with food a little bit, but there was big back and forth. And he said, this is the hill that I am willing to die on. You can't disrupt other people's lives.

because of your children. So who's right, who's wrong, who's moving out, who gets to keep the house? Sure. No, I understand. I understand. No, the real fissure here is between you and horrible couples who are those couples who decide they're not giving their kids screen time.

Those are awful people. No, they're not. Those are. They're lovely and their kids aren't addicted to screens. They don't, you know, yell out for Moana in their sleep. Yeah, those are, you know, those are the people that, oh, it's parenting and they shouldn't have screen time. Those are awful people. You need better friends, too. The real key here is you need to start hitting your children. That immediately resets the operating system.

and brings a moment of shock, but a moment of peace to everything. And I'm in favor of giving them screen time. So first off, I totally empathize. I go absolutely crazy when our kids, my kids or other kids are loud and distracting. If they're really loud and distracting, I think you take them outside and separate them from the rest of the crew. I have no patience for that. Also,

It's a very difficult situation. Actually, I'm now being serious because the reality is, I get accused of this a lot and that is I decide I understand parenting when it's bothering me, but I'm not interested in participating in parenting when everything's fine. And so it's a little bit like selective parenting. But I think you're gonna, the good news is this is only gonna happen to you about every two weeks for the rest of your marriage until the kids are out of the house.

So I think, and also I think your husband needs to realize as it relates to parenting, he's an influencer, not a decision maker. I have generally found, which is a bit of an abdication and I want to acknowledge that, but I've generally found that mom has just much better instincts around how to handle this stuff than dad. I'm a sexist that way. I'll provide input around parenting decisions and then mom gets to make the decision because I find she's just more, much more in tune with the kids.

But yeah, the way the kids behave in public is absolutely a point of...

tension for me because I think what he's doing is just I think he's reflecting on his own shortcomings as a parent. Thank you. He feels as a man, he's a disciplinarian. And when the kids are out of control, it's a poor reflection on him. He also grew up hypersensitive to this, apparently. So I and I get it. My dad used to just pick us up and take us out of restaurants and say, like, Judy, my mom, you know, get the check. We'll be outside. And that's the end of it.

Which I would have understand. I mean, this wasn't, you know, like a high-end restaurant. We were in the public space at Whole Foods. But I take the point. Anyway, we ended up in a good place. And I appreciate your sexism when it's going in a feminist direction that you should try to

always hang in that direction. But anyway, that was basically my weekend. Yeah, no, it's so just just recognize that kids ruin everything. Kids are the best thing that could happen to you that will ruin your life. And it does put a huge strain. I have found there's actually just to be serious for a moment. All the studies on happiness show that your least happy years are the years you're in 25 to 45, specifically around child year. And you'll look back and

On the period we have young children at home and reflect on that as the happiest time of your life. But what's interesting is in the moment, people without children are actually happier on average than people with children because of instances like this. But as they get older, it gets, I do find it gets easier and easier. Yours are...

Yours are 11 and 9? 3 and not even 1. Have we met? I knew that. Oh, you did? Okay, that's a Mexico hangover joke. Okay. Yeah, no, it gets much better. I know. There's a very, I don't know if it counts as a meme. I don't know what the definition of a meme is. But anyway, something that was passed around on social media about...

How parents spend their days just praying for the kids to go to sleep. And then we just lay in bed looking at cute pictures of them all night until we fall asleep. That's really nice. Yeah, it's very sweet and very accurate. All right. Before we dive in.

In a quick announcement, Jess and I are taking the show live. We are literally woke royalty right now. We are literally the Duchess of Wokistan now. We're partnering with, get this, the 92nd Street Y in New York for a special event on Thursday, April 17th. That's right, Thursday, April 17th. And you can grab your tickets right now. The link is in the show notes. Trust us,

You don't want to miss this one. Literally, I've been working my ass off for 30 years and I'm an overnight woke success because of you, Jess. This is literally...

Like, I feel like Patrick Moynihan is, it could emerge from his crypt. And who's the wokest person ever? Literally, we are woke royalty now. We're speaking at the 92nd Y. Your thoughts? I would love it if Daniel Patrick Moynihan could come and chill with us. I heard he's not doing that well. Rough patch, yeah. I'm so excited. I grew up in the city here, and the 92nd Street Y has always held, you know, some of the most

interesting and exciting programming and where everyone wants to go to be able, if they have a book coming out or for serious conversations on what's going on, future of the country, and was totally floored when they sent the email. I remember, I didn't know. It was like when a boy...

that you like texts you and you think like, how long should I wait to reply? When we got that email, I was like, is four seconds too long to wait with the unequivocal? Yes, I will do anything to do this. It's a little daunting for me because we did a live show right after we launched with like 100 people.

This is many more people than that, but you say it's going to be fine. So I'm just leaning in to your experience, but it feels very special and exciting. And I hope if whoever's listening, if you guys are in the New York area, that you'll get tickets and come see us live at the 92nd Street Y. Yeah, just as a moment of excitement, let me just relate that or make it relatable to the 98% of us that weren't really attractive in high school. It's like when you found out you got on the 80th percentile in the SAT and you thought, oh, I might get into UC Irvine.

Anyways, but we feel you. But this is so exciting. I'm waiting for the fallout of my other co-host, Kara Swisher. She and I have not been invited in 92nd Street Y. But anyways, come see both. Come see both at the 92nd Street Y. This is very exciting on April 17th. Today, in today's episode of Raging Moderates, we're discussing the Democrats' fury over Schumer's vote on the spending bill.

