Transcription
Let me give you a warning about what I'm about to say. This is both serious and, um, not hyperbole.
So, when you think about what's been going on in the last month and a half, uh, it's it's what many people thought would happen because of Project 2025, but worse. It's not so much the policies in Project 2025; those were articulated, and we're seeing them carried out. But we're seeing a lot more than that. That includes the hollowing out of institutions, whether we're talking about the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, the EPA, the Department of Health and Human Services, or maybe most dramatically, the military. We're seeing career people leaving or being fired, or potentially being fired, or being rounded up for potential action. Um, and we're seeing lots and lots of career people and commissionary employees actually being let go in a way that is potentially quite illegal, meaning that they will bring lawsuits and they will get back pay and/or be reinstated. Thus, the whole reason for doing this, which was to potentially save money, or as Elon Musk says, you know, this is the only way that we can stay afloat, which is really just… um… I was thinking of a lot of crude ways of describing that, but it's just not true. When you think about the infinitesimal amount of money that is spent on federal employees compared to the budget and the deficit, it's it's just… this is like, as a friend of mine used to say about things, it's a pimple on an elephant's ass. This is that; that's just a crazy justification. What it really is is the complete eradication, destruction of institutions that serve to protect us. When we're dealing with the Department of, of, um, like the CDC, or in the larger group of DHS, and institutions that serve to make sure that our liberties are adhered to, our rights are protected, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Inspectors General that serve to look for waste, fraud, and abuse, and the top three military judges who were all fired. These are apolitical people, as I have said. Can you think of eight, but nine, reasons why you would fire the three top judge advocates in the military? Can you think of a benign reason? I can't. I can only think of a reason why you would want loyalists who are going to not stand in the way.
And it's impossible not to put what is happening in the context of 20th-century history, thinking about Hungary, thinking about Germany, thinking about lots of countries where the rule of law and forms of democracy have fallen. And that is, I'm afraid to say, the world that we are in—not entering, but are in. I think it's not healthy to be in denial. I am the son of a psychologist; I understand that denial, at times, can be healthy and can help you get through a situation until such a time that you're ready to confront it. We need to confront this. It is not the case that we just stick our heads in the sand with hope, "Oh, this isn't going to really happen, and this isn't really what's going on." We are seeing so many laws, in my view, being broken. We are seeing so many… it's not just a policy issue; we're seeing so many things that are not just red flags, they're actually the thing that you worry about when you eliminate the top three judges in the military, when you eliminate the Inspectors General. None of that has to do with, "Oh, we need to save money, and we're downsizing." It all has to do with, "I want those institutions not to get in my way," of not just the unitary executive, but unitary power, as the president has, quote, joked, in having a mock cover of a magazine depict him as a king. That is not who we are supposed to be. I also don't think that's who we, or that's what we voted for, but we'll see whether people stand up to that. We obviously have seen people in government who have been vocal, who have been heroes, who have not been willing to go along. We've seen that at the FBI, where I used to work. We've seen that at the Department of Justice, where I also used to work, with the lawyers at the Department of Justice who have taken courageous actions in the sense that they have done what their oaths of office and what their own moral fiber, backbone told them they had to do.
