Jessica Yellin
Appearances
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Sure. I mean, even if it's for bad motives or not the most noble motives, one thing that happens in these environments is you get these clash of egos. Like when you're not governed by rules and law, but by personality and dominance, the clash of egos is part of what just makes them fall apart because it's not a functional system, right? Right.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
I didn't know that. But I just have a commitment today to be happy and chill no matter how wild the news is. And that's my gift to everyone listening too.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And say no. And so it proves that his power is limited or has limits for now. Right. Also, after he did that weird... scene last week where he held up a chainsaw at a conference. I think that a lot of even conservatives have started to say around the country, I don't like that. Who is that guy? Why is he in our government?
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
WTAF. And then there's this random video showing as he left the stage, he just hurried off like he just had the best performance of his life and was jacked on something and left his toddler son wandering around alone on the stairs.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Yeah. And that crosses party lines.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
So there's a couple things we could say. One is, first, we should note that the other piece of this is what is he doing with the data? Where is that data going? He's in all these agencies. I think Tim Snyder, who's written about authoritarianism, said-
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
If in another country you saw tanks roll up to the government agencies and people run out with guns to steal their files, you would call that an attack on the government. In this case, it's hackers getting the key to our files, which is digital. We don't know what they're doing with them. Yeah. is also an attack on our institutions, quite reasonable to argue that.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And Musk is creating an AI right now called Grok and has set on the record that AIs are running out of new information, new data to train on. You know, AI runs on this collection of data that you can then ask questions and it spits back the information it got from that data. They need new data to grow and be big. And government data is the most trusted, valuable data that there is.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Is there a possibility he's using this to train his AI? We don't have transparency, so we don't know.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
So there is something going on in Congress. Democrats are pushing back to varying degrees, some quite heatedly, like Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar. I even saw Gillibrand. Many are, you know, ringing the alarm. Others are being quite quiet. And so are a lot of Republicans, especially Republican senators who are traditionalists, true institutionalists.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
It causes me to wonder why those people are being quiet. And it's my belief that they are kind of holding their powder, keeping their powder dry while this all goes on to see what the impacts are. And saving it for a moment when they actually get to the work of legislating and they have some leverage.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And it would be my expectation that at some point those people will say, you want our votes, you need to put boundaries around Doge.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
If we can do it, everyone can do it, right? This is correct. This is correct. How are you? How is your week so far?
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Wait, I'll say one happy thing, which is I do remember we all flipped out about Steve Bannon in the first administration. Yes. And granted, he did not have the power to exfiltrate our data and save it. And to me, that's a different kind of risk and, you know, a unique one. But he also caused hair on fire anxiety as well. And he was out of the White House within nine months because of ego clashes.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Right. So-
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
All right.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Okay. Should we talk about foreign policy for a minute and then we can go to Congress? Let's do it. I'm trying to think of a happy thing that's happening first to talk about, but we can just go to the news. Is there a happy thing we could talk about? I don't know.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
I love that. Yeah, she said that it has been proven to totally cure the illness in 29 women. That's real news that doesn't suck.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
That was a nice palate cleanser.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Okay. So let's go to the UN. So this week, it was the three-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And the UN held two different votes that amounted to a call to condemn Russia for for invading Ukraine. And in a shocking move, the U.S. refused to sign on to that and instead sided with Russia in an effort inside the U.N. calling for peace, but without casting blame for the war at all.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
That's weird.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Exactly.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
It follows on Trump last week calling Zelensky a dictator. He was this week asked if he also thinks Putin is a dictator and wouldn't answer the question, wouldn't use the word again. He also last week said that Russia did not invade Ukraine. Republican senators disagreed with Trump and said Russia did invade Ukraine. And at one point, Trump sort of walked it back.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
But the fact that the US as a policy wouldn't vote to agree that Russia invaded Ukraine is enormously meaningful, striking. I can't remember another time the US sided with Russia over a war that they've started. It's just a total breach of US foreign policy and tradition. some people have sort of darkly joked, is Russia now our ally?
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Are we now in the axis of powers with Russia and China against Europe? You said what's been the reaction? Macron, the French president, came to the White House and did the most elaborate courting of Trump and sort of flattering him and we're your friend and we adore you. All the personal stuff you need to woo Trump in order to get him to the position they want.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
But Europe is holding an emergency summit on March, I think it's March 6th, to decide how to proceed with European security now that they feel the U.S. may not be their ally or may not be in their corner if Russia chooses to invade a European nation.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
I don't think that's what it is. Okay. I think that what Trump's doing is, I think there's two pieces to it. One is he does have this historic affection for Putin.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Yes, and has a specific history of getting financing from Russian interests and a history of doing business with Russian interests.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
He loves strongmen and has a specific affection and affinity for Russia and Putin, it seems, right? Remember Helsinki in his first term where he took this private meeting with Putin and said, he believes Putin over America's own intelligence community. Yeah. It was a sort of, signal moment in that administration. So we're sort of seeing echoes of that.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
I will remind everybody that even though we saw that happen during the same term, the Trump administration also sanctioned a lot of oligarchs and Russian diplomats. So they did take action against Russia. It wasn't a sudden allyship. There were just these inconsistent messages. And we don't know what else, right?
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
So is it possible that what Trump's doing is, in his own mind, at least negotiating with Putin, flattering him, playing to his ego in order to get the deal that he wants to bring a peace to Ukraine? That's possible. What's remarkable is the way he's going about trying to reach that peace is by sort of demanding of Ukraine that it make the concessions Russia wants
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
at the outset, before negotiations begin, without demanding any similar concessions from Russia, and also making an extreme demand of Ukraine that's bizarre, which is that they give us, the U.S., 50% of their rare earth minerals, which is a vital natural resource for them that Zelensky says would take 250 years for his descendants to repay. And I'll just circle back and close the loop here.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Rare earth minerals are essential to building AI. So if we were to plunder Ukraine for these things, it would be presumably to make the U.S. the AI capital of the world, which is what Trump announced he wants, along with Musk and Sam Altman and Larry Ellison, the tech broligarchs around him.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Yeah. Okay. One way to think about this that may or may not help is there's this term kakistocracy, which is a form of government that's all about plundering to enrich oligarchs. What he could be doing is trying to create American oligarchs, basically.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Yeah.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
It is. And the idea is that Russia would hold the area it already occupies. I will say that the Obama administration set Ukraine up for this by failing to engage when Russia first invaded Crimea. And by sort of allowing the invasion, you have a Russian occupation. In order to push Russia out, it would require sort of ongoing war force, a lot more leverage than Europe and the U.S.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
seem even prior to now were willing to bring. Right. At the time when the Biden administration was flowing all those weapons to Ukraine, Russia was still occupying that land and they couldn't get them out of that part of the country. So Russia's been there, I guess it's since 2014, they've been occupying part of that land. Oh, so that's the border that he's talking about.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
They've expanded beyond that during this war, but it is around the port and the water around Crimea. Yeah, and Donetsk and that region. So it's the part of the territory that Russian troops already hold and have been holding for some time. I'm sure there'll be border disputes.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
But what they're basically saying is, no, we're not backing you to have some, like, intensified period of combat to push Russia out. Got it. Okay. And the main complaint from Ukraine, really, like, if we're being practical and strategic, is... I'm going past what the actual reporting is, but stick with me.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
It's basically Ukraine's position is a little bit like, sure, sure, we might have to give up this land, but don't say that going in. Let us hold that as a negotiating position to give it up to get something.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
I mean, that's totally normal at work, right? And it sounds very efficient. Right. Super high efficiency here, at the very least.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Yeah.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And this has been, you know, the U.S. has been conflicted on whether Ukraine should be admitted to NATO or not for years because Ukraine wasn't admitted previously because the West was concerned Russia would take that as a provocation and then invade. Right. now that they've invaded, it's a little like, do they get protection or not? The big sticking point at this stage, I mean, J.D.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Vance already, or was it Hegseth, said the U.S. will oppose NATO membership for Ukraine. But when the big questions is, will Russia accept either EU or NATO peacekeepers inside Ukraine as part of a peace? So somebody's got to hold the peace. If you're not stationed there to rebuff Russian troops, what's going to keep Russia from invading further after everybody withdraws?
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
So what they're negotiating now is like, will EU or NATO peacekeepers be allowed in? And Trump, after saying no, has now said yes. And it's all very uncertain at this stage.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Yeah. Do you remember that?
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
J.D. Vance went to Europe and met with that leader of the AFD, the sort of far, far right extremist party in Germany that's seen as, you know, the farthest right party they've had since the Nazis. It's not Nazis, but it's sort of like... Nazi light. Worryingly leaning that way. So J.D. Vance met with them and sort of extended their support to them.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And Elon Musk gave this actual virtual address to their conference and- basically endorsed them. So the AFD won second place in German elections that just happened, but actually less of a win than they had hoped for. But more than they've ever had, right? More than a far-right party has had since the Nazis were in power. So Germany was... deeply concerned about this.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And the biggest winner is the conservative party. So right now, Germany is governed by a center-left party. This is a change of the guard. The conservatives will be in charge. They have a coalition government, so you have to make deals with other parties. So it will be conservatives and centrists.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
It's chaos over here. DC is so, it's so interesting. I used to live there. I don't anymore. And I just remember you have this, as a reporter, you have like this one level of understanding of what's happening at a systems level, doing the work all day. And then you go home and you run into people who are actually living the thing you were covering.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
One thing that's a huge relief is all the parties agreed that the AFD, that far-right party, will not be allowed in the coalition. So they will not have a governing voice in that way. And the conservative leader, when he accepted Mertz, when he accepted the win, in his acceptance speech, basically said, we can't rely on America to be our ally.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Europe needs to come together for Europe's own defense and announce the summit that's going to be happening on March 6th that we spoke about earlier. So, I mean, it is extremely worrying shift to the right, but it's also reassuring that Germany internally decided to ice out the AFD. Yes.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And I will say that after Vance and Musk endorsed the AFD, their poll numbers fell because Germans were like, yeah, no, we don't like your interference. Nuh-uh. So it actually hurts. That's fascinating. Okay.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
No, I think it's worth acknowledging Congress. I mean, this might actually be a cause for some levity, The Republicans, you might note, have done almost no legislating so far. Most of what Trump has, they passed one bill, I think, small bill. But most of what Trump's done has been by executive order or by doge just steamrolling in.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
So if Congress had to give us five bullet points on what they did last week, they would not be able to do it.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
You could write it. Yeah, so this week, the House is considering and trying to pass a budget, the first step of their budget measure. And the big bill they want to get done is one big budget bill that the House wants to pass. Trump has called it a big, beautiful bill that basically crams- many of their top priorities into a single bill.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And it would include lowering the corporate tax rate, extending the tax cuts Trump had from last time, new measures on all sorts of Trump priorities. And they will have to find, I think like $2 billion in savings In part, they don't say this exactly, but it's very clear that it's going to include cuts to Medicaid. They've directed one specific committee to find $800 billion of cuts.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And the only place they could do that is Medicare or Medicaid. If they cut Medicaid, it's going to be wildly unpopular. So wildly. I mean, think about that really hurts Trump voters. Yeah. And so they have the smallest majority in Congress in, I think, 100 years. And so they're struggling to find a majority. Long story short, their conservative members want steeper cuts.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And you're like, oh my gosh, the human piece of this is just so painful or it can be beautiful or whatever. But in this case, it's, painful and confusing.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Their members who work in swing districts don't want Medicaid touched. They can't afford any defections. It doesn't look like they're going to be able to get this passed with their own votes. You know, the Senate will try to pass, has a different bill that they've moved with. They're going to have to figure out a solution.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
But one possibility is if they don't get something done in the next week or so, we face a government shutdown. They're going to be desperate. The Republicans might have to say to the Democrats, hey, can we make a deal with you? And if they get to that point, Democrats will say, well, if you do, here are some of our priorities, which presumably would include limits on Doge, transparency around Doge.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
and, you know, protecting Medicaid and these other things.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
That's why I think some members, as we, going back to the beginning of our conversation, have been keeping their powder dry so that they can come to negotiations with, you know, some friendliness to cut a deal.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
One other thing also why people who live in blue districts, it's worth contacting your members too, to say that you want them to fight for this and you will get their back if they do.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And I'll say, as a journalist, I don't have a problem weighing in on this because fighting attacks on our government is not a right-left partisan endeavor. It's an all-Americans endeavor. I don't think this is a partisan call. And I just want to make it really easy. Every single representative has a Washington office, but they also have a regional office. So wherever you live...
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
there's an office near you that is for your member of Congress. So what you can do is Google your zip code and who is my member, if you don't know, Google their name and contact local office. And your senators will have multiple local offices and your representative will too.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
You can call those office numbers or get their email and you say, I wanna be added to your email list or I wanna know when you're holding town halls. And you want to get on a system that notifies you when they're having town halls and then get with your friends and show up at those things. You don't have to be wildly well-informed or anything.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
You just want to be present because what's going to happen is you're there's a congressional recess coming up soon for spring break. And what they do is go back to listen to their constituents. And when members start getting earfuls and start saying like, my constituents are going wild, that gives them leverage to push back on the White House and say, hey, this isn't me.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
I'm just letting you know what I'm hearing from home. And I'm going to lose my seat if you don't help us compromise in some way that makes my constituents happier. Honestly, that all makes a difference. It also leads to social media content that goes viral, you know, all of that. So these are important things everybody can do.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And there's one thing I thought I'd ask you, Amanda, which is some people have said to me, like, I want to convene. I want to get together with my friends. And I've always wondered if there's, in this moment, a need for people across the country to form their own circles. Yes.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Where they can get together and like talk about the news, get informed, plan together to go to these things, solve together how to find those emails. So you're not in it alone.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
That's beautiful. And you know what's so interesting is I interviewed this woman named Ann Applebaum, who's a Pulitzer Prize winning historian. She's written about Eastern Europe and Russia. Her expertise is authoritarianism. And when I ask what can regular people do to protect democracy, she said two things. Get involved in your local politics and connect with community to do that.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
So build community locally, which is exactly what you're talking about. And the other thing is make sure you practice joy in your life. that it's literally what you're saying, that part of the project of authoritarianism is to crush your spirit.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And if you can continually fuel that fire of enjoyment, creativity, pleasure, wonder at the world, and especially in community with others, you're in the mindset of defense. And that itself is a form of resistance.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
It's icky. Yeah. It's so wild because I put my contact information on Signal out to the public. Signal's a secure messaging app where it's encrypted. And it's the way journalists are doing a lot of reporting now where, you know, you can feel that you're doing the most you can to protect your sources.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
So I put that out on my newsletter and I say, if you have information or you're a federal worker, tell me what's going on. And people are sending me, you know, partly they're giving me tips and it's super interesting. We can talk about them. And then sometimes people are just sharing, like, I'm having a mental health crisis. I've been in this job. I think my work is vital.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
I'm protecting a lot of people's lives in various ways. And I'm scared for what happens if I lose the job, what happens to the people who are my responsibility right now. But also I can't take this personally. They're saying it's just, It's brutal. There's so many dimensions. So what exactly happened with that? What is this? I know, right? Okay, so here's the news.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Over the weekend on Saturday, Elon Musk, in a very familiar fashion, anybody who has worked for him, especially at Twitter most recently, says, oh yeah, we went through this exact thing. He sent an email or Doge sent an email from some rando email address they created with a government address.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
to all 2 million federal workers, minus those they recently fired, saying, please respond by X and such time Monday in an email listing five bullet points detailing what you accomplished in the last week. Please be sure to CC your manager. That went out to everybody on a Saturday evening.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And then he followed it up with a post on X saying failure to respond to the email we sent will be taken as a resignation.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Apparently government assignments come through X. I mean. Okay.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Obviously, that's not legal, but it's also one of these things where I keep thinking we're a little bit like in those Roadrunner versus Bugs Bunny cartoons where the Roadrunner runs off the cliff and keeps running until he looks down and sees there's no ground under him. That's a lot of what Elon Musk is doing. And they're just like going so fast. They keep going.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
But at some point they're going to be like, no, there's gravity. Yeah. So we're a little bit in that, like gravity's maybe starting to hit, but not yet. So right now government workers are like, okay, do I have to, like, what does this mean? And so as you lived through, I was hearing this as a reporter, people were reaching out to their managers all weekend, what do we do?
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And getting conflicting messages. All of the agencies that deal explicitly with national security matters, classified material and intelligence told their staff by email, do not respond to this message.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
In other words, if you worked for the FBI, run by Kash Patel now, if you worked for ODNI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, run by Tulsi Gabbard, you got an email saying, do not respond to this. Those agencies understood quickly that this was a deep national security threat and it would be dangerous for their employees to respond.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And even though these people are Trump loyalists, they broke with Musk and said don't. Other agencies like Social Security Administration said do comply and then change their guidance Monday. So some people were told over the weekend to comply, did so, learned Monday it could be a national security threat that they did so. One person wrote me and said, I feel sick to my stomach that I replied.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And then a lot of people got conflicting guidance. In many cases, it ended up with employees directed to reply if they want to. It's voluntary. And directed to be very generic if they do reply and not describe in any specific detail what they really did, but more broadly the kinds of things they did.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Great question. It's because think about it like if every single person in the government sends in a description of the work they do and copies in who their manager is.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
These emails create a map of our entire federal government and show what work is done within which agencies, who's working on Africa classified information, who's working on Russia matters, who's working on cybersecurity in the US, where cybersecurity loopholes lie inside the Social Security Administration.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Not only does it map all this information, it then clarifies these employees working on these things report up to this manager who reports up to that manager who reports on and on.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
So you've created now a map of all the workings of the government and you're taking that map and directing it to a single email address, which means any one individual who can hack that email now has a map of our government. One person who works in intelligence said to me, this is doing the bidding of China and Russia for them.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
This is the information our adversaries and threat actors have wanted for all of time. And in fact, HHS, run by RFK Jr., put out an email on Monday telling staff, if you reply to this, use coded language and assume anything you write will be obtained by threat actors.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
It's also, I think, instructive because it gives the lie to his claim that what he's really interested in is efficiency and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. Because if you think about it, this is a guy who's brought in, as we discussed, these kid hackers to obtain the data from every agency, right? aren't.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
If their access to the data isn't telling them which workers are showing up to work and which aren't and who's lazy and who isn't and who's good and who's not, why do they need all that data?