Trump challenging the courts on deportations and the latest on Ukraine-Russia ceasefire talks. All right, let's jump into it. Last week, as the clock ran down to a potential government shutdown, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer found himself in a tough spot trying to balance a divided Democratic Party. His unexpected decision to support the GOP's stopgap funding bill sparked major backlash from House Democrats and members of his own caucus, who

who wanted a stronger stand against Trump's agenda. The bill itself slashes about $7 billion in overall spending from fiscal 2024 levels, cutting $13 billion from non-defense discretionary programs while boosting defense spending by $6 billion. With no easy path forward, Schumer's choice has left Democrats questioning their strategy for the battles ahead in this volatile political climate. Jess?

What led to Schumer's decision to back the GOP funding bill? And do you think him folding was a mystery? What do you think? I'm very upset, like most Democrats are. And that's not because I don't think that we ended up in the correct place, because the calculation was, what's scarier? The government being open and them operating the way that we know, which is very bad, but

We have an insight into it versus the government is shut down and then they get to make the decisions on absolutely everything. And it doesn't become Donald Trump's government. It doesn't become Elon Musk's government. It becomes Russ Vogt's government. The guy who's running OMB, the guy, the Project 2025 guy, the guy who...

is the most dedicated to destroying the federal government, I think, of anyone in this administration. And he would decide who's essential and who's not. He could close entire bureaucracies. And Democrats were worried about, well, how are we even going to get these open again? What is the path forward? So I understand the conundrum. And I think ultimately, probably Schumer was right that

the devil you know is better. But the way he went about this was totally feckless, totally spineless. He screwed over his caucus. I mean, just 24 hours before he said that he was voting for the continuing resolution, he said they don't have the votes. And then all of these moderates, all of these Democrats that are in swing districts up for re-election, like John Ossoff in Georgia, for instance,

came out against the continuing resolution, thinking that this was a unified front like it was in the House. There was only one Democrat in the House, Jared Golden from Maine, who voted for it. Hakeem Jeffries had the caucus absolutely in line in this. And I think it's ultimately, and we're almost broken records about this, there's such a tremendous messaging problem about this continuing resolution. If you went out and asked people on the street,

What the continuing resolution is, obviously, most people would say, I don't even know what you're talking about. But the people who did know would likely tell you that this was a clean continuing resolution and that it was just an extension of the Biden Harris spending plan. That is absolutely not true.

It's chock full of cuts that we don't want, things, you know, to veterans, Social Security benefits. It's giving them more and more authority. You know, we know that the executive is after having full control of everything. They don't care about oversight. They don't care about congressionally appropriated money, etc. But

That's the going narrative on this. I'm seeing it on social media from smart people, actually, who usually are paying attention. They're like, well, this is a clean CR and we'll deal with it in September when it's up, when they're going to try to jam through their trillions of dollars in tax cuts and take away, you know, nearly $900 billion in Medicaid funding. But...

The way that the Democrats played this or Schumer played this, it was like it was a surprise to them. We have known for months that March 14th was the drop-dead date on this, that that's when this vote was going to happen. And it's like they woke up four days before and were like, oh, holy shit, something's happening. The House is on fire. How did you not spend months recasting the continuing resolution as, you know, something like,

the Doge Act, right? Or, I don't know, give it some fancy name. You're the branding guy. Maybe you can come up with something better. But how did you waste that opportunity? And then how did you not also have your own continuing resolution to put forward to say, okay, let's work together on this. Spending the government should be bipartisan, which is one of the lines from one of Schumer's speeches, maybe when he was wearing the really bad suit,

And you say, all right, if you guys are going to maintain this as a clean CR, let's show you what an actual clean CR is and force them, force them to accept some amendments that keep the government, you know, reflective of at least how it has been, even though that's not ideal. And so we missed on absolutely every opportunity. The voters are incensed to a crazy level. The Democratic approval is the lowest it's been in 30 years of polling, 29 percent or something.

And 65% of self-identified Democrats now want...

our elected officials to stick to their positions, even if this means not getting things done in Washington. That's a complete reversal of what we saw coming into this, where people were saying, you know, pick and choose your spots, work with them where it makes sense. Now they're saying this is war. I thought that was great. So, yeah, the graph that sort of indicates this is the very beginning of the last Trump administration in 17. Seventy four percent of Democrats wanted Democrats to work with Republicans and get things done.

That number is now 42%. And there's a difference between being effective and being right. And right now we look neither. It just, it looks as if we are the gang that can't shoot straight between these ridiculous, feckless attempts to be angry at the joint address or march down to federal buildings and wave our cane. It's clear the leadership is divided and has no control over the caucus.

They're responding late. One of the strategies that the GRU sort of invented and that Trump has adopted is flooding the zone. Every day throw so much shit out that they react to and chase that we can slip through almost everything because they're not unified. They don't know where, they don't know which arrow to put their wood behind. And so let's announce we're letting the Tate brothers back into Florida. Everyone goes apeshit. Let's

let's blame a helicopter crash on DEI. Everyone goes apeshit. And they're not looking at kind of the bigger issues that America cares about, or they could actually have some reasonable chance of pushing back on. America, quite frankly, over the last couple of weeks has been the nation of surrender. Trump surrendering to Putin and the Democrats surrendering to Republicans. And his argument was that, look,

Schumer's argument was that all we were going to do here was play into Trump and Musk's hands by closing the government, shutting it down. Everyone in the government or nearly everyone in the government would be furloughed except where he could invoke some sort of emergency powers to keep air traffic controllers and effectively never end the furlough and essentially shut down the government. And they didn't want to let him do that.

We're at that point where we need to take that risk. And that is the government is no longer a government of the people. When you are sending plans, when you are denying court orders, when you have the richest man in the world who has no congressional oversight or approval going upstream of those programs and cutting out funding to things like USAID, which by latest estimates is going to cost 3 million lives this year.