But I think there's another aspect to this. So I'm talking a lot about what Donald Trump has done with respect to governmental institutions and that hollowing out. So we have the veneer of those institutions without the content. So it's like Kabuki theater, or like those Western towns in 1930s John Ford movies where they're only an inch deep because it's just a stage set. That's what Washington's being turned into. But I think there's more, unfortunately, and that is that I think that Donald Trump has realized that when you weaponize government, that capitalism can capitulate quite quickly. If you are in a corporation and you just don't want to be illegally or improperly targeted, you do what companies in Hungary or companies in Russia—companies that don't have a rule of law—do, which is that you capitulate; you settle lawsuits, even though those lawsuits are completely ridiculous and not meritorious. You settle it because you're afraid that if you don't give money to the Trump side, that you will be targeted. That is completely antithetical to the rule of law. And what normally you do is like, "I'm not going to settle a lawsuit that is garbage," and you don't have to worry about reprisal because it's illegal to have reprisal. But that's not what we're seeing. You're seeing companies not just settle lawsuits brought by Trump and Trump allies, but you're seeing more than that. So, um, I'm not going to… I don't mean to pick on Jeff Bezos, but that's a really good illustration here. You have somebody who can afford—God knows he can afford—to have principles and to live by those principles. Maybe it would cost him some money, but he's not going broke anytime soon. During the election, he said that and changed the policy of the Washington Post, which he owns, and said that the Washington Post is not going to… it's not going to… say that it is endorsing a presidential candidate. And that if he had said that two years before the campaigns, I would have said, you know, that's a choice, and that you can decide that it's something that the newspaper doesn't have to do, and it could be questioned; it's impartiality, and it's… that's like reasonable minds can differ, but there's nothing outrageous about it doing it for the first time in a very long time during the campaign, sort of at the last minute when there was a draft endorsement that had been presented to him, to make the decision. That is a very different thing. And the reason, you know, it's a very different thing is because the subsequent actions that he took. So he said, "I don't want to have endorsements at the presidential level because of the appearance it gives that it undermines people having faith in our objectivity." Well, okay, let's just take that as a given that you say, you know what, he should have decided that earlier; it seems partisan at the time that he did it, but it's just a policy difference. Here's the problem with that. Fast forward a New York minute forward to the inauguration, and where is Jeff Bezos? He is in the roto for the presidential inauguration, standing right behind Donald Trump. Where's the appearance of impropriety there? A newspaper, I thought, is not supposed to be endorsing one candidate or another. They obviously have an obligation to cover the president objectively, which means at times they will have reporting and opinion writers who take issue or support or don't support various policies. So you know that that issue of, "Oh, I just don't want to be accused of impropriety," is one that is very hard to swallow with the owner's subsequent actions, which didn't… were not at all consistent with that. But it gets worse. So, um, yesterday Jeff Bezos issued a policy with respect to the opinion page at the Washington Post. The policy—and I'm going to just read it for a moment—is that the opinion section would now advocate, quote, "personal liberties and free markets," unquote, and it would not publish opposing viewpoints on those topics. The head of the… the man who ran the opinion section resigned. That is so reminiscent of what you… we saw when… Danielle… the head of the Southern District of New York US Attorney's office resigned, when Denise… the chief of the Criminal Division in the DC US Attorney's office resigned, when the heads of the Public Integrity section at Main Justice resigned. Here you have J—Jeff Bezos, in my view, doing basically a complete suck-up to the administration, um, in the most transparent way, using language right out of George Orwell's *1984*. The part of this that says, "Our opinion section is going to be for personal liberties and free markets," well, first of all, what does that mean, to say you're for personal liberties? Who isn't for personal liberties? It's such a meaningless comment. And if you scratch just the surface of that, you know it's personal liberty—the First Amendment of the Constitution. So how is a newspaper, which should be the place where the First Amendment… it's a bastion, is the guardian of the First Amendment… when you say, "We're going to support personal liberties," that would be fine, except that the part of the policy is, "We're not going to have opposing viewpoints." That is the whole point of the First Amendment is that you have a whole range of views. And then you have the second part, which is, "We're going to support free markets." Well, that is… that is really a staked-out opinion because free markets… there's all sorts of great things about free markets, but that's not enshrined in our Constitution. There are all sorts of limits that are placed on free markets, and it really seems to be a pandering by Jeff Bezos to the idea that there shouldn't be any regulation of any company. And of course, that would certainly help him because he runs Amazon and the Washington Post and other other companies. But