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And if he's acting in the best interests of our government, why would he send out a mass email without coordinating it with our agency heads who are also loyal to Trump and doing it in a way that protects the security of the nation? He's not doing any of the above. So it raises a question, why is he accessing that data?
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And why is he shooting from the hip so recklessly when it comes to such sensitive material about the security of our government? I have some theories, you know.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
I mean, this is why I think it's going to come crashing down, because at some point this is just offensive to even the most conservative Republicans loyal to Trump. This just flies in the face of what our standards and values and rule of law is. We can talk about what regular people have to do to help get leaders to do that.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
But to answer your question first, I think that we could postulate, is he doing this so that he, Elon Musk, has all this information so that he can get government contracts and advantage? Well, to answer that question, already today, there's news that Starlink, well, that Doge decided that certain contracts the FAA had were not being well executed.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And now Starlink has those contracts, a company run by Musk. Yes.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
I have to just be careful. I can't necessarily say it was Doge that made the assignments, but Doge decided that there's all this waste and inefficiency inside the FAA and fired a lot of people. We don't have transparency to understand the inner workings of exactly how the decisions are being made. There's lawsuits to get that transparency.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
The result of a lot of decisions led to these contracts being awarded to Starlink. Did Doge make those decisions? Did someone else? Wow. We do know Doge entered, said there's problems. Elon Musk ends up with contracts. That's just one example. Wow. Then, you know, Doge, when it started, to give it like... It merged with this thing.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
I'm going to bungle the name, but it's like Office of Digital Strategy inside the government. It's basically like the IT efficiency entity in the government. And it merged with that. And a bunch of the staffers who had been there before just resigned in protest for some of the things Doge is doing and some of the ways they're getting info and stuff. So should I pause? Yes.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Jessica, how the hell are you? Hi, what a nice intro. I am well. I'm going to tell you something I didn't warn you of in advance, which is great. It's my birthday today. I know.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
I think we should all pause. I think we should collectively pause. Should we do one of our breaths? I think that's a great idea. Should we do an inhale and then a slow exhale? Inhale. Maybe we should. Hold. One, two, three, four, five, six. Exhale for seven or eight. I do find that helpful.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Like reminding yourself that we're all spinning into what could be, which is important because it gives you the context to understand why these actions matter. But it's also good to remember that all of the worst hasn't happened. We're sharing this knowledge now so that everybody can take action.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
So... A couple of things. I mean, we're starting to see there's judges who are starting to say we need to know what Doge is doing and how we need as a court to have transparency into these activities. And I'm sure there'll be a legal battle on that, but that'll be important. And also to see if they comply once the courts rule.
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Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
There's also it is meaningful to see that even the most diehard Trump loyalists stood up to Musk and said no. Mm hmm. Kash Patel. You can't get a bigger like Trump loyalist. He said no, right?
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Ja, es gibt eine Methode für diese Verrücktheit. Ich werde noch zwei mehr, nur eine weitere Kategorie hinzufügen und dann können wir über das Warum sprechen. Sie haben auch alle Art von Konsumenten-Wachhundern im Konsumenten-Finanz-Verteidigungsbüro gefeuert, die es wichtig sind, Konsumenten gegen Corporate Overreach zu verteidigen.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Und jetzt habe ich gehört, dass sie heute Morgen Menschen bei der FDIC starten. Which is the banking regulators. They're letting go of the people who watch big business on our behalf.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And it puts our whole financial system at risk, right? Because it's instability. And, you know, we have to think about what's this about? Why are they doing this?
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Totally. So I am in contact endlessly with federal workers who are now feeling so paranoid. They have been warned. They've gotten emails and memos saying, if you know anybody... So the government put out this edict, the Trump administration put out an edict saying, anything with DEI must go. And they said, we also are aware that some of you will try to hide DEI under other language. So... Wow.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Wow. Wow. Wow.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Because that is different than your loyalty is to the Constitution. So I've heard throughout the agencies ridiculous loyalty tests, like in the National Park Service, the head park ranger has to attest that the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America. There was another one like that, that was ridiculous, you know, a level of absurdity you can't believe, right? And
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
It's sort of catching people off guard because it's so bizarre, un-American and also silly.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Whose truth are you going to accept? Yeah.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Ja, ich habe von Leuten gehört, die sich auch gefragt haben, weißt du, glaubst du, dass Trump die 2020-Elektion gewonnen hat? Und sie müssen beurteilen, dass er das in ihrer Meinung gemacht hat, diese Art von Sache. Ich möchte auch sagen, eine Perspektive, es ist möglich, Trump ist jetzt am Apex seiner Macht.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Sie haben noch nicht zu dem Budget-Bill gekommen, wo er Republikansupport vermutlich verlieren wird. His coalition could fray. Right now, what we're discussing, this is on a path that can't be stopped. It's possible that the wheels could come off the bus. So I want to give people a sense like horror isn't inevitable. Right.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Yes. So multiple attorneys general have formed kind of coalitions and they've brought suits against Doge on behalf of the people of their states. And so have associations and there are a lot of lawsuits. The judges have so far shown concern about the how and the what. In other words, what is Doge getting into and how are they getting into it? What is
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
the Trump administration trying to freeze and how are they trying to freeze it? Where the courts have not been willing to say no, it looks like they're unwilling to say no to, can Doge be stopped as an entity? So the attorneys general, for example, brought two lawsuits. Doge one was against Doge getting access to that sensitive payment system at the treasury department.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And the judges said, we're putting a hold on that. That doesn't seem right. The Attorney's General also brought a case saying Doge as an entity is illegitimate and should not exist and should not be getting access in the ways it does. And so far, they argued the case the day before we're recording this.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
In the hearings, it sounded like the judge was not inclined to agree that that judge, who was appointed by Barack Obama, felt that Doge, her question suggested Doge is legit. The issue might be how it does its work. So that's one thing. Where are the Democrats? Well, they're not in power. They can't control Congress. Right.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
I've heard, you know, from my reporting that a lot of them think we're not going to be able to get anything done until things start to break. And until red state senators are also in pain and their citizens are in pain and they're willing to work with Democrats. The Republicans so far have mostly embraced what's happening as a gift from the world's most brilliant and able engineer.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
This is the man, you know, they'd say who invented Tesla and SpaceX. And now he wants to come fix the government for free and we should let him. That's their view. The White House opened the door. So who's going to stop it? In fact, it's Project 2025's dream. Because Moskau is executing on their will in a way nobody could if they didn't have access to just sort of tech know-how.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
What's their goal? There are three theories about this from the people I talk to Eine ist, dass das eine Strategie ist, dass im Tech-Welt der effizienteste Weg ist, ein gebrochenes System zu verändern, ist, zu gehen und schnell Menschen auf der größten Ebene möglich zu schießen. Und wenn du anfängst, zu sehen, was zerfällt, und du rutschst hin und füllst diese Höhlen, richtig?
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Wenn etwas einen Leak erzeugt, patchst du diesen Leak. Und die Theorie ist, dass das der Weg ist, den du am längsten, am schnellsten schneidest. Obviously, when you're doing that to Twitter, an app nobody needs, it's very different from when you're doing that to firefighters or disease detectives or our National Intelligence Service.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
It's a level of unconcern about impact on human lives that's shocking. So that's just like efficiency theory. Second theory is privatized theory. That what they really want to do is break government so badly that we, the public, lose faith in government. Your social security checks stop coming, for example.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Then you reach a point where you're so desperate and panicked that you say, anybody who will fix this is a blessing. Please bring in a solution. And then they rush in with a privatization solution, right? Musk kreiert eine Firma, Peter Thiel, was auch immer, kreiert eine Firma, die Social Security-Checks privatisiert. Und wir sind dankbar, weil jetzt die Checke wieder aufsteht, richtig?
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Okay. Let's go to Jessica. Okay. Go ahead, Jessica. May I just say hi? Oh, hi. You look fantastic today. I dig your straight hair. I just need one human moment before we jump into all this.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
So there is a theory that they want to either privatize by putting all federal payments on X, using X as the default payment system for America, or they want to put America on the blockchain and move to cryptocurrency, right? Those are two out there theories that may or may not be that out there. So, we did efficiency and privatize.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
The third and final theory about what's going on here is something that sounds so wild. A week ago, I would have said this sounds too conspiracy theory to talk about. But here we are, is the CEO nation state theory, which is that these tech oligarchs actually envision themselves as more able leaders than anybody else on earth. And that the goal is to break democracy and America.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Reform ourselves into nation states run by CEO kings. Und das ist alles aufgrund eines Buches und eines Quote-unquote Philosophen, ich weiß nicht, mit dem sie schon lange besessen sind, der darüber schreibt, wie die Welt besser funktionieren würde mit diesen oligarchischen Innovatoren, unverfesselt von Regulierung, frei zu kreieren und Technologie zu innovieren.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
They would let us live in these, you know, mini nation states where we have a nice life and then they get to do whatever they want free of regulation. Bye bye democracy.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
I think the media people is crucial. I personally, if I had to sort of, what do I believe? I think that it's more likely that J.D. Vance is this crucial linchpin between the Project 2025 ideologues who have a technocrats understanding of government and where the roadblocks are and has paired them with the tech oligarchs to sort of blow through the guts, right?
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
My hair is curly right now and I'm like, oh, it's too out of control. I need to go deal with that. That's a whole thing we can discuss. That should help us get through. Okay, so we are at a very strange juncture in American history. We've certainly never seen anything like what we're about to talk about in the modern era.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And they can both execute on their will and and that Trump doesn't even understand what's going on.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
He thinks he's Mr. Powerful, like running the country, and he's got the most wealthy, powerful man in the world as his new buddy.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Also, Vizepräsident J.D. Vance, der in Amerika ziemlich privat ist, wie wir ihn nicht so oft sehen, ist wirklich wichtig in der Mitte all dessen, als der Linchpin-Konnektor. Er wurde von Peter Thiel, der sein Mentor war und ihn durch seine Karriere finanziert hat,
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Peter Thiel ist vermutlich der stärkste Venture-Kapitalist, der, unter vielen Dingen, Palantir kreiert hat, eine Datenfirma, die globalen Überwachung macht. Er hat also viele Augen auf die Welt. Er ist auch jetzt sehr investiert in Drohnen und will sich in militärische Hardware entwickeln. Er will einen Verteidigungscontractor kreieren.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Er und Elon Musk gehen zurück zu PayPal und arbeiten sehr nah zusammen. Wenn wir sagen Musk, bedeutet das auch Thiel.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And he was elected. Right. The voters did choose him. He wrote this bestselling book that Hollywood embraced and liberals embraced as this great, you know, like he has an interesting trajectory. It's bizarre.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
There's a lot of cooks that made him what he is. But yes, his number one patron is Peter Thiel. Also J.D. Vance, der zur Yale Law School ging, ist extrem glatt und artikulierend, ging in Europa zu einer Aussprache zur Munich Security Conference, wo Außenpolitik-Intellektuelle und Führer zusammenkommen, um über globale Threaten und Verbindungen zu sprechen. Es ist wie ein Netzwerk für Alliierten.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And because what we're talking about is so centered around tech, I don't think we've ever seen anything like this. Right now, a team of essentially hackers is inside the pipes of government, accessing some of the most sensitive data we have.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And US usually comes there and says, Europe, we've got your back. Russia is a big threat. And then they talk about, is Russia or China the bigger threat? Variations on that. Instead, they thought J.D. Vance was coming to give a speech and that he would talk about the Ukraine war and how to wind down the Ukraine war.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Instead, he showed up and said, effectively, Europe, the greatest threat out there is not Russia. It is you, Europe, and your liberal... Wow. Taken together, this was seen as a profound retreat from America's role in alliance with Europe as a bulwark against Russia and a real invitation to Russia.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
So this is another version of just rushing in and breaking something that has been carefully built, alliances that have been carefully built and are maintaining
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Absolut. Und das eine, was ich vergessen habe, ist, dass J.D. Vance auch mit dem AfD-Partei in Deutschland ein Meeting mitgenommen hat, das ist der moderne Ereignis nach rechts, den man den Nazi-Partei nennen könnte. Und er hat nicht mit den liberalen Demokraten getroffen, die Amerika's long allies and in power are. Also, This followed Musk making an address to this same far-right Nazi-ish party.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
They work for DOGE, that's the government efficiency body Trump set up under Elon Musk, although the White House now says that Musk isn't really in charge of DOGE, and I'll come back to that in just a minute.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
He did this one that was like, I don't know what that was, if that wasn't a salute.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
What do you hear when you hear all that, Jessica? She's correct. That's accurate. And I also would add that this alliance we're seeing form in America between sort of these, the ideologues of Project 2025 and these tech organizations Vielen Dank. Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Untertitelung. BR 2018 Untertitelung. BR 2018
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
So, I think today we should talk about what DOGE is reportedly accessing, what DOGE seems to be doing with this information, how little transparency there is, and the chilling implications of all this, frankly for the country, for federal workers, and for each one of us personally. So before we get into the big topics, I just want to do a quick aside.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
In the last 24, 36 hours, the White House has gone to court and told a judge that Elon Musk doesn't run Doge. They claim that he might not even be an employee of Doge, which is wild because Trump originally said he was setting up Doge under Musk. Musk spricht von Doge, als ob es sein Fieftum ist. Es wird von Musk-Alliieren gestafft.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Das war's für heute.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Untertitelung. BR 2018 Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Untertitelung. BR 2018
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Ich meine, die Ebenen von Bizarro gehen weiter, aber sie sind im Gericht, um diese Vorstellung von Distanz für legalen Gründen zu kreieren. Und deshalb möchte ich das einfach anerkennen. Und wir erneuern das in dieser Konversation, indem wir das hier bezeichnen. Okay, also hier ist, was wir von DOGE wissen.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Die Lieutenanten, die es runten, sind in verschiedenen Organisationen und sie verfügen über einige der am stärksten geschützten, sensiblen Daten, die es gibt. Das betrifft persönliche, identifizierte Informationen über Amerikaner. Das könnte unsere Social Security-Nummern, Geburtstagen, Einkommen, Gesundheitsbedingungen, Adressen, all the things identity thieves need to get to us.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Little X? Little X, yes. Can you tell us what happened? Okay, so this was, in all the years I've covered the White House, one of the most mind-explodingly weird things to watch. On a day last week, or I can't, a few days ago, Donald Trump was in the Oval Office, sitting behind the Resolute Desk, the famous presidential desk, and standing next to him was Elon Musk, wearing a T-shirt,
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
a baseball cap, all black, holding his toddler son, who is also dressed like a mini daddy with a chain around his neck, and holding forth to the press. Elon Musk was lecturing America about democracy and about how we're under the control of bureaucrats and all this wild stuff as if he was the shadow president, while Trump sat slumped in his chair looking like sad,
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
It also gives them visibility into the money flows that undergird our financial system, information flows, who's talking to whom. They have real visibility into the guts of our infrastructure that keep us functioning. And they say they're rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. But to be real, their decisions to date are so careless and arbitrary.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Und Elon Musks Sohn X ist an einem Punkt auf seinen Schultern, aber dann an einem anderen Punkt... Warte, warte bitte.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
He goes up to Trump at the desk and he's on video. You see him whispering at Trump quite like with hostility and aggressiveness. And what people who like the denizens of the Internet have decided he's saying and they've captioned the video this way is stop talking. You're not the real president.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
But Trump is sitting there looking so morose, like side-eyeing the kid. And it just looks like Daddy Elon is, you know, taking control of his two little boys over here.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The video is really mind-bendingly weird. Elon Musk also went and took a sit-down meeting with Modi, the Prime Minister of India, a la presidential meeting, where they sat together and invited the press in to get a pool spray of them. You're like, this is what a president does. So many out there things are happening like that. Wow. Not very zenny, but very odd. Yes, yes.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
For me, it's just that we launched saying we do calm news and this does not feel calm. So I just want to remind people to breathe and remember that we're safe right now. We're not in that bad place that we can get to. And feeling calm is part of what it takes to have agency in the world. So pull out that toolkit and use it after you listen to this before you go into your day.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Maybe do an inhale, exhale and sit for a moment.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Sources I talk to say that it's wise for all of us to be deeply concerned about what they're doing with this data and to what end they're gathering it.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
We do know that one component of this is that they have been using some of their access to make arbitrary and careless mass firings of government workers that multiple sources have said to me put vital services at risk that could undermine some of the basic functions that keep our society working. People have described it as potentially catastrophic.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
And that's just one piece of what they're doing with this data. We are in a very vulnerable position. And I think because of the strange mix of realities right now, with Trump's newness to office again, his power over the party controlling Congress right now, and just sort of the shock of what's going on, official Washington is sort of watching this without doing much to try and stop it.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
It's possible. We just don't know what he's actually accessing. And I would caution about the turn anything on and off. We just don't know. One of the beautiful things about our government is that it's so fragmented. The system that controls the Department of Education is different from the system that controls Social Security.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
It would be hard to map it in a way you could definitely turn everything on and off. But is that possible? It seems that he's gaining a level of information that makes us extraordinarily vulnerable to his personal whims. And it's not clear, does Trump even understand what they're doing or capable of doing to members of Congress? So it puts us in a extremely vulnerable position with blinders on.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
We just don't know what's happening. I don't have information that they are inside the DOD yet. Trump has said, I want to send them to the Pentagon next. So I don't have personal reporting that they are, and I haven't seen that.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
They are inside Social Security Administration and there is a dust up there because they wanted to access sort of the most protected of the most protected of the most protected information that very few people have access to, even the most high-ranking, long-serving, only a few can access it. They demanded access to that and somebody resigned over that.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Social Security Administration, the prior administrator of Social Security Administration, Democratic Governor Martin O'Malley, is saying publicly, this is such a fragile system, they can break it.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
So part of the concern is not only that in some sort of, you know, evil mastermind, he wants to wrest control of it, which is a possibility we can talk about, but also that these are just 20-something kids who are going in sloppily and could just break things that have been carefully, you know, jerry-rigged together for many years in a way. Social Security, IRS and Treasury.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
They've demanded access to the most sensitive systems in all three entities that undergird our payment system, right? If you don't get your Social Security checks, if information at the IRS is exposed, you know, if our payment system at Treasury goes offline,
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
I've talked to software programmers who say these are not the ways, there are simpler ways to go at doing these things, right? So it's a level of access they're demanding that defies comprehension given their mandate. Is it possible that what they're trying to do is look for social security checks that are going out in duplicate? Yes.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Is it possible that they're looking for excessive payments and trying to map things against each other? It is possible. It's that they're going in at it in a way that's so sloppy. And so, as far as we know, they're just not using the normal protocols you use to ensure that everything's kept safe. And it's unclear why they need this much access. So that's why it's raising alarms.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
We don't know what they're doing with that. What they have done so far with it is make these lists of people to fire, disseminated those lists to agencies and ordered people to fire this list of people regardless of how effective they are, how valuable they are. It's indiscriminate it seems. And so that's the first action we actually know they're taking based on the information they're gleaning.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
I think about the Gilded Age. Did, you know, the robber barons of the Gilded Age have a level of power and knowledge and access? Yes, that was undemocratic, un-American, yes. But they didn't have the power of technology that gives you this far-reaching visual into everything.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
So in any case, this is a level of, I mean, I think what they're doing is it's an assault on our government from within and by private individuals. I think we should talk about what they're doing, like who they're firing or how this might affect us and then why they might be doing this. Darf ich nur eine Sache beurteilen, die du gesagt hast, Glennon? Ja, bitte.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
An dieser Stelle wissen wir, dass sie Visibilität in riesige Pools von Daten haben, die die persönliche Information der Menschen enthalten. Wir haben so weit keine Beweise, dass sie eine Info von einer Person geschaut haben oder versucht haben, sie herauszufinden, oder dass sie es benutzen, um Menschen zu beurteilen oder zu beurteilen.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
One could hypothesize that they can, but so far there's no evidence that's happening.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Well, let's talk about what the possible theories are that give structure to this, because I think that helps us see this more broadly. Do you want to talk about who's been fired for a minute so people understand, or do you want to leap to the why?