Then, okay, it's no longer a government of the people. You have usurped government, and we're not down with that. We are fine. Let's shut down government. And they also miscalculated—I listened to Senator Schumer on his follow-up on The Daily—

And he said that effectively he thought, okay, this is without it, the entire government would be shut down and we would be blamed. No, we wouldn't. If within whatever it is, 45 days of inauguration or what is it, 60 days now,

the government is shut down, people would feel this and I believe they would hold Trump responsible. Okay, he's inaugurated and the government gets shut down and it's not reopening and people aren't getting their diabetes medication and we're having trouble with flights and people aren't getting their social security payments. This was essentially the Democrats showing we are so fucking disorganized. We have such an inability to punch back.

I mean, for God's sakes, the first thing they should do, it's like when I was in Sunday school, they used to say, what would Jesus do? That was meant to be a framework for decisions. What would Jesus do? And now my attitude is for the Democrats, I am so fed up with their feckless, stupid rationalization of doing the weakest thing possible. What would Mitch McConnell do?

And what Mitch McConnell would have done here was said, this is an unacceptable policy. Unfortunately, Americans, and he could show data, don't agree with what's going on in the government. We'd like to work with the president, but the Republican Party is so off the rails in terms of American priorities. We refuse to sign this bill and force them to negotiating table. And also there was an in-between. There were several steps along the way, including a filibuster where we probably could have got some

I mean, this literally is like, oh, our biggest fears about how just incredibly weak and our inability to punch back because we have really weak, unstrategic leaders with absolutely no command of their constituents, that all bubbled up and said, yeah, your worst fears are being realized here, that there is no adult supervision. The kids are running wild at the Whole Foods and there's nothing we can do. There's no, there's absolutely, absolutely nothing

No parenting here. And the outcome here is I'm now convinced that the new junior senator from New York is going to be AOC in 2028. I think Schumer's out. I think he looks so incredibly weak.

I'm just sick of being bested by people who have control of their caucus. Thoughts? So, yeah, it doesn't seem like Schumer being minority or let alone majority leader again is an idea that's long for this world. You know, Hakeem Jeffries basically dodged a question about it. I think Senator Warnock, also from Georgia, made a comment which was basically like, I'm not backing this guy, especially after he hung all of us out to dry.

There is precedent, and you say, what would Mitch McConnell do in this in 2021 under similar circumstances? Senate Republicans successfully filibustered on a continuing resolution, and they got some of what they wanted. People just want to see the fight, right? They just want to see that there is a pulse, and that that pulse understands the existential threat to the constitutional republic that we are witnessing. And I hate to...

Be that girl that's screaming constitutional crisis. But all of the evidence is just sitting out there in front of us. And Bill Maher used to always say, it's a slow-moving coup. It's a slow-moving coup. This coup is so fast, Usain Bolt wouldn't be able to catch it at this point. Like, when you look at the continuing resolution, and it's a six months, right? That's a quote-unquote short-term funding bill. Think about what's happened in just two months.

So then you give them another six months of runway with furloughed employees and bureaus being closed, and you have to go to the absolute worst possible conclusion. And it's not as if the American public isn't noticing that things are going badly. So according to the new NBC poll, the only area that Trump is above water on is his handling of immigration, and we're going to talk about that later.

in the next block. But people disapprove of how he's doing the job generally, the economy, how he's handling tariffs. You see people like Scott Bessant. He's on with Kristen Welker over the weekend. She's asking him about, you know, the market plunging, trade wars, and he says a correction is healthy. Well, this is so easy for people who have over half a billion dollars to say. It made me think back to, do you remember Wilbur Ross, who was the Commerce Secretary in Trump 1.0?

And he, I think his net worth is about $700 million. And he's talking about tariffs. Again, I guess it's a theme that tariffs are not good for people. And he holds up a Campbell's soup can, right? And he says, well, people can have soup for a little bit. And it was, of course, wildly out of touch. It was Marie Antoinette moment. And we went about our business and we elected somebody else. But now it's like when you have 13 billionaires in your cabinet, right?

It's just everywhere. There is nowhere to look for a person with any semblance of a normal perspective on what's going on. And the American public get it. Like there was this new stat that it's the highest level of people who think that business conditions will be worse in a year since 1980. So they are smashing records.

on consumer sentiment going down. This, how will things be for me in the next year? And it's kind of astounding that it happened this quickly, right? There was a lot of economic promise coming into this, or at least the average voter felt that way. And it's been a complete reversal. And Democrats are just sitting there thinking, like, if I post a video from my car and shout out Mark Warner, I was glad that he started engaging with social media in the 21st century.

in a way that, you know, people can access it and maybe feel like you're even slightly relatable. But like car videos aren't going to save us at this point. Floor votes are. Yeah, I agree with all that. My only thing is the social media being kind of put out there as we're fighting back feels like they hired someone's niece to do their social media. They just look so unnatural and so uncomfortable doing it. But this was an opportunity for

for the Democrats to at least fight back. And Americans will take bad policy over weakness. I think that one of Biden's losses was when you talked to him about, when you talk to voters about policies, people vastly favored Biden's policies over the stated policies or non-policies of Trump.

But they just they'll they just weakness and a lack of resolve are just death knells and politics. And right now, the Democrats look fragmented, weak, and just like we're clutching our pearls all the time and complaining and yet have an inability to even punch back. And this we just look weak. We look defeated and we look like, I don't know, agents of surrender. All right, Jess, we're going to take a quick break. Stay with us.

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Welcome back. The Trump administration is facing sharp criticism after ignoring a federal judge's order to halt the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members. The White House argues the order came too late as the planes were already over international waters. It's weird. I heard planes can actually turn around. But legal experts warn this move is

could mark the start of a serious constitutional showdown. Meanwhile, concerns over immigration enforcement are also growing on college campuses where Palestinian activist and Columbia University student leader Mahmoud Khalil now faces deportation. His arrest has sparked fears the administration is targeting political dissent under the guise of national security. Just

The administration claims it wasn't actively defying a court order rather than operating within the legal gray areas. What are the legal consequences of this move? I don't know. We're going to find out. I feel like I have a little bit of interview egg on my face because I talked to Mark Elias last week. The interview went up on Friday, and it was all about how the courts are the only viable backstop for what's going on. And then you wake up.