um, the free markets are not and have not been, quote, "free" for a very long time. Encompassed in the idea, we only are going to run stories on the free markets and not tolerate any dissent on that… does that mean that he's against the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC? That there should be regulations? That you shouldn't be able to lie to investors? That you need to be truthful in your statements if you're a public company? And that's just one example. Does it mean that there shouldn't be criminal laws that govern money laundering and fraud and bad practices? I spent much of my career dealing with… I spent much of my career dealing with corporate cases, corporate criminal cases, whether it's Enron or Merrill Lynch or Volkswagen… all sorts of wrongdoing in companies. Is that something that should be eradicated because we just believe in, quote, "free markets"? Is the Washington Post not going to tolerate anyone saying something on those topics that would in any way eliminate or reduce the quote "free market"? What's his view on tariffs? Or how does free markets deal with taxes? I mean, it's such a meaningless statement to say, "We're only in favor of personal liberties and free markets." In and of itself, it's just meaningless words. But what it's saying, what it really means, what it's code for is deregulation, and more dangerously, that there's not going to… we're not going to brook any dissent. And so that's why you saw the head of that paper leave. That is the reason you saw the subscribers to the Washington Post dramatically reduced, including… I used to subscribe; I don't anymore, precisely for this reason. I didn't want to support, even in my own small way, the Washington Post. Everyone has to make up their own minds, and I made up mine. It's the same reason I'm not on X anymore. I didn't want to support, even in a small way, that institution and the person who I think is a danger to this country.
So again, I want to pick on Jeff Bezos because I think that what you're seeing with him you're seeing in many, many other companies. I think that there is a lot of, as Professor Schneider yells at a bang in advance, knowing that you don't want to be targeted and picked on and on Donald Trump's radar screen. And so what it shows is that the roots of our democracy are a whole lot shallower than we thought. It's like a weeping willow tree—in many ways that seems like a good analogy—where it seems big and magisterial, but willow trees have very, very shallow roots, and they can be blown over quite easily. And what we're seeing is that the people that are the heart and soul of keeping our democracy are not living up to that obligation, whether it's members of Congress who are not adhering to their oaths of office, to what they have to do when they're the ones who make the laws; the president's only supposed to execute the laws, as Senator Angus King has reminded us, as an independent senator from Maine. You don't see it in institutions that are private corporations where there's this capitulation in advance. You don't see it in a whole range of areas within government where people are obeying in advance, and then people are suffering consequences for their principles. And that can be very difficult for people. But if there's one thing about this moment right now, it's—for those people who are old movie buffs—this is a moment for a sort of "I am Spartacus" moment, where you have to stand together, and this is when you can't just say, "Well, it's just happening to somebody else," and you want to keep your head down. I know everyone thinks this is like a Chicken Little thing, where it's like, "Oh, everyone always wants to say the sky is falling, the sky is falling." But when everyone was warning about Project 2025, candidate Trump was saying, "Don't worry, that's… I disagree with that; it's not my thing." We know that that wasn't true, and in fact, we're seeing it all being carried out now. And if you care about democracy, this is the moment to stand up. We have generations of people who have done much and fought for democracy. We have living examples now from the people in Ukraine, of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. We have the feminist movement that's gone on for quite a long time and it's still going on, that are all living examples. We have the so-called Greatest Generation of people who fought in World War II, and they were not losers and suckers; they were people who made a decision about what's important in terms of being alive, what you stand for. And this is that moment. And there is a huge history of people doing the right thing and making decisions about what they stand for and what they're willing to sacrifice for it. So, as I said, this wasn't going to be an easy conversation, but I think it is the moment for people to really understand that they need to stand up and be counted. I've talked, um, in other… on this sub, actually, I've talked about what people can do and give it some suggestions as to practical things that any one person can do within, you know, what they think is important to them that can be powerful. But I do think it's important not to just internalize what's happening and recognize it, but if you feel like I do, you need to take lawful action to be heard within a democracy while we still have it. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me. This is my YouTube channel, which I just started. If you want additional information or just chatter from me, not just on YouTube, I also recently started a Substack, and there's information below as to how to get to and subscribe to, if you want to choose to do that, to my Substack where I post almost every day, actually, some thought or something that I find interesting. So anyway, thank you very much for listening.