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
There are labs that have shut down around the country. I've talked to people at a power plant in the Pacific Northwest. That powers one third of the grid to the Pacific Northwest. They think it's the firings that have hit them because of this. They think it'll be catastrophic, potentially. Grid could go down, etc.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Basically what happened is the Doge guys, who are these kids, put out lists of and targeted certain... areas of government and said, fire all your probationary employees. Now, probationary means you've been in your job for one to two years. But that could lead one to conclude that these are new to governments, kids out of college that aren't that valuable. No, I've talked...
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
zu Leuten, die 25 Jahre Veteranen ihrer Departement, die sie als vital bezeichnen, aber die nur eine Promo bekommen haben. Und seit du eine Promo bekommen hast, bist du als Präventionär in dieser neuen Rolle für ein bis zwei Jahre. Und das war ein wertvoller Wildland-Fahrer.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Zwischen den Leuten, die sie gefeuert haben, sind Wildland-Fahrer, die wir in der Westen relying on, um rauszukommen und die Feuerzeuge in dieser Saison zu kämpfen. Wir sind apparell bereits kurzstafft und ich habe zu vielen Managern gesprochen, die panikiert sind über die Feuerzeuge. They've also let go of an incoming class of disease detectives at the CDC.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
They're all over in all our states and help monitor incidents of new diseases, for example, bird flu. And they're our first alert when bird flu is spreading, right? And we need to do something. Es gibt unendliche Beispiele von verschiedenen Kategorien von Leuten in unseren vitalen Services, Power-Planten, die Energie bieten.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Der Nationalpark-Service hat gerade ein Massaker, wo die Zahl der Leute, die gefeuert wurden, und das ist dein erstaunlicher Parkranger, der in der Wälder lebt und der einzige EMT in einem Nationalpark ist. Und sie zählen oft als Feuerwehrleute in der Feuerzeit.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Die andere Brutalität ist, dass wenn sie verlassen wurden, ihre Managern sagen, es sei eine schlechte Leistung, auch wenn ihre letzte Review exzeptionell war. Und für viele Menschen in einigen Staaten bedeutet das, dass sie Unabhängigkeit nicht sammeln können. Oh mein Gott. Und dann für die Menschen im Nationalpark-Service, die auch im Park leben.
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What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Also verlieren sie ihren Salar, können Unabhängigkeit nicht sammeln und sie sind unabhängig.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
It's just the moment. You get it. The reason I think this is such a revolutionary way to approach our reality is I spend so much time in social media and one half of my feed is all this like tools and tricks to, you know, be calm on the mat and how to work on your mindset. And it's all the therapy stuff, right?
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And then the other half of my feed is the world is ending, explosions, panic, blah, blah, blah. And often the very same mindfulness meditation people that I look to for guidance on how to practice on the mat or how to be still in myself are then posting these wild, panicked, hysterical things about the world and politics.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And I'm like, how are you not applying the wisdom you've gained in this comfortable, safe meditation world into the world of action and change and stress out there? Isn't the whole point of having those tools that you can use them in the world? Yeah. And not just in your own personal life. Like Amanda, what you said is 100%. Yes, we use them in our own personal relationships.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
They also apply to how we interact with the world of information, ideas, and political change.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
One of the key tools in that is asking yourself when you feel like you're on the ride, to use language, is what have I decided is true about this that might not be true? If you've written the script and you're already moving because you've decided an outcome, you're ahead of the story.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
Mm-hmm. And I can feel my nervous system calm down when you're saying that, when we say I'm not on the ride, like I can see it. And one of the things that's valuable about having this conversation and hearing this conversation is you might not get it the first time, like your body might not respond, but those ideas are in your head.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
So the next time you hear this, or the next time you suddenly feel so anxious with the news, there's a part of your brain that'll go, wait, I know something about this. And you might have just a moment of being able to distance yourself. Like, oh, I remember they talked about how I'm on the ride.
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Your intellectual mind might not understand what that means, but in that moment you're triggered, it gives you almost like an air gap, a moment to step out. Yes. And the more you can lean into that air gap to notice that you're too caught up and triggered in that way and that there is a way to relax out of it, that's your key.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And the more you practice that, the more your muscle memory grows and you're able to do it in the moment.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And I add a corollary to that, which I hadn't thought about until this conversation, which is one of the reasons Elon Musk and all those people we'll talk about are able to do as much as they do in the world and they're doing right now is because by all accounts, they're not very emotional about their work. They don't go on a ride.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
They stay at that witnessing space and they can make calculated decisions about what to do. And that gives them a measure of power over people who get emotionally reactive. And so I'm not advocating to not care.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
That's the whole point of doing the news is to care so that you can know and take action, but to step out of the reactivity so that you have that powerful driver's seat, sort of wise mind as you're doing it, which they have.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
Calm news. Okay, story number one is about DOGE, which is Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Please know it is not an actual department. So the headline of this is Elon Musk and his boys are inside the pipes of government.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And insiders and lawyers are warning that they're behaving with cruelty to federal workers and compromising the privacy of millions of Americans and the credibility of America's financial system.
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That sounds scary. What it means and what's going on is Musk said that he wants to find waste, fraud and abuse inside the different agencies in government. The way he decided to do that is by plugging a bunch of computers into the different agencies. And he's going one by one. and then examining the guts of the agencies.
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We don't have information on exactly what they're doing, what they're using, what they're really looking at, but we do know that he's working with a team of people he brought in that were either 20-somethings, there's even a 19-year-old, who he's worked with before who are engineers. Others were sourced and hired by Peter Thiel, who is a...
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Venture capitalist, worked with him at PayPal and is involved in a lot of surveillance technology, drone technology. And they've sort of plugged these young men into workstations going into the guts of these agencies around government. They've been taking down websites, demanding access to highly sensitive systems.
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grilling staff, and also recommending things to be frozen, presumably people to be fired, we don't know, sending emails to all of the federal workforce. And it's very unclear what criteria they're using for any of this, what level of vetting they've had, the questions go on.
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What are we looking at here? Great questions. And I'm going to start with your second question first, which is, If you wanted to move into oligarchy, this is one way to lay the groundwork to do that. It could be a predecessor step to that kind of thing. We are not there yet. There are people who argue we are because they see what's coming, but I would argue they've written the script.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And going back to the script writing idea, I'm staying on the facts that are true today. And we can talk about where it could go and how it could go that way. Right now, today, what we know is that these people are gaining a level of centralized access to systems that no one's ever had before. And it gives them a measure of power and eyes and ears onto the system and control.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
That's a potential consolidation of power, could lead a lot of scary things, but we don't know that it's gone there or what they're doing. I'll pause on that, ask if you have a question, and then before answering your first one.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
There's a lot of conflict and we don't know.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
We don't know. So that's part of the, we can write multiple scripts about where it goes from here. Peter Thiel, the man I referred to before who has worked in a venture capitalist who was Elon Musk's partner, helped hire some of these guys. He's the mentor supporter of J.D. Vance. he gave JD Vance his entree to politics and to venture capital and all more.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
He is very big in the data surveillance world. And, you know, Elon Musk has access to all manner of tools and Peter Thiel's built systems around data surveillance. And there's endless number of worrying scenarios that could emerge from giving them access to so much. But again, they've been so cloak and dagger.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
One of the things that happened when Trump came into office is he mandated that none of the agencies communicate anymore with the public. So every agency used to have a communications office where as press, you could call and ask what's this and what's that. And they were pretty withholding. They didn't tell you much, but you could at least talk to them.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And they'd post things on their website and updates. That's gone.
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I don't know how temporary that is. And if that's just for this like blitzkrieg first hundred days, massive attack approach they're using to making change. But that's where we are right now. And so we don't know a lot about what they're doing. I don't believe that if they were talking to us, they'd tell us anyway. But we just can't know.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
So let me answer Glennon's question first, then we'll go to Treasury. You'd asked, I think, a version of under what authority, by what permission is he doing this? Trump made Musk what's called a special government employee. That's a real thing. And they say that his team of people has been vetted. We don't know that they have
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
proper classic security clearance, but the White House says they've been, quote, vetted. And they've been made some form of employees and tasked with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. And there are Republicans and supporters of Trump who say, y'all who were worried about this are out of your minds.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
We have one, their view, one of the world's most talented engineers and CEOs who's volunteering his time and the best minds to go in and make our government more efficient. and we should be thanking them. So that's the alt view and how they would present it.
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What we don't know is what tools they're using once inside the system to look around, what they're doing with that, and how they're making decisions. So I hear from federal employees that they're feeling like they're being surveilled. People are telling one another that they think that their work computers are listening to them. So they're saying to turn it off at night if it's at home.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
People are telling stories. Those are stories I've heard. Other people are reporting that some of these Doge kids are grilling federal employees like on video conferences in a rather rude manner, like justify your work. If you had to fire one person in your workspace, who would it be?
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And that even sometimes they're doing it on a two-way video conference where the Doge kid who's questioning the federal worker has their video turned off.
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It's very eerie. Yeah. So that's the human level. The larger scale is, you know, people who work in cyber tell me they're concerned because the Musk Silicon Valley way to do things is move fast and break things and ask questions later. And in government, if you break things, that's someone's social security check. That's the payment that goes to the cancer research. That's on and on and on.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And that's super un-American. And one of the fears is once these folks are in the system and have a measure of power, can this be unraveled? I will say before we go into the rest, to give people some perspective, I think every case, like one case after another, these things have now been challenged that they've taken to courts. The courts have said no.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
They have paused a lot of what Doge is doing that's most concerning some of what they've done. It's going back to court, but paused everything. The Trump administration tried to halt federal funds for a lot of places. The court said, you can't do that. At every step, the courts have said, no, no, no. We don't know if they will try to defy the courts. We're going to learn.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
But I also think it helps to understand that one of the theories about the Trump administration and this term is that Trump insiders believe they have very few days to actually force their will into the system because At some point soon, Congress is going to start to their factions will start to fall apart. They don't have a big majority.
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Their own teams are very like they have a coalition that has a lot of factions that aren't well aligned that could start fighting soon. And so they feel like this is like part of the reason it's massive attack is, yes, to confuse us. Yes, to distract the press. Also, because they're like, let's see how much we can get done while we can before things start to fall apart.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
So there's a future version of this where it starts to fall apart of its own weight in a way. Okay.
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He's called a special government employee. Okay. He's sort of acting like the CEO.
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You're still allowed to go OMFG. Yes. Witnessing mindset allows you to have feelings about the thing. Okay. I'll just say in general, It feels like it could be problematic.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
Okay, one of the big concerns right now is... will Doge behave in ways that are constitutional or not? And in a larger sense, is the Trump administration going to trigger a constitutional crisis? I'll tell you that J.D. Vance and Elon Musk have actually challenged the legitimacy of courts to do their constitutional checks and balances.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And that's triggering concerns that we might be at the start of a constitutional crisis. And I can explain that a bit more. Amanda had mentioned earlier that DOGE, which is not a department, it's just calling itself one.
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Yes. And you raise such an important point, which is... All of this should be stood up by Congress. Yes. So if they want some sort of new department that does this, that would have to be voted on by Congress. It's the executive's job to execute how that department does its work. But Congress has to have a say and Congress has not had its say.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
Now, Congress is not stepping in to check anything Musk is doing. So that's worth noting. But that could change in time. So this Doge entity, one of the first things they did is go into some of the key departments, including Treasury, and they went into this payment system Amanda mentioned. to start looking around. We don't know what they did.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
This raised, as you might imagine, some significant alarms all over the place, and they were taken to court. A bunch of state's attorneys general said, this is a violation of Americans' privacy, because, right, our pay stubs or tax stubs are in there. And we don't actually know what they're looking at. Like, is it all Americans' IRS payments? Is it just federal employees' payments? We don't know.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
But they have the risk of violating privacy laws. They're putting payments to states at risk. And it's risking the credibility of our financial system. In fact, five former treasury secretaries wrote an op-ed this week saying that this is almost constitutional crisis. It's threatening America's financial stability. And a judge said, it's true. The first, get out.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
They said the kids who were in there have to get out of the system, unplug your laptop, you know, and erase everything that you downloaded. That upset the administration. And J.D. Vance, I still say tweeted. He posted on X. It's so hard to get used to that. A message that said essentially the last sentence of his message is judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
He's saying back off courts. You can't tell us what to do. And then the administration filed a lawsuit challenging the judge, saying, your ruling that we need to get out of Treasury, that Doge needs to get out of Treasury, is unconstitutionally telling us how we can do our job. It is our job to run Treasury. True. It is the Treasury Secretary's job to decide how the payment system functions. True.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And the Treasury Secretary said it was OK for Doge to go in. So you are overstepping. They're going back to court on Friday and we'll see what the judge decides. This is a potential constitutional crisis because if the judge says, no, you have to stay out and they violate it and go back in, they are saying, we don't listen to the courts. They haven't done that yet.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
To our knowledge, we don't know that they've gone in overriding a judge's will. So we're not in the crisis now. We are looking at the possibility of that. Hmm. I'll pause there.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
Yes, exactly. And what the constitution says is these three branches do different things. Congress writes the laws, sets the policy. The executive, the president's branch, puts it into action, takes those and interprets what they mean and puts them into action. And then when there's a dispute about that, the judiciary, the judges weigh in and decide this is what it really means.
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And you have to do this and you have to do that now. It is precedent history in America that the judges have the final word. There is a court case called Marbury versus Madison. And in that case, the Supreme Court said when there is a dispute and the Congress and White House disagree, we, the Supreme Court, have the final say. And ever since then, we have followed that pattern.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
Interestingly, not the Constitution that says that. It's Marbury versus Madison. And we follow that tradition. to this day. What could happen is they could say, for example, no, we're not getting out of the Treasury Department. And then that would be challenging that history-making precedent in Marbury v. Madison that the courts have the final say if it went to the Supreme Court.