And you're like, okay, well, that's gone. So what do we have? It feels like we got nothing on this. And I'm watching Tom Holman, The Borders Are. He's on Fox and Friends this morning. So we're recording this Monday morning. And he's asked by Lawrence Jones, the host, well, what's next? And he says, another flight, another flight every day. We are not stopping. I don't care what the judges think. I don't care what the left thinks. We're coming. So

They're laying it all out on the field, right? Going back to a six-month spending bill, that's tons of time in Trump years for them to accomplish whatever it is that they are going after. And...

You know, it's a difficult place to be in because, like, I tweeted something about this yesterday. And I said, well, I guess the courts aren't stopping him. And Tommy Lahren, who is, you know, a MAGA firebrand and one of my colleagues, we actually get along really well. She responded and said, you know, Jess, I love you, girl, but, like, why are you defending these people? And I'm not defending Trenda Uruguay gang members.

I'm defending the rule of law and the fact that, according to immigration attorneys, there are people on those flights who had legitimate asylum claims and are not in a gang. Like, they've been using tattoos as evidence of someone being part of this gang, which is a murderous gang. And I want every single one of those people out of this country. But they're saying, like, about this one person's client that they had the gang tattoos and

And she posted on social media that that is not the case, that this person has decorative tattoos, part of the LGBTQ plus community, here with a legitimate asylum claim. And their hearing was supposed to have started last week, but this person was disappeared. And there's another person whose hearing was supposed to be today, on Monday. But they ended up on one of these flights heading to El Salvador, to one of the scariest prisons that apparently exists on the face of the planet.

And I feel so despondent about what to do and worried that we used all of our alarm bells and all of our words about the constitutional crisis and the end of the republic too early, right? That we were, this was 2016, 2017, and it went through 2020. And then he did actually try to stay past that.

his sell-by date, right? The voters decided they wanted Joe Biden. He stages an insurrection, gets away with it. Now every prosecutor that worked on that is gone. He's going after the lawyers that worked on those cases, etc. But I don't know if we should have just been quiet the entire time. And certainly there were some big swings and misses, right? We should not have done Russia, Russia, Russia, even though the Mueller report obviously did show that the Russians were working to get Trump

elected. I am not trying to minimize any of that, but it feels like people completely tuned out the argument that he is a threat to democracy. They don't want to hear about January 6th again, which seems like a clear precursor to what we're seeing now, and that we're like the girl who cried insurrection, and now we have nothing. Yeah, this is really, if you think about

I mean, it's sort of deciding, all right, we don't have a country. If we're not going to have laws, an easy way to reduce a lot of crime would be to do away with search and seizure laws. And that is if for whatever reason, your local law enforcement or federal law enforcement can just come raid your house, raid you, incarcerate you, hold you for as long as they want until they're satisfied.

they're either right or wrong, you would see a drop in crime. But we've decided that it might be you with that knock at the door and that we're gonna pay for a certain level of insecurity around overtime crime and those rights.

And that rule of law and that democracy attracts so many talented people and makes people feel so good about America. It ultimately resolves in a greater quality of life, greater prosperity, greater economic growth. This is essentially saying, okay, we're now in an autocracy and the people in power get to kind of make the laws and basically not listen to the government. So there are literally no checks and balances. The Republican Party

who is in control, has said, I'm willing for an unelected official who was not born here to essentially usurp my power as an elected representative, right? So that branch of the government is gone. Then sort of the last man standing or the last defense between us and total autocracy was supposed to be the courts.

And they have said, we don't give a shit what the courts say. Yeah. I mean, when I saw it, the courts have ordered these flights to stop. Then that means the flights can't go or can't turn around. Well, they said they basically stuck up the middle finger and said, stop us. So this is this feels like when you challenge the court.

If nothing happens here, they will have the incentives and the signal that they are now the law, that the White House, the Trump administration and the supporters are now the law. The judges are now similar to Republican representatives who are so scared of being primaried or a weak and feckless Democratic Party that there's effectively, we've gone from checks and balances to absolutely none of them. They've all been sort of shut down. And

The one that kind of tested my resolve around this, or I had some moral dilemma, if you will, is Mahmoud Khalil's arrest. And it did tickle my progressive censors. I think an individual here on a green card who is inciting violence, in my view, and shitposting America and making a campus environment less productive and kids can't go to class and basically tearing at the fabric of America and also the legal argument for deporting him.

is that when you're here on a green card, you are not supposed to promote or endorse terrorist activities. That is a legal argument for deporting him. And I can see making that legal argument. The problem is the way they went about it, and that is he was effectively disappeared. And that is he was arrested and detained, and his family and his lawyer couldn't even find out where he was. And it ended up he had been transferred to a facility, I believe, in Louisiana.

And that's the thing that's really upsetting and bothersome. And as much as I would like to see this individual having had been expelled and maybe losing his, I imagine he's, I don't know if he's here on a student visa or a green card. Just green card. Just green card. I can see- Not just green card. It's the best. I shouldn't say that. Student visa would be worse. He has the best you can have. Yeah, it's the best you can have. He has a green card. The bottom line is this, is that regardless of how shitty the speech may be,

If you start rounding up people and deporting them for political speech, be careful for when that knock comes on the door, because eventually it means that if you have political speech that is counter or detrimental or disparaging of an administration that now appears to be ignoring court orders and is suing and intimidating and saying publicly now that people at CNN and MSNBC should be prosecuted,

I mean, we are, you know, we're effectively in a full, I don't know what you want to call it, dictatorship where speech is now chilled. So as much as I would like to see bad things happen to this individual because I think he's created incredible dissent and that he's wrong and that he's inciting violence, if he hasn't really broken any laws and this is just political speech and he's getting disappeared and deported,

Who's next? And what qualifies as political speech that is worthy of deportation? So there's a lot here. It feels as if because we show absolutely no resistance, no coordination, no backbone, and quite frankly, it feels as if the flooding the zone has the public looking in so many different directions over if and what to respond to.

I used to think that the focus should be on Ukraine, our surrender to Russia over Ukraine, the deficits. But this feels like it really is something that Democrats should be focusing on and messaging. And that is, have we broken down all of our constitutional checks and balances that in fact make us a democracy and a country? And the last week, I would think the last week, and I'm trying to think if I'm being somewhat...

I'm catastrophizing. It feels like the actions of the last week, if they go unchecked and the Democrats and the public don't coordinate, mature, gestate a really thoughtful, strong response to this, that we have pretty much taken a pretty, pretty strong step away from a democracy that

to an autocracy. What are your thoughts about Mahmoud Khalil's arrest? I share a lot of your same sentiments. And, you know, this is someone who is completely abhorrent to me. And I'm

I see this also as a major failing of Columbia University that could have nipped this in the bud last year. Yep. Agreed. Great point. And it is part of the Trump administration's plan to gut higher education in this country. So they took $400 million away from Columbia.

They're doing the same at Harvard. I saw that they're taking $800 million in USAID grants from Johns Hopkins, which is the biggest employer for Baltimore writ large. And

They're not there's no accusation of an anti-Semitism problem at Johns Hopkins. You know, they just don't want people to be able to continue with their research grants. And, you know, they say, oh, we have to maintain that we're going to be competitive with China and the rest of the world. Well, why don't you just take away our innovation, which is happening in all of these labs that have NIH funding? And it's as someone who.

believes in higher education, was part of a quote-unquote elite institution for my PhD work, taught there, loves the ivory tower even though I accept that there are problems with it. This is gut-wrenching. And I worry about

about the fact that the people that we're seeing going to the mats for are folks like Mahmoud Khalil. And I know that the point of the First Amendment is that it's not about the speech that you like, it's about the speech that makes your blood boil. And that is exactly the kind of speech that this man engaged in. But I really wish that the administration would go out there and find the law that he violated,

the law that's on the books for that, or even the Columbia University laws that he definitely violated. Because what went on last year at Hamilton Hall and that Jews were prevented from going to the library, to their classes, to their Chabad's, that seems like grounds for him to have been kicked out of school. So we have to retrace our steps.

And all of this is making Marco Rubio, who gave a pretty impassioned defense of what the administration was doing, seem pretty sane. Like,

This is the hill that you want to die on for this guy who sympathizes with a terrorist organization that is at this moment holding Americans hostage. This isn't some group that has no relevance to our lives right now. There are Americans sitting in tunnels in Gaza. God knows what has happened to them over the last, what is it, 450 days now at this point.

And we have to be on the side of this guy. Now, we have, I guess, good company. Ann Coulter is with us now. Eli Lake, someone who really hates Mahmoud Khalil, came out and said as well, you need some law that the guy broke in order to take away a green card, which is basically sacrosanct.

On top of the fact that he's married to an American who's eight months pregnant, which creates, you know, a lot of sympathy for the situation. But...

I was taken, there was, it was just a White House official. There was no name attached to it, but there was reporting in the Free Press last week where this official told the Free Press reporter, essentially, we don't need to say that any law was broken. We're just going for aiding and abetting a terrorist organization. And the American public gets that. And

I think when push comes to shove and when you look at those immigration numbers, that's the only area in which Trump is above water. I think it's a 55 percent approval in the new NBC poll that I think that they're going to win this one. And he is not going to be a sympathetic figure anymore.

for many people kind of in the moderate middle of this who are looking for examples of people who they don't think hold beliefs that run counter to the American project, who are not siding with violent terrorists that are holding us captive at this particular moment and think that October 7th

was a day of love, right? And that there was nothing wrong with this. And, you know, their anti-Zionism certainly steps over the line into anti-Semitism, which is what was going on in these campuses and continues to go on on a number of them with these spineless leaderships who sat in front of Congress and basically said, we're not going to do anything when we know if this hadn't been about Jews and it had been about Black kids, trans kids, gay kids,

they would have been shut down in minutes. There is no chance that they would have been able to go forward. And so it's,

it's complicated, of course, and I'm torn about it, but I'm looking at this as the precursor for what they're going to continue to do. You know, they reportedly held a green card holder at Logan Airport. Did you see this story? Yeah. A German who's been here on a green card since 07-08, married to an American. He's an engineer. According to his mother, they detained him, put him in an ice-cold shower. There's no

evidence that this guy is sympathetic to anything that runs counter to the United States. And no one is safe. They should really just change this to, we only want natural-born citizens plus Elon Musk. And if you have a green card,

That doesn't mean anything to us. And we're going to completely rewrite the way we do immigration law in this country. Asylum, get over it. It's done. It means nothing. There are no legitimate asylum claims. And Tom Holman is the king. Yeah, I do think that Democrats have a habit of sticking out our chin and having this fist of autocracy stone come for it.

And to your point, if I had gone down as a faculty member of NYU with a big sign saying, "Burn the gays or lynch the blacks," they would have had no need for context. My ID would have been turned off. I would have been shut out of academia, fired, never allowed back on the campus, never been able to work in academia again. But free speech has never been freer when it's hate speech against Jews.