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And if Congress doesn't want to act because they've been passive to date and the courts ruled and the executive decides, I'm not listening to the courts, then the question is, who has the controlling authority and how do you enact that will? If it's the courts that should be driving what the executive does, how do you force that on the executive? That would be the crisis.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And there's terms for that, like constitutional coup and people are throwing that term around and, I don't feel comfortable with that word at this point. I don't think that's where we are. Others do. I don't. But, you know, we are in this weird position where because Congress isn't saying, hey, no, stop, the executive isn't overriding their will. They're not expressing their will. Right, exactly.
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Or maybe they're fine with this. Maybe they're in a wait-and-see mode. Yeah.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
In my analysis, they have found clever legalistic ways to try to end run the courts in some cases without explicitly defying the court. So I think they've adjusted. I'm going to give you a quick example. The White House, I can't even remember how long ago now, said there's going to be a freeze on all federal grants and funds. That went to court. That was in a memo. It went to court.
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The judge said, you can't do that. So they rescinded the memo. Then they said, now that the memo's rescinded, we're going to freeze federal grants and loans because the judge's ruling was about the memo. And without the memo, we're just going to do it in a different way. But you see that they were recognizing the court's authority, I think, by saying no memo.
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And so it went back to court and the court just said, uh-uh, uh-uh, memo or no, you can't do this. And you're in defiance if you do. And so now we're waiting to see if the payments go out. But I think by doing that, they recognize the court's authority in a sneaky, trying to test boundaries way.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
What is your reaction to that? I would say... it's a fair feeling, right? It's a fair experience out of what we've discussed. But what I see is our systems haven't been working. And I think that's pretty clear now. And something's changing. Things have to change. And this is an invitation for moving into reform. And
We Can Do Hard Things
Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
It's true that the people who are at the driver's seat right now have one vision of reform, and we don't know what it is. But maybe we are being called to awaken in a different way. And we weren't awakening. And nothing before was awakening. And we needed a much louder knock at the door.
We Can Do Hard Things
Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
They're clear with their vision and they have a new language for what they do. And that's honestly part of the reason I'm so excited to talk to the two of you is you're so good with language and we need new language around what is healthy and good and right to have a better world, right?
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And to act in the political space and act in our own lives in ways that are not just good and kind, but powerful and effective and strong.
We Can Do Hard Things
Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
Thank you, Glennon. That was the most beautiful description and introduction. Thank you. Oh my gosh.
We Can Do Hard Things
Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
Yes. And I'll tell you, my favorite compliment comes from therapists who tell me, I prescribe your news to patients who can't take it, but want to stay engaged. So you are not alone. There are a lot of folks out there who are feeling that way. My general view is the news exists to inform citizens in a democracy. The news is the only private business explicitly protected in the U.S.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
Constitution, the free press, because the founders of America believed a free press is essential to have a well-functioning democracy because you need your citizens to be informed.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
But if the news is panicking people or the news is giving people so much trauma fatigue that they're operating out of fight or flight or not informing them or all the other things, it's not doing its job and our democracy is not stable, right? So I spent so long in the news noticing how my own nervous system was responding and I spent basically 20 years, 17, as a TV news journalist or writer.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And I would talk to regular voters. And by the end of the time I was in TV news, they would scream at me. I was always interviewing undecided women voters and they would scream at me saying, you know, the news, you give me a heart attack, you panic me and then you go to commercial break. I have no idea what's going on. It's like walking into a dinner party halfway through.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
You use this lingo, you have these names, you talk about terms and then all of a sudden I'm watching a commercial and they say I leave with more questions than answers and people would say to me, I'd rather watch the crime channel. And I'd say, why? And they'd say, because at least at the end, there's a resolution.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And so I started to realize there's a fundamental problem here that we need to re-engineer. The language we use in the news, the way we frame things is designed, as you said, to panic people. Not because people in the news are cruel or they want to be mean.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
I have a whole presentation on it, but the bottom line is the industry learned that's how they can drive engagement, drive up ratings and profits, right? And so it became industry standard to panic folks or build on your outrage or rage, just negativity. And I started to think about, are there other ways to drive interest and engagement that aren't those negative qualities?
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
Because those negative qualities drive rage, fear, disengagement, polarization, depression. Depressed people are more likely to engage with disinformation. It goes on and on. And I'm from LA. And in LA, I grew up around Hollywood. And Hollywood drives interest and engagement, sometimes through fear, but largely through compassion and empathy.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And I thought, how can we use compassion and empathy to engage people in the news?
We Can Do Hard Things
Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
So I think of it, as you said, as witnessing mindset, which means recognizing that what's happening in the world is real and it's not your experience in this moment in most cases, right? Like if you're in a wildfire, yes. But in most cases, what we're going to talk about today is something that is happening out there, but what's in here for you is still safe and stable and calm.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And constantly reconnecting with that knowledge is what helps me keep myself calm and helps me get through the difficult things. But the other piece of it is asking yourself what story or what conclusions am I drawing about what I'm hearing that might not necessarily be the truth.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
So the first piece of that is anybody who's done yoga or done meditation or done mindfulness work knows the experience of being connected with self, with the calm self within. There's so many different terms used for that experience.
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
But when you're feeling like you're not in your fight or flight body and you're in your vagus nerve is activated and you're chill and you're good, if you can kind of take a minute and moment and breathe into that, Right. And I start there. So one way I do that is, you know, inhale, hold, and then you exhale much longer than you've inhaled. Should we do it for a second?
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Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
Hold. Two, one, exhale as long as you can. It's the longer exhale that activates the vagus nerve. That's what I've learned.
We Can Do Hard Things
Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
I think you're supposed to inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth. But for this, I don't know that it's essential. It's length of time. I've also learned people have different ways. So the audience can tell us. So when you get into that calm place, that's your landing pad. Like that's where you're living.
We Can Do Hard Things
Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And so when you feel that you're outside of that and activated, that's when you know you've been triggered and it's time to like put the thing down and remind yourself, I'm here, my body's safe, I'm good. and then come back into it. Because what we do with the news, importantly, because we care, is we go on the ride.
We Can Do Hard Things
Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed
And then all of a sudden, you're inside the Treasury Department with Elon Musk, and you're going down the rabbit hole, and you can't stop him. And you're like, no, come on, we're not in the movie. Back out. Where's my calm self?
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Yeah. Just so people know, Signal, unlike text, it's end-to-end encrypted. Let's say the government subpoenas Signal, and let's say Signal complied, which they wouldn't, but if they did, what Signal would turn over would be scrambled, garbled nothingness. So Signal itself doesn't retain the text of your message in any way they could decipher, unlike Apple, which does.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
but they just don't turn it over to the government, Apple says. Signal couldn't even provide something legible to the government. But if somebody like Russia gets into your device, what they can do is they can watch the text come in on your device just as you're seeing your screen. Think of it like they can screen watch your screen. Right.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Right. Let's talk about competence here. And that's what this really goes to is nobody on this group chat said, hey, y'all, we should probably take this offline to a skiff. You know, the White House chief of staff was on that chat. Why didn't she say this is inappropriate? And it raises the question, how many other conversations around the government are taking place on a signal group chat?
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Fast and loose. Fast and loose. A signal you set it to erase, as you said, it can erase messages, which is against the law. Federal officials have to retain copies of all their messages that go into the National Archives. But what's going on here is like we should talk a little bit about how they're reacting.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
The administration is reacting, the ass cover, the shifting of blame, the denials, and that it's not working. like for the first time, the Trump strategy is kind of collapsing around them. Um,
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
So what's happened is since this was exposed, the people on the chat, the White House, a White House communications officer confirmed that, I guess, Jeffrey Goldberg sent over the text chat, shared what he asked and said, you know, comment on this. And they said, this appears to be authentic. We don't know how this happened. But they confirmed the veracity of the chat.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Then Pete Hegseth was asked about it and he gave this rambling, rageful, like hot-headed response where he attacked Jeffrey Goldberg, the author, as pretending that he's a reckless smut peddler who makes up Russia hoax stories and all this stuff and said all these things to play to Trump's ego. Like we smoked the hooties. We did the mission right. That's all that matters.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
And this is a guy who peddles Russia hoaxes. and no war plans were shared, goodbye. And he tried to, it's a classic PR strategy in Washington, attack the messenger. Only the problem is Jeffrey Goldberg, as I said, is highly acclaimed, comported himself with the utmost integrity and has the receipts. So nobody's outside of like Trump and diehard MAGA is buying that.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Right. And they are trying to take issue with the way – like when he said, I'm not going to get into the specifics. I'll just say they shared war plans and locations and ordinance or whatever. They're saying, well, they never shared – like they're taking issue like nitpicky, right? Right. To try to make the case. They didn't share an exact location.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
But what's basically happened is in the ensuing day and a half, Trump has – First, didn't know about it for hours because he was asked hours after the whole media world started talking about this, you know, to comment on it. And he said, this is the first I'm hearing about it. I found that amazing. It just means his staff is not briefing him on bad news in a timely way.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
They're waiting for the press to tell him bad news. A well-functioning White House, the staff tells you the bad news so that he obviously can't take it. And then...
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
They've since said, you know, he held a cabinet meeting and instead of asking for anybody to apologize or saying somebody is going to resign or there will be an investigation, he did the like admit no weakness thing where they all pretended like this was fine, that there was a small error in adding Jeffrey Goldberg and they're going to not do that again and no one's going to resign is the position they've taken so far.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
So this is the first story of all many scandals that we've seen in the Trump administration in the second term. This is the first story that is starting to stick, that is generating criticism from some Republicans, and where it seems that the Trump administration, it's definitely on its back heels and may have to really ultimately fire someone. We'll see. How to start.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
So after the director of national intelligence, head of the CIA, Pete Hegseth, the head of the NSC, the president all say there's nothing classified.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Yes. And I will caveat that at some points, Gabbard in particular said, well, really, the Department of Defense and Pete Hegseth have to decide what's classified from what he said. I didn't share anything classified. So there's a lot of.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Right. And just to be clear, it is Pete Hegseth who's the one who shared location, times, et cetera, all those things, ordinance. So the focus really is on him. Like why was he reckless enough to do that here? But classification, like she's the director of national intelligence. She knows what's classified or not.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Passing the buck to Hegseth is very telling because it shows there's division within. Anyway, so since they all say it's not classified, the Atlantic goes back and is like, well, they're saying it's not classified, so we should publish the rest. They contact every one of the agencies involved and say, do you have any problem with us publishing any of this?
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
CIA responds and says, please don't publish one name that the director mentioned in the chat. It's sensitive. And the White House press secretary finally responds for everybody saying nothing's classified, but we want you to not publish it because it's sensitive. Lots of misspellings and typos in her message.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
So they say, well, we waited all and decided that given the circumstances, the public's interest in knowing what was in here is more serious than what the Caroline Leavitt is saying. And also, we're not putting any lives at risk because the military operation's over. It's finished. So we're going to publish.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
And this is now a matter of great national importance, right? Are our national security principles acting in ways that are reckless, incompetent, and putting American lives and security at risk. So the press has a real, not just like interest in publishing for sensational reasons, but literal like duty to report. This is the role of the press to hold our leaders to account.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
And if they're clearly or quite possibly lying on matters of such national security significance. It's incumbent on the press to report. And I would say that they put themselves at great risk because I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump administration tries to sue the Atlantic for huge amounts of money, despite the fact that they said there's nothing classified there.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
So, you know, the Atlantic took a massive risk on behalf of democracy here. And now there's so many questions. I would add that not only did they these principals have to testify on Tuesday in the Senate, they also had pre-scheduled testimony before the House as we're recording this today, Wednesday. And as we're recording, they are before the House testifying there tomorrow.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
And taking now questions about the second Atlantic report with the details where they're pretending, for example, that the magazine misrepresented things because the only location was saying it's at a hootie girlfriend's house. Things like...
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
I'm just trying to share, as a reporter, they rip apart the smallest detail that you might have like slightly had off, but you could get the entire thing right and you're attacked, right? Whereas these schmucks are acting like reckless Keystone cops and getting each other's back and trying to pretend it's fine. I will add that even the New York Post and Fox News are not having it.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
And this is the first time why I'm saying I feel like the wheels a little bit started coming off the bus with this. Fox News has been consistently, there are defenders on there, but also people reporting that this is like national security officials say this is unacceptable. This is not done. It put lives at risk. The New York Post has a headline that says, quote, a real hootie done it.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
So a reporter, one of Washington's most acclaimed reporters, Jeffrey Goldberg, is the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, one of the most serious journalism outlets in America. The Atlantic has won multiple Pulitzer Prizes.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Trump team tries to spin Warlink. So even Rupert Murdoch is pushing back on this. As a side note, it would seem that Trump is most upset by the fact that somebody had Jeffrey Goldberg's number in their phone.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
So Mike Waltz, the national security director, is like, I've never met Jeffrey Goldberg. I've never spoken to him. I don't have his number. And so they're pretending that Jeffrey Goldberg somehow knew about this group and somehow hacked his way into this group, which is not a thing. And Jeffrey Goldberg has the receipts that say, Mike Waltz has added you to this chat. It's just... like absurd.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
They're making stuff up to try to win over people who don't know anything about how anything works, you know.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
So there's three things that are interesting beyond the classification stuff. Yes. One is that J.D.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Vance says the words, I don't think the president understands, which reflects a perspective on the president that he not only has, that he wouldn't understand something relevant to something as important as a military strike, and B, that he feels comfortable using that language in front of all these people about the president. Two, that he personally feels empowered to
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
He reported yesterday, or as we're recording this, it was yesterday, that one day he was going about his business and on his Signal app, this is an encrypted messaging app that journalists use and government officials use frequently because it's considered to have slightly more security than just a text message, but not government level security, to be clear.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
in this group without the president there to contradict war planning. Like, obviously, there's been an agreement to move ahead with this. And at this late stage, he's disagreeing. You also see Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff, who's the real policy hardliner in the White House, reminding everyone that he says, as I understand it, the president gave the go ahead on this.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
So we're going ahead with this. You see a tension between Miller and Vance. Vance's perspective is basically we're doing a favor to Europe by clearing out the Houthis because the Houthis are making it hard to do shipping in these lanes. And it's Europe's economy that relies on shipping in these lanes more than U.S. economy. The National Security Advisor jumps in there and is like, well, sort of.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Your numbers are wrong. And actually, like, yeah, those goods get to Europe first, but then they come to us. So it's kind of hard to assess. And then the other piece of this that will have follow-on consequences is J.D. Vance basically rips on Europe and is, I'm paraphrasing, but like, I'm sick and tired of us saying,
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
taking action that helps out Europe, those, you know, cheap losers who don't pay for anything. We should not be getting their back. And later on, Pete Hegseth is like, yeah, I agree. Europe is all caps pathetic. Now, we already know that the U.S. is having tension with Europe.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
But until this point, Europe had reason to maybe wonder whether this wasn't just public posturing, chest thumping to appeal to the MAGA base. And with these texts and this private group, Europe realizes that this is actually a privately and deeply held worldview. And they do now have motivation to distance themselves from the U.S., develop their own military, and go their own way without us.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
And the people back in Washington who are in essence the civilian heads of these intelligence and military services have traditionally comported themselves, at least in the work capacity, with a level of rigor, calm, and almost nobility because they're humbled by what they know the people on the front lines are doing. And they're there to keep them safe. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
He's just looking at his signal chats, which is something I do all day too. And something pops up. It's an invitation from the White House's director of the National Security Council.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
the president's most senior national security advisor, inviting him, this top reporter, to join a chat that also has Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Secretary of State Rubio, the head of the CIA Ratcliffe, the White House Chief of Staff, and many more people who are our top national security principals in this chat.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. ,,,, So he's deciding the constitutionality of applying the Enemy Aliens Act here. There's a whole lot we could talk about, but basically he puts everything on hold and says no more deportations, no more flights. I don't even want to call it a deportation because –
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
And what unfolds over the next few days is a conversation among them about what the Atlantic and every serious national security observer I know describes as the sharing of most likely classified intelligence. Specifically, they're chatting about the attack that the US launched against the Houthis in Yemen. This happened in the last few weeks. And it was, the chat started before the attack.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
It describes like deliberations about whether they should or shouldn't launch this. And then on the day of the attack, about two hours prior, Pete Hegseth, our secretary of defense pops in there and starts texting specific plans. This kind of fighter jet is going to drop a bomb at this rough time in this rough area. and starts detailing the operation.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
That's a legal process that wasn't followed. I'd say a forced removal. No more forced removals. And he's pissed that they shipped these guys out while his case was actively being heard. And he's questioning them about the Enemy Aliens Act. The government refuses to provide any information, even outside court chambers. They invoke State Secrets Act. They say it's too classified.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
I can't tell you, Judge, any of the details. And P.S., Judge, who the F do you think you are? You don't even have a right to talk to us because in doing so, you're trying to circumvent the president's wartime foreign policy decision making. You're not the commander in chief. And in doing this, they're creating an until now never before seen claim that the federal courts have no power to
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
check the constitutionality of a president's actions as commander in chief. They're making a claim that's bullshit that we've never seen, but they want to create new standards. So the judges put all these forced removals on hold and the government appeals and goes to a higher court, the D.C. Circuit Court, to say, will you override this judge? We want to do more forced removals.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
And also, will you agree that he has no right to tell us what to do? And in a hearing that happened earlier this week, it went before a three-judge panel. The one judge on the panel who was appointed by Obama said, what you've done here, basically I'm paraphrasing, was so blatantly unconstitutional, it's shocking. These people didn't have a court hearing. Under U.S.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
law, they must have a hearing or a way to push back. And because you've done it that way, it's a fact that even the Nazis were given more rights than these men. And that's because going way back after World War II or the tail end of World War II, Nazis fled to the U.S. and tried to hide here. When they were discovered, the U.S.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
would put them through the court system, have it revealed that they are in fact Nazis and had this Nazi history, and they'd be shipped to The Hague to stand trial. Those Nazis got the court hearing. These Venezuelan men did not.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
For so many reasons, this is outrageous, egregious, and dangerous. But the most serious problem here of all of those is that imagine if this had fallen into the possession of an enemy. And they had shared it with the Houthis. The Houthis could have used this to target our fighter pilots as they were flying over Yemen and shoot them out of the sky.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Yes. And I'm pretty sure that as a subcategory of that, another question is, does this federal judge even have the right to tell us what to do on this? Like, should this be what they weigh in on this? And as a concerning development, the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, in a press conference, like talking to reporters, casually said, basically –
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
They're frustrated that the federal courts are standing in the way of so many Trump policies. And Speaker Johnson floated the idea that maybe Congress should dissolve some of these federal courts. We have the power to eliminate them. We have the power to fund them, he said. And so we need to think about whether we should do that. I'm not, that's a paraphrase.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Later, obviously this set off alarms because it seems like a aggressive attack on the checks and balances system. He said that wasn't meant as a threat. But I will add that he used to practice constitutional law.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
And we fully expect that whatever the court decides, this will get appealed to the Supreme Court. So they'll have to weigh in on this eventually.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Yes, I will. There's a little bit of first signs of life in the resistance and some Democratic voices emerging. We can get into this more another time, but Hakeem Jeffries has sort of gotten a little more aggressive. He's called for Pete Hegseth to be fired. There's a lot of talk that he needs to sort of lead rather than letting Schumer lead. We'll see what happens on that front.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
AOC and Bernie Sanders have been holding rallies around the country and at a rally this weekend, They got 34,000 people to show up. Wow. Whatever your views of the Democratic Party, people have different feelings.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
The fact that they're getting such a big turnout shows that there is a hunger for clarity and leadership, people stepping forward in the party, and that people will show up when it happens. And then finally, a number of advocacy groups have called for both boycotts
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
to stop shopping, shop with your dollars, and stop shopping at companies that have complied with Trump's demand to eliminate any diversity policies. Their first target was Target, and Target has, it's worked, so it's working. Target, there's a video of one Target store that had all its lights off. They said they're just conserving energy, but they're just not getting shoppers.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
So when people say lives are at risk, they quite literally mean sharing this information put the lives of American service members at risk. Where to go from there?
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
I'm hearing from my audience that, you know, Target's shopping, Parking lot is usually so full, empty, empty these days, and they really are. Their stock price is down. They've been struggling. And they've also announced a buy-cott, asking folks to start spending their dollars at places that have stood by their diversity policies. And they started with Costco. And Costco is booming.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Not only is business up, there are some days lines are around the block and there's video of people lined up for a long time to get into Costco.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Yeah, go get your paper towels for the next four years.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
So Disney shareholders had to vote on whether Disney would continue to participate in a national report on diversity. And there was a campaign to get them to drop out of this report. And a lot of concern among some groups that they'd feel pressure to because it'd be considered better for business.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
The Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group for LGBTQ plus rights, worked hard to try to encourage shareholders to stay in the report. And in the end, Disney shareholders voted by more than 90%, to continue to participate in the diversity report. They decided to do what they think was in the best interest of the employees and the company and not to pre-comply out of pressure.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Yes. What he described is that he assumed that maybe this was like a phishing attempt and that it is true. Sometimes you'll get outreach from somebody who pretends to be a leaker, but they're really trying to feed you false information so that you report false information and you're embarrassed and your career is destroyed or tarnished. So he's like, this has to be what you're saying, right?
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Like not real.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Right. There's no way the national security advice. First of all, as you said, there's no way they discuss this on a non-secure platform, a commercially available texting platform. We should talk about how you're supposed to have this kind of conversation. And then B, there's no way somebody would have me in the group and A, add me and B, not notice that I'm there.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
So I just want to pause and say two things. One is on Signal, you can look at the, it would have the name of everybody who's in your chat so that you'd look, and I've been on group chats where we're all like, oh, we're saying things that are rude. Let's just check that everybody who's on here is in the cone of silence. And there was somebody with the initials JG. No one thought like, who's JG?
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Should we find out what's going on?
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
And I keep saying, like, the most egregious thing is that they had the conversation on Signal. Like, I keep saying that that's the most egregious thing, not that they added a reporter. And then I'm like, well, no, that they added a reporter is the most egregious thing. No, that they... It's like, it's just all bad. I want to say it is honestly just a moment of pride for me in how...
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
much integrity Jeffrey Goldberg and the Atlantic have used in the way they've reported and proceeded with this story. So I'll just make a couple points on that front. First, as I said, he thought it was a fake and he didn't report on any of it or do anything when he got the information.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
So over these course of days, we said that Pete Hegseth finally gives the details of this attack that's meant to happen. And Goldberg's like, well, let's see. He looks at X and sees about within an hour of that text that the U.S. reports an attack on Yemen and he realized this is real. He did not report it. He didn't report it for days and days and days and days, weeks. What did he do?
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
He approached – he convened with like – he said his national security advisors that he knows and lawyers and asked what's the safest way to proceed to not endanger American lives. Right? And he removed himself from the chat. I've had so many conversations with reporters about this. Like, I don't think I could have removed. I would want to see what comes next.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Right, so it would say JG has left the chat. And he saw that that message went, so he removes himself from the chat, confers with sort of lawyers, advisors, whoever else, and eventually goes back to the administration and each agency that was represented on the chat reaches out to them and says, basically, I was on this chat, you shared this. How did you not notice I was there?
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Why are you sharing this on Signal? And how did you not notice that I left? And did you breach national security? So when they finally published the original piece, they said he published text to prove that this happened and share broadly. But he did not publish any of the operational details that he said they shared because he was worried about exposing U.S.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
national security secrets, methods, and agents, and the like. So he's really displayed an enormous level of integrity. And in the end, the media did more to protect national security than America's top national security principles.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Yes. And I will say even some Republican elected officials have said that. In other words, have said, you know, their former service members, had I done this when I was in active duty, I would have been court-martialed or I would have been sent to the stockades or I would have been relieved of duty instantly and prosecuted.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
They'd also say, you know, an investigation has to be stood up instantly to understand the At this point, not just how did it happen and why are they using Signal and how common is that? And by the way, I'll add that it's now been confirmed that both the Pentagon advised Pentagon staff that Signal has been penetrated by Russia and to be very cautious if using Signal at all.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
that the national – I think the NSC has advised people not to use Signal, that it's just – like there's an awareness internally that this is not a – that this has been breached as a platform and they shouldn't be using it, even though – we'll get into it – but principals testifying today before Congress are pretending like that's kind of like unclear to them.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Let me go back and answer your first question. When you have – and I know you know this – when you have national security – conversations that are classified around something like an impending attack. There's extreme and very specific and clear protocols that you're mandated to use by law to protect both the lives of the military members doing the action and also protecting
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Sources and methods, like how do we gather this information? If Russia or China finds out too many details that we have, they can backwards assess how we got them and who's giving them to us. So like big picture, you have to do some things that are very inconvenient. You can't take documents out of the building. You have to be in the building in a secure space.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
For people at the level of the head of the CIA and the head of the Pentagon, they have both in their offices and in their homes something called a SCIF, which is a secure compartmentalized environment. It means that basically it's a box that's wrapped interiorly with all this stuff.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Basically, think of it like aluminum or tinfoil that prevents people, outsiders, from penetrating it with their surveillance systems, where any device that you're used is scrambled. It's not using the standard internet. There's many levels of moats. You have to use VPN in and jump into another level and another level. I'm simplifying it for commercial terms, but you get the general idea.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
It makes conversations slower and it's less convenient because you can't be walking around the street texting. You have to be in your SCIF. We do that because it's so vital. Anybody who's on the Intelligence Committee or the Armed Services Committee in the House or the Senate also has to engage with classified information that way so they know. what a reckless violation this is.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
I love that. So we titrate the toxicity of your news. Always within alliteration.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
To boot, so they're not in their skiff when they're having this conversation. Separately, they're not doing it inside a government system. They're on a commercially available app that you could download right now in the App Store.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
Like, yeah, it's a... I use it all, right? We use it all day. Many of them won't say if they were on their government-issued device, which gets swept regularly for bugs, for surveillance. So, since they won't say, there's a big suspicion that they were on their personal device, which is a lot more porous. They were sharing things that they should not be sharing in any environment like that.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
And I'd add one member of that chat was physically in Moscow and potentially in the Kremlin meeting with Putin at the time this chat was taking place. And any time a government official is in Russia, it is just assumed that they are penetrating the device.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
And I'll give you a – for example, when I worked at CNN and ABC News and we would travel to Russia or China, they would – the network would tell us to leave our devices – computer, phone, iPad, personal or work – at home. And they'd issue us a travel device that reporters only use when they're going to Russia or China because we know it'll be surveilled.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
I also appreciate how every week you try to frame our efforts in a way that people can understand, like, we're not trying to make you stressed. It's just that these events are very hard to put in the most calm context.
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Who Said What in that Group Chat Debacle & Is MAGA Starting to Fracture? | Jessica Yellin
They'll insert themselves into the system to watch. And so you have to go with the burner device, return it when you get home. It gets cleaned and swept for the next person. I was a junior reporter at the time for a network. If you're Steve Witkoff, a top Trump White House official, and you're in Moscow, you can be sure that they're all over that device when they're texting this stuff on Signal.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
Das ist die wirklich schreckliche Partie. Du hast es genutzt. Und du kannst Interviews über die News finden und in den Medien von Menschen, regelmäßigen Amerikanern, die sagen, ja, ich will diese Gang-Mitglieder aus dem Land. Gut für Trump, das zu tun. Oder du findest sogar Moderaten, die sagen, ich mag nicht viel, was Trump tut, aber ich bin froh, dass er das tut.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
Weil es scheint, dass der Ziel ist, Menschen zu drücken, die ein Verrückter sind. to safety in our society. And the video they released showed people who look stereotypically like gang members. Very, very, very tall men covered in tattoos with massive beards and hair that are being shaved. You know, that kind of, in a movie, this is who you'd cast kind of thing.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
Now, we should add that Venezuelan gang members or alleged gang members are not the only people who are falling under this sort of extrajudicial dragnet for deportation. Several pro-Palestine activists were also removed from the US. One is a woman whom the Trump administration says, this is, I'm just quoting this, self-deported is their language.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
There's a Brown University professor and kidney transplant specialist with a valid visa who was deported on Friday. And they justify this by saying that they found sympathetic photos and videos of Hezbollah militants on one of So all these things are test cases. I think both to test the judiciary and see how the courts will rule and also to see how the public responds and how Congress responds.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
Musik
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
So the Trump administration, as we're recording this, is refusing to comply with the district judge's order to provide more information about the flights, who's on them, when they left, etc., Their language is he's beating a dead horse. That's not a legal claim. So this is going to get appealed and it will eventually end up before the Supreme Court. My guess is quite quickly.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
We have to see how the court rules. One early sign is that as this whole process was underway, Trump tweeted or truth socials, whatever you want to call it, that the judge in the case should be impeached. And, you know, Elon Musk has been ranting about impeachments and replacing all judges for months.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
In an act that is wildly rare, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, issued a statement injecting himself into a political conversation that just doesn't happen. And in his very sort of cautious, considered language, basically said, America does not impeach judges over their rulings. Like, that's not what we do here.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
The judiciary is an equal branch of government, and this is in defiance of America's tradition. I'm using much more explicit language than he did. He said it in a judge way, but that's what he was saying. But I will point out to you that what he was weighing in on was the language and the threat to the judge, not the underlying claims in the case.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
And what the court is going to have to adjudicate are the underlying claims. Does a president, when he's acting in his commander-in-chief role, have unchecked power to do what he wants to do? Or can the courts weigh in? And if so, which courts, how, etc.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
I just want to point out that even if people are listening to this and thinking, maybe the president should have some power, like in a war, to make decisions without the judge. We have special courts for national security things.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
And even in emergency crises, when there's a ticking clock and there's a terrorist with a thing and you need to have a surveillance, they have to go to something called the FISA court, where it's the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Court, where they can go there and say to a judge, Judge, there's no time. We need a quick decision. Can we have this warrant to find out this thing?
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
And a judge rules really fast. Yes or no?
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
And there is a justified claim in some cases where, you know, we need speedy decisions in a classified setting for people who understand national security to make informed, wise decisions. And so maybe the judges, the court says we need to stand up a commander in chief, I don't know, a wartime court, I don't know.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
But the idea that you can outright defy the courts is sort of the lie is evident in the existence of the FISA court, because we already have the existence of a thing that weighs in when a president is doing national security, acting in behalf of our national security interests.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
Thank you. How are you? I'm okay. Digestion is a triggering word right now.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
Thumbing their nose at the courts and our due process and our system of government. What do you think they're doing? I think that they're chest thumping and acting like bros, right? To excite the base and sort of energize. When we were talking about the fact, you said this was a really clever test case because
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
die Mehrheit von Amerika würde keine natürliche Sympathie für venezuelische Gangmitglieder haben, die eine Nachbarländerung in der Nähe verbreiten könnten. Sie spielen zu diesem Instinkt, wo sie sich grundsätzlich als die Verteidiger der rationalen sozialen Willen gegen diesen reklamen Liberalismus, der so tolerant von allem ist,
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
that they would have your communities overrun by violent gang members rather than let us just do what government should do, right? It's a law and order posture that they're just on testosterone, right? Yeah. It's like super max law and order. And playing to this desire for, you know, a lot of people... Of all political orientations are frustrated with the state of government in their towns.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
I live in L.A. where the wildfires made a lot of us feel like, is anyone in charge? And I think they're trying to project, y'all were in charge and we're laying down the law and no liberal judges are going to stand in our way of making your town safe. Right.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
I know.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
And so this is why this is such a big deal. And I'll add that a court also this week said that Elon Musk and his actions at Doge You know, attacking our federal government, taking all this data, firing people was unconstitutional and that he has no legal authority to do what he's doing because he's not an officer of the U.S. government.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
So a judge has ordered Elon Musk's actions reined in and a bunch of people rehired at USAID and funds to continue to go out through USAID.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
So that's the sort of case that could be if Trump gets away with what he's trying to do in the deportations, then he's going to apply it to what the judge is trying to do to rein in Doge, what they're trying to do to limit Trump's ability to break Social Security, take our national parks, all the things start here and then it just spreads to everything.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
So this is why you're completely wise to say this is a strategic test case.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
Yes. Perkins-Cooey in particular is one of the things that happens in Washington is certain law firms end up representing Trump. Democrats and certain law firms end up representing Republicans. I don't mean as individuals, but like when the Republican Party, the RNC, has legal issues, there are certain law firms they rely on.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
So as we're speaking, the Trump administration and the courts are in a standoff and we are in a place, I would say, at the doorstep of a constitutional conflict that could become a full blown crisis. We're not necessarily in the crisis yet. So what's happened? I mean, we could look at this through a bunch of lenses. I think the most obvious and overt is what's going on with
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
And when the Democratic Party has legal issues, Perkins Coie is one of the law firms they rely on. And Perkins Coie was the law firm for the Hillary Clinton campaign. And during the Clinton campaign against Trump in 2016, Perkins Coie ended up taking over payments that the campaign was making to People who were doing investigations. This is standard.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
During campaigns, folks hire ex-journalists to basically dig up dirt on the other side and then they use it as opposition research to, you know, make attack ads and whatever else.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
And among the things that they were researching were Trump's ties to Russia and they were paying somebody to investigate, you know, what ended up being the dossier, the Steele dossier that made these claims that the Mueller investigation looked into, etc., They've informally discredited the main claims, but it was sort of what happens in politics.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
And Perkins Coie ended up doing the payments because sometimes they just end up taking over. It's a, I don't know, a paperwork thing. Right. And Perkins Coie also has a lawyer who is among the most outspoken people about defending election integrity. And he ran this group to defend the integrity of the election on the Democratic side.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
So to help people understand, Mark Elias formed an outside group. I think it's called Democracy Docket that brought the cases. So it wasn't even brought through Perkins Coie, but he was a Perkins Coie lawyer prior to Democracy Docket and I think might still be there. I know he's not even there anymore. He's gone. Okay. Yeah. But you see how it's closely tied.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
And so the Trump administration effectively is trying to disable Perkins Coies ability to to bring any cases on behalf of their clients.