And the Republican administration has now found an opportunity to tap into that rage and that wrong and go way too far and deny the rights of everyday Americans. And this is just a huge failing, in my opinion, and has created an opening the size of the Grand Canyon for the Republicans to come in or for the Trump administration to come in and start violating that.

everybody's rights. And I actually did advise or have been advising the Regency of the University of California on this issue. And their general viewpoint is, my advice was, this is super easy. They were really worried about fall, what happens when the students return last fall. And because UCLA, I think probably, I think the most shameful moment I've ever felt, and there hasn't been a lot of them,

for my alma mater, UCLA, was when kids were passing out bans to non-Jews. And if you didn't have a ban, you couldn't access certain parts of the campus. So they basically decided to prohibit Jews from certain, you know, from campus activities. And I thought, okay, what's going to happen here? And I don't know what happened, which probably means nothing. And they said, well, what would you do? And I said, it's very easy.

The first protest, first sign of any protest around where there's hate speech or there are people trespassing who aren't students or the students are doing anything resembling what would qualify as hate speech, of which there's a lot. If it's a peaceful protest, of course you do nothing. But if it's not and it turns ugly or they're occupying facilities like what recently happened to Columbia, you give them 15 minutes to vacate and then you start expelling students and let them call their parents and say,

and say, oh, that $72,000 tuition, I'm coming home. And you do that right away, and word gets out really fast. And there was this bullshit argument that, Scott, these are young people. We can't just start expelling them in a wanton kind of reckless fashion. And my response is the following. At Columbia, they expel 91% of freshmen every year. It's called the admissions process.

And the notion that somehow you have a birthright to attend a private university and that you're protected by these first, you have, you're at a private organization. It's like no shoes, no shirt, no service. They have the right to kind of determine the laws as long as they're not breaking the law. And the fact that they have come across as so incredibly anti-Semitic

They have stuck their chin out, and the result is an overreaction in the Trump administration taking advantage of this weak, bigoted thinking to go the other way and have an overreaction. I do think, to your point, this is a response to an incredible lack of leadership and insanity

on university campuses. I'm about to do a college tour with my son, and I'm fascinated by colleges and admission standards and data and enrollment trends. And it's interesting, the schools that are booming in terms of applications

are these Southern schools that are seen as apolitical or even a little less, or even a little conservative. Parents are sending their kids, they want their kids to go to college. They don't want a political orthodoxy. They don't want a school and administration that sees themselves as engineers of social engineers. It's really interesting. Southern schools were schools that are distinctly seen as somewhat center-left, are booming in terms of applications.

But Columbia University leadership goes down as such incredibly misguided, weak leadership that has set up an overreaction that has been justified. And the cloud cover for the justification of an overreaction has been what have been an incredible lack of leadership and blatant anti-Semitism. So this is...

This is like a lot of democratic policies. We start on the right foot, we take it too far, and we set up an overreaction because people are just rolling their eyes and thinking, okay.

Making an argument for a six foot four swimmer to show up to a swim meet who presents as female and then blow away everything. Didn't win a single race as a male swimmer, but is absolutely winning everything. And then having everyone on the left applaud and say, isn't that inspiring? You set up an overreaction where we begin demonizing a special interest group for no real reason.

And the same has happened here. We take things too far, we stick our chin out, and we set ourselves up for an overreaction that makes things much worse than if we'd had a less insane, thoughtful reaction. I'm totally with you. I'm noticing...

the higher education trend myself that parents are saying, oh, we're going to look at University of South Carolina. We're going to look at Clemson. Or Wake Forest or SMU. Wake Forest, yeah. People love Vanderbilt, UNC Chapel Hill. Vanderbilt is now as difficult to get into as many Ivy Leagues. There's so many applications. That feels right to me. Not just on this point, but the way that academia and higher education is

has been going. It's exclusionary. It's not providing what it purports to, right? You know, people think it's the golden ticket, right? That you got to the Wonka factory and your life is going to be set. But guess what? The only thing that makes your life set is hustle and reading and preparing. And you're seeing that more and more in these

high positions everywhere from investment banks, law firms, down to, of course, like the tech and the startup world, where it's just how hard you're going to work, how good are your ideas, and how intense is your grind. And by the time my kids are going to college, you know, I went to private school here in New York City. I went and talked to who's now the head of the school, prestigious, progressive institution. He was like, it's not even...

necessarily going to be a requirement by the time your kids are going to college, that you have to be thinking about this. Because I said, I have two little Jewish babies. What am I going to do? Right? I'm not going to send them off to Harvard or Columbia under these conditions. Even if there aren't protests in the streets, the academics have shown themselves to not be interested in treating Jews equally to the other kids that are there. And he said, I'm

Just don't worry. It's going to be a completely different game by the time your kids are going and you're going to see it even on the tour that you're organizing for your son. Schools that you wouldn't have even thought of that you were going to go and consider, he's going to be dying to get into. Say like, this is the right place for me, both academically and socially.

So maybe that will be a silver lining in all of this. But these huge endowments, Harvard with what is it, $50 billion are sitting on? They should start paying for all these kids to come for free. Now is the time. If the government's going to take away your funding, you say, you know what, we're going to go it alone. Get rid of all the anti-Semitic professors.

Get rid of the kids that are ruining the quality of life for other students, clearly violating your policies, and put that money back into the system so that the smart kids that are going to be the leaders of tomorrow can come there without landing themselves in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for the rest of their lives and make this a bit more of an equal playing field. Yeah, well, as you can imagine, I think a lot about this. And I do think, unfortunately—

I do think it's tempting to think that because there's so much manufactured artificial stress as someone who's going through it right now from universities who've adopted a rejectionist exclusionary strategy. And despite sitting on an endowment, the GDP, the size of the GDP of a Latin American nation only let in 500 students. Dartmouth sits on an endowment of $8 billion and lets in 500 freshmen.

Harvard sits on an endowment of $52 billion and decides to only let in $1,500. That is morally corrupt. If you had a drug that made people less likely to kill themselves, more likely to get married, more likely to pay a lot of taxes, less likely to be obese, less likely to be depressed, would you hoard that drug? We in higher education hoard that drug. We have the resources. We have the capability. There would be absolutely no sacrifice.

in the quality of the students. People say, oh, but the brand would go down. When I applied to UCLA, the acceptance rate was 76%.