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Deportations and Trump's immigration policy.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
You make a very good case, by the way. You're a very good lawyer. I was chilling. I'm listening to that, nodding, thinking, my gosh. And this is what, you know, this is sometimes when they say the slide away from democracy sometimes happens before you fully realized it.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
And it's when we normalize these kinds of things, like when these things are allowed to happen without comment and without protest, it becomes sort of accepted and Bevor es zu spät ist, ist es nur ein Bouldern, der sich runterrollt. Und Geräte verabschieden sich von sich selbst, richtig? Sie verabschieden sich von den Fällen, weil sie wissen, dass sie ihr Geschäft verlieren.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
Und jeder muss sich selbst schützen. Und dann ist es plötzlich so, dass wir in einem anderen Weltraum leben. Also ist es eine echte Frage. Wir sind jetzt an dem Punkt, wo wir in der letzten Drittel seiner ersten 100 Tage sind. Und so werden wir sehen, er ist nach der Runde. Jetzt werden wir ein bisschen herausfinden. Wird unsere Geräte halten? Wird der Kongress aufstehen?
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
So there's a number of ways you could look at it, but fundamentally it's about where the administration is challenging what the constitution clearly states and defying it. And in this case, the way they're trying to defy it is by die Validität der Gerichte, die die Administration richten. Also sagt unsere Verfassung, es gibt drei gleiche Branche. Der Kongress hat die Macht des Körpers.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
One of the big questions right now is, if it is up to Congress to act, will Congress do anything? And I guess we had a glimpse of what Congress is ready to do last week. When Democrats had their first opportunity to flex their muscles, they had leverage over the GOP in their spending bill. And as Nancy Pelosi said, gave up everything for nothing.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
They kind of folded and did what the GOP wanted without exacting any concessions. So there is a big question about not only what would the Republicans do? Will the Republicans stand up to Trump? But do the Democrats have the leadership and organization to effectively force a reckoning when it comes time? Yes.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
Yeah, I like your Chuck Schumer impression. That was very good. We can talk about this to make it clear. There's the strategy question for Democrats and the substance question. So the Democrats had this decision to make. Republicans had been unable for the entirety of Trump's second term. It's been, what, seven weeks.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
They have been unable to pass their major legislative package, which was meant to be like tax cuts and all these changes and extend the government spending, like solve for government spending. They couldn't agree among themselves, the Republicans. It's a mess. They were in a bad situation because they couldn't even push their own agenda forward.
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And it got so bad because House and Senate were disagreeing that they were up against this deadline. And government was going to shut down Friday night if they didn't come up with a plan. zu finanzieren, wenn es um die Regierung geht. Nun, das ist viele Male vorgegangen.
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Um etwas in dieser letzten Minute zu verfolgen, wollten sie nur die aktuellen Spendungsniveaus des Governments in etwas, was eine fortschrittliche Resolution genannt wird. Das Problem damit ist, dass es 60 Voten in der Senate braucht, um es zu verfolgen. Sie brauchten... In this case, eight Democrats to vote for them. Well, there are no eight Democrats that want to vote with Republicans right now.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
And it was the first time Democrats had leverage to say, uh-uh, we're not doing anything for you unless you give us what we want and negotiate. In the House, all the Democrats except one hung together and, as you said, voted against what the Republicans wanted to do, fund the government, which fundamentally meant government was going to shut down.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
Came over to the Senate and that was the opportunity for the Senate to refuse to cooperate with the Republicans and exact concessions. Now here's where the substance and strategy question breaks. Substance on this is, there is a defensible argument that it would not have been smart for Democrats to let government shut down. If Democrats voted no, government shuts down, what happens?
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
It means that Doge has free reign to do what it wants inside these agencies. You think it's bad now, they would have furloughed, meaning temporarily laid off, every government employee that's standing in their way. And the Trump administration would decide which government employees to keep around, which basically could have been the guy with the key to unlock everything, right? And no one else.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
Let them run Rashad, then they could not only fire people, but shut agencies and never reopen them. Right. I actually think it was a smart position to not allow that to happen. Yep. Musk wanted it to happen. So, you know, you could debate this, but Democrats had this moment of choosing that they knew this was coming.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
Der Exekutiv hat die Macht, diese Agenzien zu überwinden und den Militär zu führen. Und dann ist die Judiziarie dieser dritte Branche, die in die Diskussionen hineinweist. Es ist eine Frage von Präzision und Praxis, dass in Amerika die Judiziarie das letzte Wort hat. When there is something unclear and the judges speak, it ends.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
They knew for weeks that they could end up in a position where the Republicans who couldn't get organized might have to do a CR and need Democratic votes. And so what is it, the responsibility of Democratic leadership? Going back a month, they needed to have sat down with one another and agreed. Here are the possible future scenarios. If this happens, what are we doing?
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
If that happens, what are we doing? Plan it out. And then when this became inevitable, have a strategy. They could have gone on air every day saying, I'm a Democrat and I'm not voting for a shutdown because I believe we want our national parks to survive and blah, blah, blah. I'm not shutting it down because I believe in Social Security.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
Das ist das, was Nancy Pelosi sagt, ich gebe nichts für nichts. There are no Democrats who wanted government to shut down. What they wanted was to use their leverage to get something. Reign in Musk. Make Trump stop. The list is endless.
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Who took the vote. Yeah, there were House members who were in swing districts where they will in their next election, people are going to use ads against them saying they voted to shut down government and that could hurt them and they could lose their seats. So those people took these politically risky votes for no reason. Exactly.
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Yeah. And Schumer has actually said, I heard him say, well, we didn't think the GOP would have the votes to pass their CR. We didn't think they'd be able to pass their own budget bill. It's like they were waiting until game day to devise their plays.
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And that's always worked because presidents in Congress have followed it. They have listened. The weird thing about our system is the courts are the one branch that have no means of forcing their will. They don't have a military and they don't have power of the purse to take away money. So we all listen to the courts just through our social compacts.
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And there's no excuse that they do not. So one of the things, and I think we'll talk about this another time, but I do think part of what Trump does as a figure is he makes what was there obvious. And I think in the case of Democrats, this challenge and conflict is making it evident that something isn't working in the party. And that change is necessary. Yes.
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That's part of our agreement in being in society with one another. We choose to follow what the courts say so that our government can continue functioning. What happened this week is in a number of ways we can talk about. It's clear the Trump administration wants to test the power of the courts to expand their own executive authority and essentially run roughshod over judges they don't like.
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Just stop this madness. And the piece of that that's so powerful and encouraging to me, I think, is This happened because 15 Republicans crossed party lines to do this. And that was only possible because the Democrats who were advocating for this were open to working with them, were open to not demonizing them as the enemy that's never going to do anything, and found the right language and values
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um sie zu messen und eine empathische Verbindung zu finden. Dass es nicht um ein liberales Wettbewerb geht. Es geht um Eltern und Familien. Und ob diese Eltern und Familien das Recht haben, ihre eigenen Entscheidungen zu machen.
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Und ich denke, das ist ein bisschen inspirierend, hoffnungsvoll und instruktiv, dass es die Möglichkeit gibt für Koalition mit Leuten, mit denen viele von uns auf viele Themen nicht zufrieden sind. Aber du findest die Bereiche, wo du nicht zufrieden bist. especially when you're able to make a values connection.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
And I'll just say one more thing, which is in authoritarian governments, as you see governments move from democracies into authoritarianism, One of the key features is this practice of defying courts and or dismissing judges that don't go along with the leader's will.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
And we've also seen both Trump and Elon Musk this week and actually for weeks now saying judges they don't like should be impeached.
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We don't know. Because no president until now has defied the courts in the way we're imagining Trump will. He hasn't quite done that yet. Then if he defies the court, the Supreme Court really, We're in a constitutional crisis because the crisis is there's no controlling rule about who wins in this standoff. And we have to decide.
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Obviously, they have the military, the president, you know, so in theory, he could use the military to force his way if anybody tries to stand up to him. We'll see if Congress will stand up to him. Some Republicans have indicated privately they would. We'll see. And then I think, and we can talk about this, it's up to the people. And what will the people do? And will we go in the streets?
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Would we use our power and influence to force our government to follow the rule of law? We'll see.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
Yeah. So this week, in an escalation of Trump's immigration policy, He's done a number of things, the most sort of dramatic of which was ICE went and rounded up more than 200 people who they say are Venezuelan gang members, but without any due process. They didn't go to court. They didn't have any presentation of evidence. So we don't really know who is who.
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In that group, we're starting to hear stories, put them on a flight and sent that flight to a quite terrifying prison in El Salvador. We're paying the strong man of El Salvador six million dollars to use this prison. None of the things that happened there would be allowed in the US. You know, there's no rehabilitation services, no rights afforded to people like it's just a nightmare.
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And they presented this glossy video, propaganda video that they released with it of these men being, you know, manhandled, shackled and taken. So what happened is after these guys had been arrested, but before the flights left, a number of opponents took the Trump administration to court. Immigrant rights advocates took the Trump administration to court.
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And there was a legal hearing happening while these men were waiting to get on their plane and getting on their plane and before the plane left. So you can imagine the split screen, right? Here are the people waiting to be deported and then the hearings going on. In the hearing, the judge said, I'm paraphrasing, if there are any flights or people about to leave, don't take them.
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They may not leave until we resolve this in court. And if there are any planes in the air right now, you're going to have to turn them around and bring them back. You cannot do deportations of people under this specific authority while this hearing is going on. And the specific authority was what? It's called the Enemy Aliens Act.
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And it's basically a 1798 law that Trump is activating again to justify deportations. And this law says, first, the deportees are alleged members of a Venezuelan gang. The president says that their presence in the US is an invasion or an incursion.
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And because it's an invasion, they fall under something called the Alien Enemies Act, which is connected to the Venezuelan government trying to infiltrate America.
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Will Our Courts Hold? What You Need to Know with Amanda & Jessica Yellin
And the Trump claim is that we are in a state of war by what they are calling immigrant gang invaders connected to the Venezuelan government. They're constructing this narrative, right, that we don't even know that these people who are deported are
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in any gang or even venezuelan or it hasn't been adjudicated in court and already some family members have spoken out saying like one woman said my husband was taken he's a barber he has a tattoo but he's never been in a gang and a number of people come forward disputing the claim that their spouse or loved one was in any way connected to any gang activity and
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As if even that is legal justification for what's happened. Keep in mind, even if they're Venezuelan gang members, they've been taken to a prison in El Salvador. Yeah, why is that? Because the Trump administration was able to cut a deal with the strong man who leads that country. And we're paying them six million dollars for use of their jail.
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And this guy brags about how they have these like fancy new jails. It's just space. He's a real estate guy. He found real estate in El Salvador in a prison.
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So this much is in some dispute, but based on independent records that journalists have been able to find about flights, there were three flights. It seems that so during the court hearing, the judge says, don't take anyone and basically asks, what's the status of these flights? Where is everybody? What's going on? And they say, you know what? I don't know.
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The lawyer for the government's like, I need a break to find out. Okay, let's take a break in the court hearing. So they break. They come back, I think like an hour later. In that break, two of the planes take off. Die Flugzeuge fliegen in die Luft. Sie kommen zurück aus dem Abbruch und gehen zurück ins Gerichtssitz. Und mehr passiert.
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Und der Gericht wiederholt, dass wir alles, wo es ist, befreien werden, bis ich beurteilen kann. Ich will mehr Informationen. Und ich werde eine geschriebenen Ordnung geben. Der Gericht gibt eine Art geschriebenen Ordnung nach und sagt nicht in den gleichen Worten, wenn jede Flugzeuge in die Luft sind, müssen sie sich umdrehen. Aber er macht seine Intention klar. Und dann brechen sie.
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Subsequently two of the planes land and a third plane after the hearing ends also takes off. So, these men are gone. They've been deported, disappeared. And I will add, quite chillingly, Amanda, their names disappear from our immigration system. So the minute they've left, it's as if they've been disappeared.
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If you're a family member of this person and you looked them up, you know, an hour prior, they're in the system. Now you look them up, they're gone. No trace of where they are, what their charges are, how you'd find them, nothing. Eine Frau sagt, sie hatte einen Anruf von ihrem Verliebten, wie hysterische, panikwürdig weinend, zu sagen, ich weiß nicht, wo sie mich nehmen, und dann verschwinden.
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So, abgesehen von diesem, plötzlich kommt dieses Video auf, dieses, du weißt, Leute in diesem Propaganda-Video, diese Leute werden in dieses Gefängnis genommen. Die Leute verstehen, was passiert ist. Sie gehen zurück ins Gericht. Der Judge beantragt das Regierung, um zu erklären, was passiert ist. Das Regierung sagt, wir wissen es nicht. Wir haben keine Informationen.
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Der Judge sagt, du hast 24 Stunden, um mir Informationen zu bekommen. I need to know when the planes took off, how you defied, blah, blah. And now the White House, the Trump administration has gone back to court and said to the judge in response to his request for more information, we won't respond to a judge who's beating a dead horse.
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Ja, sie machen eine Menge... Bullshit. Can I just say like, yeah, if you tell your kid you can't have dessert and then the kid goes and eats jelly beans and they're like, oh, they're beans. Mom, they're not dessert. You wouldn't be like, oh, let's have an argument about whether they're beans or dessert. You'd be like, go to your room. This is what they're doing.
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They're making up an argument that's not an argument. It's not real. There's no legal basis for the claim. So, yeah, they claim that they're claiming a couple of things. One, that the oral version was not binding. They're saying that the plane that left after the court closed had immigrants on it who were not being held under the Alien Enemies Act, weren't being deported under the act.
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So that doesn't apply.
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Yes, and let's ladder up to the next argument, which helps people understand what they're really doing, which is Stephen Miller, who has been kind of behind the scenes until now, but he is sort of the legal, one of the legal minds behind Trump's immigration policy and his more extreme attacks on our system.
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He's said that this district court judge, this federal judge, has no authority to tell the president what to do when it comes to the president making commander-in-chief decisions, when it comes to the president making a decision about our national security or federal policy. No district judge should be weighing in on the authority of the great leader, President Trump.
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And what they're fundamentally doing here is creating a case in which they can challenge the authority of the courts and sort of try to refashion how we function in this country, what our democracy is, to sort of push down the power of the courts and make the president more of a monarch king.
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And in doing this, they've said that they want it to go to the Supreme Court and they expect that the court will side with them, meaning the monarch king White House.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
So they do have people that they call, quote, fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party who are saying you got to pay for some of this. Now, it's a misnomer to say they're fiscal conservatives because they're approving wild spending that they, you know, how will when Democrats do any facsimile of that. But he does have to come up with what they call, quote, pay for or make goods.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And one way is through tariffs. The other theory is that he wants to negotiate. He just wants negotiations. That's what he thinks he's good at. And he wants to, quote, get better deals out of other countries, whether it's for trade or he wants access to rare earth minerals or things like that. And how do you do that? He wants to change the terms of the discussion.
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Just like remake the playing field.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
So what's happened is he's actually getting some of that leverage that he's asked for. For example, with Canada on Tuesday, we said that the market plunged Monday. Everybody expected he's going to back off tariffs to stabilize the market. Instead, wake up Tuesday and what does he do? He says that he is going to, we talked about those 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
He's going to make them 50% for Canada. Because Canada had threatened to retaliate for tariffs. And he's like, uh-uh, you do that, I'm going to make tariffs worse for you. So what does Canada do? They say, we're going to put a 25% surcharge on the electricity we sell to the U.S. And three U.S. states get some electricity from Canada. It's New York, Michigan, and Minnesota.
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Canada said, we're going to make your electricity so expensive. And then Trump escalated his threat against Canada and Canada threatened to turn off the electricity altogether to the states. And they're like in He-Man, you know, chest thumping, no man's like never. How do you get out of this? Until it looks like we'd be in an electricity emergency.
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And then finally, somebody put the premier of one of the provinces in Canada on the phone with our commerce secretary and they agreed to back down. And what are they going to do? They're going to start renegotiating part of a trade agreement that the U.S. has with Canada. And Trump must want some better, quote, better terms in that trade agreement.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
ironically, that trade agreement was negotiated by Trump in his first term.
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Okay, great. And yet he's getting his way. We'll see how that deal shakes out. And I'm curious to see what else he wants from Canada. You know, he keeps saying Canada should be our 51st state. He does not back off of that, no matter how many people laugh in his face, tell him not to.
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Even the King of England is apparently offended because Canada is not, you know, has a relationship with England, not with us. So I'm sort of intrigued to know what he wants from Canada. And my suspicion, or I just put this out there to pay attention to and we can see, is Canada has one of the world's greatest repositories of rare earth minerals. And they also have enormous energy reserves.
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Both things are required to power our AI future. And Trump has said he wants the U.S. to be the AI leader of the world. And all the tech oligarchs around him are in a sort of competition for AI dominance. So I'm intrigued to see if what he's really trying to negotiate in the end is to sweep more of the resources the U.S. needs to power AI out of Canada and into the U.S. We'll see.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And as we're talking, Trump has slapped 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from the entire world, like world tariffs. Two more theories I'm going to put out there. They're quick. One is he got annoyed that when the stock market boomed on his election, people said you're benefiting from the Biden economy.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And so a theory here is that he's actually trying to create turmoil so that when he wipes away all tariffs, the stock market booms again. It'll be called the Trump rally. And then the person I've spoken with who knows him best and is in the world of finance and economics says, you're giving him too much credit for having a theory and a goal. He's doing it because he can. I don't know. Wow.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
It's so good. I mean, first of all, the Today Show hit was awesome.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
The thing to know, and I just want to make this clear, is that the sort of silver lining is as things have gone bad, he's pulled back.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
So if you go back to the first weeks of the administration, a lot of the anxiety around behavior from this administration was that he seems to be acting in ways that are disconnected from reality, that there's no adjustment when he gets pushed back or finds out that this is catastrophic. And we're seeing that as there are negative, deeply negative consequences, the administration is adjusting.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And you sound, as you're talking about it, so enthusiastic. And I woke up this morning to an email from Barnes & Noble, because I guess I'm part of the membership deal or what. And it says, we can do hard things. Are you ready for the next 20 questions to answer, get the answers into your life? Are you serious?
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
I'm not saying we're in salad days. I'm just saying there, at least there's a sign that they're in touch with reality and making adjustments. Right.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Like, what did they say in that press conference? Yeah, so in one of the White House briefings, the White House correspondent for Fox News kind of really went hard at the press secretary and said, you're asking all these federal workers to take a buyout. How do you think they're going to do that when basically, I'm paraphrasing, your policies are tanking their 401k's? That was from Fox News.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And they had on their couch in the morning show somebody who was really going hard about how Trump's tariff policy is tanking people's 401ks. So that's an expression of deep discontent within the Republican Party. They're doing that to pressure the White House because members of Congress and the Republican Party, the business community, wants Trump to back off some of this.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Correct. I mean, here we are. Okay.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
So one thing is we're recording this before the Senate has voted. We face a shutdown on Friday because Congress has failed to pass a budget. Now, let me just pause and say, that's weird because Republicans control... The House, Republicans control the Senate and the White House. And they're one party, they should just agree and pass their thing. That's what's normal.
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But of course, nothing's normal, so it hasn't happened. They've had all these go rounds about what the budget bill should be. They couldn't come to an agreement. House wants one thing, Senate another. So instead of writing a bill, they're like, hey guys, why don't we just agree to extend the current budget?
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in this like very Congress-y thing, which is kicking the can down the road by saying, we're going to talk about this in nine months again, but let's just keep going where we are with some small changes. It's called a continuing resolution is the actual structure. It's not a real budget bill. It's just an extension of current funding. And a lot of people hate that in Congress.
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So what happened is the House passed this thing that I just described. And now we're waiting to see if the Senate passes it. In order for the Senate to pass it, it needs seven or eight Democrats to support it. And for what I think are very obvious reasons, a lot of Democrats are like, no effing way I'm supporting your rando budget save thing. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know if it's going to pass.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
If it doesn't pass, government shuts down Friday. The debate and dilemma for Democrats is this. Obviously, most Senate Democrats don't want to give the White House any kind of a win. They don't want to bail them out. Right. The Republicans failed to come up with a budget bill. This is a bit like saving them from the shutdown.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And there are components of the bill that are really against Democratic priorities. It increases defense spending while decreasing spending on important domestic priorities, and basically gives the White House lots of money and says, spend it how you want. So it's giving them even more power to do the things they're doing, which is steamrolling Congress on spending.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And lots of Project 2025 guys. Yeah.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Like how did you limit it to 20?
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Exactly. And, you know, there's a clear belief that Elon Musk would like the government to shut down because, you know, you have only essential employees at the agencies then. They can run amok. There's been a lot of whispers that... There's been a strategy to shut the government down among a portion of that world of people.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
So this might it's like you could see it playing into the hands of the most extreme elements of Trump world either way.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
I mean, it was wild. They had an infomercial on the White House South Lawn. Elon Musk brought five Teslas there and Donald Trump basically hawked them to the American people. I will tell you that on Twitter, Sean Hannity also announced that he is buying a Tesla and detailed the specs of the Tesla.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Somebody made a post where it looked like it was the White House saying, use our 25% off code to get a Tesla. I was like, is this real? It was a parody, but it was so close. But it's not far. It's like we are watching the onion unfold before our eyes, except it's not the onion.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Sometimes when I, you know, I do a lot of posts on Instagram about the news, I just write, not the onion, reality, this happened. You know, it's like, just, this is real, not the onion. Okay, so why is this happening first? So we just talked about stock market volatility. Guess who's seen among the most volatility is Musk's stock at Tesla. Tesla has fallen 50, 5-0% since mid-December.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And that's in an interview, Musk sat down with somebody from Fox Business. He was asked, how are you running your businesses while you're basically dismantling government? And he got very tongue tied and started blinking and looking awkward and then finally muttered with great difficulty.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
It was one of the most sort of like seeming vulnerable revealed moments of Elon Musk seeming slightly weak and off his game that I've seen in, well, maybe ever. So Tesla is suffering because, in theory, because their CEO is distracted, but also because of the mass protests taking place against Tesla around the world because Tesla Teslas are being tagged and marked with graffiti.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And so in protest of Musk, and because think about it, his car was marketed to environmentally conscious liberals. These are the very people he's enraged with his far right and government destructive behavior. So he's cannibalizing his own market.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Totally. And nothing. And I want to just point out what you're saying and what's so instructive about it. Two things. One is we're both entrepreneurs. There is nothing harder in the world of entrepreneurship than getting that starting money to build your business. What we could both do if somebody would give us the little bit of funding it takes to start.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
So that's how people say winners and losers are chosen. Do you think that there are many people who could have started an electric vehicle business? Yes. What is Elon Musk great at? He doesn't create these companies. He buys them. Yes. And then almost... beats them into submission to hypercharge productivity, and he's very good at getting government funding investment.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
So in part of the way he wins is because he's able to lock down that early funding, which he keeps getting from the government. And I wanna point out that as we're talking about all this in the coming weeks and months, He is trying to get more contracts from the government for all his businesses, for Starlink, for Tesla and SpaceX.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And this is obviously very worrying for a million reasons, but it also means that he is entirely dependent on the American people and the American taxpayers to stay the richest man in the world. And one lever that the American people have is is to organize, to demand those subsidies go away.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And just saying that makes me feel nervous because that's the thing he fears most, but it's also the point of leverage the American people have in this scenario.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And the difference is, is during the election, he gave money to PACs that he supported. And after Trump did the infomercial, he says, I'm going to give money directly into Trump's Trump run PACs or his organization run PACs. Trump also announced at this event that people, protesters who graffiti Teslas, those acts will be prosecuted as acts of domestic terrorism.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
that is appropriate to say. We should also note that Musk has had his wings clipped in the last week. And so he was doing all his rampaging around the agencies through Doge. And in the last week, the administration said, It's not up to you, Elon, to decide who leaves and gets fired from these agencies. It's going to be up to my cabinet secretaries.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And each of you decides in your own agency who gets cut and Musk and Doge can make recommendations. He did this in a very publicly shaming way. He had a cabinet meeting where Marco Rubio and Musk got into a fight in the meeting where reportedly Rubio said things like, oh, you want me to rehire the people we fired so that you can announce that you fired them? So it became quite tense.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
I am so aisle that it's like a compulsion. Like I can't fly if I'm not in the aisle. I'm going to have an anxiety attack.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Those things don't happen unless they're sort of condoned. So that is one thing. The other is Musk went to Congress, met with members of Congress, and they said, Republican members of the Senate said to him, all those cuts you're making, we're going to have to approve them formally in legislation. You don't get to just do that. We have to pass that through Congress.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
S-E-A-T-E-D.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
On Tuesday, it was announced that the Department of Education will be cutting 50%, 5-0% of its workforce. That is on top of the probationary employees that were let go and in addition to people who accepted buyouts. So of the remaining employees, 50% will go.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Yes. One quick question. Was it so fun to be on the morning show? Like to be in the green room and backstage and all the things? I mean, it's so fun.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And I have been told by multiple sources in my audience that among the places hardest hit is the Office of Civil Rights within the Department of Education, OCR. It is not shutting down, but... Lots of the offices are being eliminated around the country.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And this is the part of the Department of Education that ensures equal access to a public education, regardless of income level, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, disability, ability, all those things. Department of Education was established. to ensure and grant, protect equal access to public education. So that goes at the heart of the very essence of its mission.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
I have a lot of people in my audience too, who are educators and I know full well, we both do how brutal this is. And to parents, we don't know exactly beyond what I've just said, who is going to be laid off as we're recording this. So I think that sort of getting announced Thursday, So we can talk more in detail once we know that.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
But, you know, the behind, the why behind the real reason, the folks in the Project 2025 world come from lots of different strains of activism throughout our last, you know, 40 years in American culture. And This part of our political world has been very much against the Department of Education because they want they say education be returned to the states.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Education is already run by the states and localities. What many in this sort of movement want is to move to vouchers so that you can have more sort of specific forms of education, religious education, education that focuses on certain kids so that you don't have to have classes that have equal access. They actually don't want equity. They don't want all kids to have the same access to education.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
I know there are plenty of people who say they don't want anyone to have education. I don't actually believe that because you do need a moderately educated workforce to have productivity. You know, you could argue with AI, that'll change. But I think it's just that people want flexibility to sort of do schools the way they want schools to be done in their community and privatize it. a lot of it.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
They have said this. I mean, this is one of the most frequently repeated talking points Trump has said on the stump since he's started campaigning for this race. It's not a surprise. They want to shut down the Department of Education. They say it out loud. I don't know why people didn't believe it. So many school teachers who voted for Trump said, I don't, this isn't real. It is real.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
That's their goal. Congress can shut down the Department of Education. The administration can't, but they can strip it of so much staffing and resources that it's functionally useless or not very effective. The other important thing is that the Department of Education is a clearinghouse for funds. It's where the Fulbright scholarships go through there. It's where student loans are managed.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
But it's such a machine, like the Today Show works so well, right? It just feels like a system that functions.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
All this federal money that goes into education flows through the DOE, and they help get it dispersed. So there's going to be a big question, where's that pot of money? Who's going to get control of that pot of money? Is it going to go to Treasury? They've said student loans should go to Treasury.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
So it's very unclear sort of how all this will function as they downsize. I want to say it is important that anybody who's concerned about this and paying attention does understand what the other side is saying and hearing that's different from what we're saying and hearing. And there is a very sort of sincere concern among conservatives that our education system is failing students.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And I think there's evidence that that's true, that kids are graduating without the reading and writing skills in many cases that they need to really excel in society. And there are arguments that kids should be able to pursue vocational training if they want to, rather than have all the funding pressure them into an arts education or a humanities education.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And there should be more ability for schools to try creative ways to do better. And that is a sort of I think, reasonable arguments and a fair discussion to have. And so if you're sitting down with somebody who disagrees with you on the Department of Education, it's worth understanding that they might come to the table thinking, hey, things are not working. We need to try some changes.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
At least this is a way to try changes. The problem is, it's like, again, going at something with a hatchet instead of a scalpel, obviously. I just want to let people keep in mind like the charitable understanding of why people might have believed there was something redeeming in Trump's theories about education is because they want positive reforms.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
You're not a pop culture person.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Yeah, and people can go to your school board meetings. One thing people can do right away is research who's on your local school board. Get knowledgeable. Find out when the next election is. You elect those people. That's the part of the ballot most people go... oh, I don't know these names. I'm going to fill in the name that I like the best. Just randomly. Don't do that. Get informed.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Do the research and make sure that you know when the next school board election is. Make sure your friends know. Have a ballot party where you all get together and talk about it and go and vote in the school board meeting and the school board election. And actually, if folks want to learn more about the attack on Section 504, we wrote about it in my most recent newsletter.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
You can find that newsletter by going to Substack and searching News Not Noise or search my name and look for the newsletter titled, Is RFK Getting His Way? There's a breakdown in that newsletter into what's going on with Section 504, and you can get into it there.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And there's one theme that's consistent through everything we've spoken about today, which is as much as a lot of this sounds like an abuse of our policies and radical changes that Americans didn't think they were voting for in many cases. Every step that they're taking is a step that gives taxpayers and voters even more power over them.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
So when the federal government under Trump says, we're going to create more state control, well, guess what? If they try to do that, that means that you as a citizen have the power to get organized and go to your school board and either run for school board or back a movement to have the voices you care about on the school board. I don't want us to forget our agency and opportunity.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
If Elon Musk is dependent on all these subsidies, those subsidies could be taken away. There's a lot that is still possible in this picture. And it's sort of an opportunity for everyone listening to think about what interests me to get involved, to participate in a movement around. Amen. Amen, Jessica.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
I mean, this is a well-timed podcast. We call it Calm News to try and keep people calm. Sort of hard given the news, but we have so much to discuss. I think that it's just a roller coaster of information right now. I don't even know where to begin. Are we allowed to curse on this podcast? Oh, Fucking yes, Jessica. OK, so it's been a what the fuck week is the easiest way to say it.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Bless them. We can now be drinking plastic straws in our red Teslas all day long.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
I woke up on Monday morning, you know, because I'm in Los Angeles. So it's a little bit behind where I think, quote, news starts on the East Coast. And it seemed that the market was already in free fall because over the weekend, Trump gave an interview in which he refused to rule out a recession. And it's just like a thing presidents do, which is rule out recessions.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
even if you're looking at the cliff and we're about to fall over it, they're like, no, no, no, there's no cliff because their job is to like talk the market, the economy into good condition because so much of economic wellbeing is just a confidence game. Right.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Yes. It's like this. But you tell everybody, it's all good, it's all good, so that everything feels lubricated to have the best possible outcome. He is, okay, I'm not going to follow through with that language, but he is. thinking. Yes, I do know what you're thinking. He didn't make it easy for anybody and he said, yeah, you know, there could be, I'm not going to rule it out.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
I don't want to talk about that. Markets woke up on Monday and everything started to tank. There was a big sell-off. It has to do with Trump's tariffs, right? And the tariff thing went so nuts that the market got total anxiety Monday, massive plummet. Everybody thought he'd wake up Tuesday and say, you know what? That was a bad day. And I'm going to, I've rethought this tariffs thing.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
I'm backing off, but he didn't do that. He didn't, he doubled down and he's doubled down again today as we record. And so we're in this crazy period of market gyration, which we can talk about why this is all happening and the anxiety around it. But basically the business community and the investment community is like, whoa, Nellie, I'm not getting on board in the stock market.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
I think it dropped like 900 points Monday and another 800 some odd Tuesday. It's gone back to... a recent low, but it's not pre-pandemic lows. So there's a little bit of wiggle room where the market's like, if it keeps going like this, it's in very bad territory. Okay. Right now, I guess they call it a correction, you know.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
But the bottom line is his economic policies are causing enormous instability, unpredictability, and anxiety for businesses, investors, sort of the class of... you know, person that you think Trump usually tries to cater to. Used to be that he looked to the market as his measure of how well he's doing, more than polls, like is the market happy?
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
The fact that he's not caring about that as much is causing concern and confusion. So that's something to talk about.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
I want to slow us down for two seconds and just say, what we're about to talk about seems stressful, but it's really about understanding some of the choices that are happening right now so that people can make decisions in their own lives. And all your worst fears have not come true, right? It's not like the bad case scenario is inevitably playing out. Okay. So can we do a breath quickly?
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
I think that's a good idea. Okay. So I think we should do an inhale. Hold. Exhale slowly. I'm always surprised by how much that's helpful.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
I know. It's like when you know that going to the gym will make you feel better, but you don't.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Yeah, I do know that. So, okay, we're going to talk about a couple of things. The stock market, tariffs, the possible government shutdown, and then some of the stuff that's also happening in the administration apart from this, including Ukraine and the Department of Education. So people have a big picture what we're talking about today. Okay. Does that sound like a reasonable agenda?
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Thanks for the roadmap. I appreciate that. Okay. So back to your question, which is why tariffs, yeah? Yes. So tariffs are an added tax on imported goods. A lot of our cars are made with steel or aluminum out of Canada. And Trump is adding today a 25% tariff on all aluminum and steel that comes into the U.S.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
That extra 25% on top of the cost is paid by the American company that buys the steel or aluminum. And so presumably, and economists say throughout history, gets passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. Right. Okay, can I pause right there?
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Yes. And the reason all that, the reason Trump can say it hurts the other country and we can say, no, no, the consumer here in America is paying is because both are true. It depends at which point of the chain you're stopping to pay attention. So the first point of pain is the tariff is paid by the company buying this metal. Then that pain is passed on to the consumer because they raise prices.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
If you wait, you know, four months and you continue this behavior for months and months and months, eventually what happens? Consumers stop buying as much of that stuff, right? You're not gonna get the new car because they're saying it could cost $12,000 more for the same car because of tariffs. You're not gonna shop as much. So what happens? The economy slows down.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
You stop buying those foreign goods. And so down the line, that car company suffers because next time you wanna buy a new car, you're like, I'm gonna wait and stick with my car. Right, and that's why all of that ecosystem equals recession. Right, and it's why Trump can say, well, it does hurt the other country because you're not buying their car in eight months or a year.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
But okay, in the meantime, for the eight months until then, you're just not shopping much and everything's costing you more because of these... tariffs and other countries retaliate by putting tariffs on American goods that are shipped to their countries.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And so if you're an exporter whose business relies on selling your goods to other countries, American goods are taxed at that very high rate in other countries and business slows down in that way. All of this adds up to an economic slowdown in America and And it's a game of chicken. Like who can endure the most pain before they say enough? Yeah.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
How much recession pain can we experience or slow down pain? I don't want to say it's necessarily a recession. And how much are they willing to suck up before both sides say enough?
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Yes. In short, yes. So there's nothing investors and businesses like more than certainty and clarity about the future. You should think of the stock market as a bet on the near future of the economy. It's not a measure of how we're doing at this minute. It's a measure of are we going to be cool in three months, six months, eight months, etc. ?