It's now 9%. And it wasn't exactly a Joey Bag of Donuts brand back then. We have become the enforcers of the caste system. And as much as we like to believe that, oh, don't worry, college won't matter, it does. Because America is turning into a caste system. And the easiest way for corporations to evaluate human capital is based on the school they went to. So the notion that it, quote unquote, doesn't matter anymore is a lie we tell ourselves.

such that we feel better about the massive amount of stress and the inequity and our disappointment in higher ed. And what has slowly happened in higher education is me and my faculty, sometimes who are 15 administrators to everyone who actually teaches, have decided that we would rather not have accountability. So we teach bullshit, ridiculous courses that

that have no measurable outcomes. Leadership, sustainability, DEI, ethics. Show me someone teaching ethics, I'm going to show you a FIPP, a Formally Important Person,

who hangs out at a university and makes $200,000 to $400,000 a year for trying to teach a 27-year-old in business school how to be more ethical, which is such the height of arrogance. Instead of being centers of excellence, we've turned it into a political orthodoxy machine where the vast majority of the faculty are very left, not reflecting any diverse thought, and where you can get in trouble for certain words.

We have totally lost the script. Our job is to give you the skills to go out and create economic security for you and your family and do great work, empower the economy. And the fact that we have become this exclusionary and this arrogant and teaching all of these bullshit courses with no measurable outcome, the result is we constrain supply. And it's not about who gets in. It should be about how many.

If a school doesn't increase its freshman seats faster than population growth, it should lose its tax-free status as it's no longer a public servant. But it's a hedge fund with classes. Higher education absolutely needs to be reformed. Anyways, that's my TED Talk. It was good, and I guess I'm wrong. So there we go. There you go. Well, we just, there's some nuance there. That's what I call it. It's nuance. All right, Jess, let's take one more quick break. Stay with us.

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Welcome back. Before we go, talks between the U.S., Ukraine, and Russia over a possible ceasefire are picking up steam. And the Kremlin is saying there's some reason to be hopeful. Specifically, the world's largest nation has become a surrender monkey. Anyways, after meeting with Trump's envoy in Moscow, Putin signaled he's open to a 30-day truce, but with conditions that are pretty one-sided. He wants formal recognition of Russia's land grabs and a promise that Ukraine will never join NATO.

Zelensky has stood firm on not giving up land, but lately he's prioritizing security guarantees over getting territory back right away. Meanwhile, Americans are skeptical of Trump's handling of the situation. A new CNN poll shows 59% think Trump's approach won't lead to long-term peace. 50% say it's flat out bad for the U.S.,

and nearly six in 10 disapprove of his handling of the U.S.'s relations with Russia. Jess, your thoughts here? Well, I think that Oval Office debacle actually did something and moved public opinion in how Trump is handling this. So that week of calling Zelensky a dictator, saying he only had a 4% approval, and then that back and forth in the Oval, you know, first with J.D. Vance and then with Trump,

obviously has people soured a bit on this approach. And, you know, with Russia saying that we're making progress, that's BS to me. I don't trust them as far as I could throw them, which would be zero feet anyway. And there is no evidence that they have...

compromised any of their positions. They're still at the maximalist position in all of this. And so all of the compromising is going to have to come on the part of Ukraine. Now, Zelensky has been signaling for months now that he is willing to make some concessions. He even said when he was speaking in Kiev a few weeks ago, I'll resign right now if it means that we can put a stop to this and that we're going to have the security guarantees that we need.

So I basically just don't believe it. I think that Zelensky continues to be between a rock and a hard place, having to negotiate with two forces that just want this over with. Putin, and he wants to get whatever he wants, and us, that wants this mineral rights deal, which is going to go through. And if there's a tentative ceasefire, they're going to break it. You know, Putin...

And Medvedev come out and say, we're making progress. And that night, there are 27 drones launched into Ukraine. So spare me, basically, is where I am. Yeah, this is, I see a silver lining here. And that is the U.S.'s surrender to Putin. The decision to ignore these 80-year alliances with the largest economies in the world such that they can have sort of this...

if you will, this mob deal with another autocrat and potentially thinking they can divide up the world, it's economically just really stupid. And the silver lining here is the following. Europe may be a union for the first time, and that is the 27 member states of the European Union have finally recognized that they need to get their shit together and can't be this rich nephew reliant on

Uncle Sam's largesse. They now actually believe there's just no getting around it. Uncle Sam has lost his shit, and we can't depend upon him for a military umbrella. The U.S. spends about $800 billion a year on defense. NATO and all EU 27 member nations spend a total of about $400 and $450. They have not been coordinated. They've been sclerotic. They've lacked investment. They've lacked risk capital.

And this might be actually the moment for them to command the space they occupy. And you have seen some signs of a pulse and of real leadership from the biggest leaders in the EU. And I believe that they basically, the bad news is that America can't be counted on, which is really unfortunate and tragic to support the post-World War II 80-year alliance that has created more prosperity in the last 80 years than the world has created in the modern economy or the history of the modern economy.

But the silver lining is that the EU may get more coordinated. They're talking about increasing their defense budgets from 1.9% of GDP to 3%. And what you've seen is the markets are responding. The quote-unquote Magnificent Seven, which consists of US tech mega caps, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia, and Tesla,

have been incredible performers. But this year, year to date, they're down 8%. Whereas the European Defense 7, that's the seven largest military contractors, are up 46% and 65% over the last year. And the Stock 600, which is the European kind of S&P, if you will, is up 9% this year. And the S&P 500 is down 2%.

If you look at military spending, as much as – and there's a decent argument here that it withdraws from more productive means of spending money on social services – there is, one, a stimulative effect, and two, there is a spillover. If you look at the most valuable companies in the world, whether it's Apple or Google, they're essentially built on the backbone of

of defense technologies developed early on, whether it's DARPA, which was built to establish a communications network such that we could communicate in a post-Soviet nuclear attack that was hubless or nodeless, or GPS, which is what essentially Apple and Android are built on. And that was developed such that we could put an ICBM in Gorbachev's pocket. All of these military technologies do have a stimulative and a spillover effect

And I believe, and this was one of my big predictions late last year for 2025, that European stocks are going to vastly outperform U.S. stocks. And the nice thing about this is we're all talking as if at the negotiation table that it's up to, first and foremost, the U.S., who kind of is acting as the propaganda wing of Russia at this point, and then Russia,

And Ukraine isn't being invited to the table around these defense stocks. And Europe plays absolutely no role. Well, here's the good news. If Europe gets its shit together and shows sort of the commitment and resolve from a spending and a boots on the ground resolve that the U.S. and Russia have shown in spades, they don't need the U.S. The Russian economy is smaller than the Canadian economy. It's less than $2 trillion.

And the GU or the EU member nations add up to about 19 trillion. So the European Union, should it show coordination, fiscal commitment, and perhaps even boots on the ground commitment, which I don't think they'll ever need to do, but show a willingness and a resolve, they don't need the U.S.,

And I'm hopeful that this additional spending and coordination might finally kind of stir a sleeping giant, and that is the EU. So I think this is a new era or could signal a new era where there's some great leadership in Europe, whether it's Macron, whether it's Keir Starmer. There is an opportunity here for Europe to finally be a union and command the space they occupy, push back on Putin with or without Europe.

the US's help and coordinate and spend and show some resolve here. They are acquiescing to a gas station that has nuclear weapons on the roof and they shouldn't be. They are bigger economy, they have fantastic IP, fantastic weapons producers,

Both France and the UK are nuclear powers. It is time for the Europeans to step up. It's going to be costly. That's the bad news. The good news is they can absolutely step up and push back on a murderous autocrat. And what's just so tragic here is.

is that Trump appears to be acting like a Russian asset. There's no evidence that he is, in fact, a Russian asset. But if you were to define the actions of a Russian asset, he would fit them to a T. But the good news is I'm not sure the European Union actually needs us. I think they have all of the spending power, all of the military technology to push back on their own. The question is, do they have the resolve and the leadership? I just want to add,

quickly to that, that while I share those sentiments and as someone who spent a lot of time living in a former EU country, but I have a deep affection for the European project. And I think it's incredible that Europe

You could design something with the free flow of humans and goods and that we're all the better for culture sharing and economic sharing, etc. But all of these silver linings or all of these good things that are happening are happening for somebody else besides us. And that feels terrible. I don't ever want to be rooting against

my own country. I don't want to be rooting against my own government. And in every single conversation that we've had today, that has had to be a stipulation in this, that I don't want to be seen to be on the side of Venezuelan gang members. I don't want to be seen to be on the side of violent anti-Semites. I don't want to be seen to be on the side of the U.S. not having the important and

central role that we should be playing in geopolitics in favor of a stronger EU or a chance for Ukraine to be able to survive as a sovereign nation. I think I said it, used the same word at the start of the podcast. I just feel despondent about all of this. And it makes me feel a bit like a shitty American too. And I love America. I think it's the most fantastic country on the planet. And

There's just so much that has made me feel sour about the way that we're behaving and what the future looks like for all of us here. Well, I go back to, I feel the same way. And I think a lot of Americans do. They feel despondent. And what helps me is that I realize that

Yeah, as Winston Churchill said, the Americans, after exhausting every other option, will do the right thing, or will do the right thing after exhausting every other option. And we faced really dark moments before. Eighty years ago, we were rounding up Japanese American and putting them in camps, and some of them had sons fighting in the European theater in our own uniform. We, you know, we do get it wrong a lot. But generally, over the medium and the long term, the arc of American justice bends towards the righteous.

We waited a couple of years before entering World War II. Canada went over there first and started training allied pilots. And finally, we decided to enter the war. And I do think Americans are going to recognize that the Ukrainian people who are fighting for liberty and American values, that Canada with the largest undefended border in the world are actually our friends.

that this move towards autocracy is so counter to everything that's wonderful and has created so much prosperity in the U.S., that those values are steadfast, that those values matter, and that they're worth fighting for. So I have a lot of confidence that Americans, should we actually find leadership in the Democratic Party, and I believe we will, to your point, and you've always said this, we have a great bench, I think they're going to realize that

a murderous autocrat invading Europe usually does not end well for Europe and then eventually for us. And I do believe there's a real moment, a kind of a, you know, people were calling Keir Starmer, Keir Churchill or Winston Starmer. There's a moment here for a leader to step up and say that America needs to be America again. And I'd like to think we're getting to that point, but we have been in these types of dark places before and,

And American values do seem to show up, and I'm confident that's going to happen again here. But this is, I would describe, and I think you're articulating it well, this does feel like a dark moment where our American values are taking a back seat to the temptation to have a strong man that's going to solve what are some very real problems here.

in the U.S., but I'd like to think that over the long term, after, again, exhausting every other solution, that we get it right. Me too. There you go. All right, that's it for this episode. Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates. Our producers are David Toledo and Chinenye Onike. Our technical director is Drew Burrows. You can find Raging Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday. That's right, its own feed. That means exclusive interviews with sharp political minds you won't hear anywhere else.

Make sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And one last plug, join us for our live show on April 17th in New York. Grab your tickets now. The last time tickets went on sale, they were sold out in 24 hours, no joke. Link in the show notes. See you there. Jess's kids will not be there. They will not be there.

Jess, have a great rest of the week. Realize, just make it clear to your husband, always defer to mom. ADM, he's an influencer, not a decision maker. I love it. He's listening. So there you go, honey. Love you. See you at home.

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