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
when the market is falling, it's investors saying, I'm not so sure about what's coming and if I feel good about it, I'm pulling out. So there's a lot of like, hey, we were willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. The market boomed right after his election, all this enthusiasm, he's gonna invest, he's gonna drill, he's gonna lower taxes, it's gonna be frothy and all these things.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And then everyone's in the investment world seeing, we don't know what he's gonna do. We can't predict, uh-uh, I'm getting out, I'm gonna be safe. And so up, down. So then the question is, so why the F is he doing this? Yes. And he states the reason as, especially with China, Canada and Mexico, it's because too much fentanyl is coming in over the borders.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
Foreign, you know, immigrants are coming in like illegally, blah, blah, blah. But in each case, that's just, look at the numbers. It's not, it doesn't add up, right? Less than 1% of the fentanyl into America is coming from Canada. And yet he uses that as the claim for why he's doing these tariffs, that while they'll be very hard on us, will truly decimate Canada's economy, like devastate them.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
So why is he doing this? There are a couple of theories. which is like, what's the real reason behind the stated reason? One is that he's just trying to find revenue. And he believes that this is an added tax, right? So we are actually paying 25% more to the government. And that's added revenue to the government. Why would he want that?
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
I wouldn't say the only people, but it is a disproportionate share of the tax cut is going to the people who ostensibly need it the least, right? The wealthiest and to corporations. And he's doing this.
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Inside a WTF Week: Stock Market Nosedives, Dept of Ed Decimated & the Elon Circus with Jessica Yellin
And one of the challenges he faces is that within the Republican Party in Congress are members of Congress, Republicans who say, I'm not going to approve these tax cuts at this scale unless you find ways to make up for some of the lost revenue. We need more dollars in the coffer because the deficit's too high. We can't live this way.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Well, there's this viral video going around right now, and it claims to be from China, that makes fun of America, showing American, it's AI, American workers doing the kinds of jobs that Chinese workers are now doing in factories over there.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
leaning over sewing machines, getting their fingers punched by the needle, you know, trying to sew clothing, trying to screw tiny little iPhone screws into the back of an iPhone. Since we've globalized our economy, American workers aren't taking those jobs.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And one of the reasons we have so much cheap stuff and we're able to buy stuff cheap is because we're essentially getting the advantage of workers who don't have the kind of labor laws we do. So, A, those jobs aren't likely to come back to America, nor do American workers want those jobs, nor would those jobs help bolster our economy for the future.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And in fact, one of Trump's top advisers, Howard Lutnick, his commerce secretary, has said if those factories come back to America, robots will do those jobs.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Yes. Can we take that in a few parts? Yes. First, let's do the auto thing. When you said, if you want to bring autos back, I just want to establish this. manufacturing companies are not going to bring their factories back. We keep saying it'll bring them back.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Maybe it'll be if they, when they know they've said they will not because of the certainty thing, because why, if you're the CEO of a company, why would you spend the hundreds of millions or even billion dollars it takes to move out of other countries where you've built your manufacturing plants, rebuild it here, figure all that stuff out, knowing that Trump will be gone in four years, everyone else hates tariffs.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And Tariff regime is probably going to be over by then and Americans won't take the jobs. They're not going to do it. So moving factories back isn't a thing. It's just not. In fact, Microsoft was going to open a new factory. Like there are a bunch of places that were on track to open places that they've now mothballed.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
In every instance, the opposite of what Trump says he wants the effect to be has happened. So that's not going to happen. And I want to tell everybody here, in case you haven't heard this, you will hear people say, well, this is going to be great for American made products like American cars. There is not a single car that is wholly made in America.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
So even the most American of all trucks or whatever has parts that are made in Canada, parts that are made in Mexico, parts that come from overseas, metal and stuff that's brought in. So Every vehicle is going to be impacted by tariffs, and that's true of many other things.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Oddly, and maybe not coincidentally, Tesla is one of the few car companies where most component parts are made here, but even Tesla has some made overseas. Okay. And it's taking a beating because of China. It has manufacturing plants elsewhere. So manufacturing is not coming back here.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Then I just want to point out, we have also slapped tariffs on some of our most reliable trading partners, our friendliest nations, our closest allies, like the EU, Swiss watches, wine that we get in from Europe, countries that give us almost all of our coffee, diamonds, like you name it. These are not countries that are doing those inequitable practices I was talking about with China.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
In fact, for example, and Jason talks about this in our interview, one of the countries where we have a trade deficit is Madagascar. Madagascar, our trade deficit is entirely because we buy vanilla from them and they don't have the money to buy that much that we make, right?
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Or Bangladesh, they make a lot of the clothing we buy is made in Bangladesh because it's very low, underdeveloped country, low income. They can't buy our goods, but we buy a lot from them. So our trade gap is big, right? That gap. But it's not because they're taking advantage of us. It's because we're different sized economies. And how do you rectify that? Trump has slapped massive tariffs.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Is Trump going to slap tariffs on every country that has a trade gap? They can't level that out. And Jason points out the way to level out our trade gap with, for example, Madagascar is by eliminating vanilla flavor. So do we want to just stop buying vanilla so that we have a zero trade gap with Madagascar? It's ridiculous.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And so we're all getting a course in like Econ 101, including the president and his trade advisors. So the most frequently stated reason by Trump that he's doing tariffs is to make sure we have a zero trade gap with all other countries. which is not a thing we want. And so he slapped these incredibly high levels of tariffs on countries where we have this inequitable gap.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
But a lot of that is because we're getting goods from Cambodia. We're getting goods made in Vietnam, Bangladesh, et cetera. So there's going to be a gap. So then this all leads to your question about uncertainty. And yes, there is nothing business hates more than uncertainty. And there's nothing the stock market hates more than uncertainty because you can't plan. You can't strategize.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
From an investor perspective, but also like if you're an entrepreneur and you're deciding, you know, what is my revenue going to be in three years? Okay. How much will sales grow? So do I need to buy a new piece of equipment now? How much should I spend? Should I get a new equipment or used equipment? Should I finance it, pay it up front?
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
All these decisions are based on being able to plan one, three, five, 10 years out, right? Yeah. when you have this much uncertainty you can't plan so what do you do you stop investing in new equipment you don't open that new plant you don't launch a new product line you don't hire people and The market reflects all this. So we all talk about the stock market is not the real economy.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
The best description of the stock market I've heard is it's a bet on the future of our economy. When the stock market's falling, investors are betting that our economy is not gonna be good in the future, in the near future. And that means that ripples, that fear ripples to business owners who then say, you know what, maybe I'm not going to do that higher. I'm not going to open that store.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And they start to pull back and it just spreads the fear and the pullback.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And everything's going to cost more. I have a friend who's an interior designer who's like, well, I can't, you know, teak is going to be through the roof now. The price of teak wood is going to be through the roof. Like all this stuff that we buy anyway, costs go up for stuff that we haven't even thought about. Not like we're all going out to buy teak, but maybe.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And also there's a lot of stuff we just buy that are imports. right? So that we're going to just be paying more for the stuff we want and our companies. And yes, when companies have to do it for parts, they're going to pass that on to the consumer. But it's just like, we're going to make everything cost more for people outside the U.S. So those people outside the U.S.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
are going to make everything cost more for us. So we're in this game of chicken where everybody's just inflating everything because we're at war and at trade war-ish and it makes no sense. And so all of that ends up costing all of us more when we shop for basic things and for major things.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Yes. So first Trump did these across the board, 10% tariffs. Then he said, I'm targeting, I think it's 60 nations with extra high tariffs because these are the worst offenders. To him and that guy who had the fake expert, the worst offenders are places that have the biggest trade gap with us.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
So that includes places like China, where it's because of hostile retaliation and limit barriers, and places like Cambodia and Vietnam, where they just, it's what we described before, they're not buying as much from us as we are from them. And we slap these major terrorists on places like countries through Europe, who are our closest trading partners. Our economies are interdependent.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
One of the shocks of this is that it's always been understood nothing like this would happen because it's like we're fraternal twins, like conjoined twins. And if you cut one, we suffer too. Why would America do that? But we did it. And so we have, it's an economic crisis. Right. It's not a military attack, but it's an economic attack.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And one of the critiques of this is that trade wars have often coincided with military wars because it's another tool of hostility against other nations, a way to harm other nations. And yeah, so what we've done is, for example, the EU is saying, basically, we'll make a deal with you if you make a deal with us that we can agree to.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
But if not, we're slapping tariffs on some of the stuff you really like. So get used to paying a lot more for European wines and for chocolate and for Swiss watches, et cetera. We have done this, as you said, with some of the nations in Asia, and it was remarkable to see avowed adversaries agree. Japan, South Korea sit down with China about trade. That just, it's unthinkable.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Now, I will say since then, South Korea and Japan have said they'll make deals, not retaliate, and figure out a way to get out of the trade war with the U.S. so that China is isolated against the U.S. But that's not true in the rest of the world. And one of the more consequential results is
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
is countries like throughout Europe have used the dollar as what you're going to hear a term called the reserve currency, the global currency, the default currency. All that lingo really means is when you're making deals across countries, we're going to make the deal in dollars, not in your currency or mine, because dollars are the most trusted, stable currency. And that makes the U.S.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
extremely powerful. It makes the dollar strong, meaning one dollar gets you more stuff on the world than other countries. And people are moving away from doing that. Already they're doing that. Yes. Instead of trading in dollars and doing deals in dollars, they're looking to do deals in other currencies. And so you're going to hear people say the dollar is losing its strength, dollar is weakening.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
People are, there's this really weird lingo, de-dollarizing. It just means that they're going to say, we trust America less. It's too erratic. Another piece of this is And this is part of the conversation. Why isn't Congress acting? Why isn't Congress acting to stop him? America's government isn't working properly. They're not as stable and trustworthy.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And so we're moving away from relying on them as the safest economy in the world. That takes a hit on our treasuries. You know, if you're invested in treasuries, you're going to see this have a hit there. And that hurts our payments back on our debt, the cost of borrowing. It just ripples across the board. And it does the exact opposite. from what Trump says tariffs will do.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
It's going to make everything cost more, our debt be more expensive, et cetera.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
So there's a couple of theories and scenarios, right? It's Trump. We can't know. He's saying no. He's tripling down. I think he, I hate saying he truthed. He posted on two social. He truthed. Be cool. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Thank you. Thank you.
We Can Do Hard Things
What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
We Can Do Hard Things
What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
,,,,,,,
We Can Do Hard Things
What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
It does, however, mean that things like the Memorial Day sale might be canceled because businesses aren't going to want to try to clear out all the inventory they have at even lower prices. The advice I've been given is don't rush out to panic buy and think about it. You can't really stock up on things like mangoes and papayas anyway.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
If you want to know where it is wise to start buying ahead and what goods might be hit most seriously by these tariffs, check out my latest sub stack. We get into a lot of that there. OK, great.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
One reassuring note on that is if you compare it to, say, 2008 financial crisis, getting out of that required unwinding, really complicated financial problems inside banks and investment firms and insurance companies, and it took time and careful thought and, you know, huge government action. Getting out of this is like convincing Donald Trump to change his mind.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Yes, the Supreme Court issued two rulings on those immigrant men who were forcibly removed from the U.S. Both of the rulings favor Trump, but there's some nuance to them. One was in the case of the Maryland man who was taken to El Salvador's prison in because of a, quote, administrative error.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
A lower court had ordered him returned by a certain deadline, and the Supreme Court on an emergency appeal waved that away and said, you don't have to return him by that deadline. But the expectation is from his own lawyer that they will order him returned. They just wanted to take more time to issue a proper decision. So they were just giving it a little more time. The other is more complicated.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
It's, overall, can Trump use the Alien Enemies Act to forcibly remove these men at all? And the Supreme Court basically said, we don't want to discuss that right now. So we're going to allow him to keep using the Alien Enemies Act and to forcibly remove people using it. However, that still has to be decided by a lower court. So the overall issue will likely come back to the Supreme Court.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
We don't know if that'll stand or not. And crucially, they said, in every instance, these people must be given due process. You cannot just grab them off the street, put them on a plane and ship them away. You have to give them notice in advance that they're being targeted. They have to be able to have a hearing before a judge. And those basic fundamental principles must be followed.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And here's what I want everybody to hear, because this is good news. All nine Supreme Court justices agreed on that. So we don't have a justice right now who is saying the law does not apply. We're just going to ignore the Constitution altogether when it comes to due process. So it's a very mixed ruling.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And there's some cause for optimism that the Supreme Court will uphold some of the most basic tenets of our Constitution.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Yeah, I agree. The court, you know, showed that they aren't down with Trump's approach entirely, at least, and that with most basic rights, they agree they have to be enforced. And one of the things you said that it'll slow it down is really worth emphasizing. One of the reasons so many undocumented people remain in the U.S.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
currently is because there are so few administrative judges to hear these cases and it takes forever as is. So sure, they'll supercharge it and try to go fast, but it really does hamper their ability to do what they're trying to do. And it shows us that the court believes that some of the constitution at least should stand.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Have a great week. Try to, you know, remember this is happening in the background, but you're still living your life. And I've been practicing my breathing and it really helps. Good. We'll do it.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
That is the right approach. That was a very perfect setup because part of this is just the whims of one man and it's quite mind boggling to investors, you know, sophisticated market watchers, basic economists and folks at home, right? One of the most confusing things right now is that Trump has been promising to do tariffs all along, right? Mm-hmm. He promised it through the campaign.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And he also has been talking about tariffs since the 80s. He loves tariffs. And so he announces these and the market plunges and the world goes haywire and everybody's shocked and panicking. And lots of folks are asking me, why? Why is everyone reacting this way when we knew it was coming? And the reason is twofold. One is a lot of, there's a lot of research that shows people who are behind Trump
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
think that his most extreme policies somehow won't apply to them. It's a psychological thing that they'll get to carve out. And second, no one expected them to be as high as they are. It is irrational, self-destructive. Economists have called this the greatest self-inflicted wound on the economy by any president in American history.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
So these are Jason Furman's numbers. This is what he does. He said in the first Trump administration, the total average tariff increase was 1.5 percent, 1.5. So far, the average tariff now is 22%. That's what Trump has done. But in some cases, as you point out, it's 50%. Those are on friendly trading partners.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And he slapped a 104 or 5% tariff on China, which is going to lead to a trade war with China. And one of the reasons the tariffs are so extraordinarily high, I just want everybody to just breathe for a minute and take this in, is bad math. Quite literally, they fucked up. And Trump is obsessed with this. He's surrounded by all these aides who are not, they know history.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
History shows that tariffs are bad for our economy and other economies and lead to other bad things. And they've tried to dissuade him from doing this policy. So he surrounded himself with only the very few few policy people who are so deeply loyal to him that they do what he wants. And they came up with the wrong formula. And I'm not even kidding.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Peter Navarro, his trade advisor, who was exposed in 2019 for writing books, citing an expert for a lot of his policy, who was a fictional person. The expert wasn't real. He made up the person?
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
So this person, Peter Navarro, helped develop a math formula. They based it on a paper, an academic paper, saying that this is how you should calculate our trade to rectify our trade imbalances. And the academic who wrote that paper said they did the math problem wrong. They miscalculated, causing an enormous error, an extra high tariffs.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
There's also evidence that they used chat GPT or an AI chat bot to calculate a lot of this stuff. Like when Trump came to the lawn at the White House and announced all this, he had these poster boards where he listed every 60 countries were targeting with extra high tariffs. And there was literally no rhyme or reason to this One, they weren't alphabetized.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
They weren't in order of friendly to unfriendly nations. It wasn't numerically. It was chaos. And the blowback has been enormous for a couple of reasons. One is because these tariffs are extremely high and we can talk about what that does. The other is it's based on nonsense. And so you can't like, how do you negotiate a deal to back out of nonsense?
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Like you can't accept his foundational premise because it's based on nothing. Right. And so people, especially in the business world who rely on numbers and math and, you know, things that are indisputable to make decisions are looking at this going, what is this?
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And why? So let's use the case of China, for example. Let's say that the U.S. imports a ton of stuff from China, factories made in China, and we send a ton of business in there. right? So they have jobs and they have revenue and economic activity because Americans are buying so much stuff that's made in China, which is true. But then let's say China doesn't allow the U.S.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
to sell a lot of goods into China. That's a trade imbalance. And that's true, right? That's why people are mad at China in one of many reasons. China also is known to steal intellectual property, Chinese businesses, from the U.S. So there are a lot of reasons why that is a hostile trading relationship. And there are arguments to take steps to combat that.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And one way one might combat that, a responsible government, is to slap a tariff on goods that are coming from China that's a little bit of a lever. And it says, hey, China, if you're not going to let us sell more American stuff in there, you're going to steal our intellectual property. We're going to make it harder for your folks to make money off of America. and it gives us leverage.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
And if you want that to go away, you have to change your practices. So let's sit down and talk about that. You can see, I've oversimplified it, but you can see how in that scenario, it makes sense.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
Well, I would actually think about that differently. Okay. And it's a great question because this is what Trump claims, is that what I just described as a trade gap or a trade deficit, you'll hear those terms. They get more money out of us than we get out of them, is the argument. And there are many arguments for tariffs.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
One is we want to have more opportunity to sell to other countries if they're selling a lot to us. That's what Trump mostly says is the purpose for it. But he also gives other reasons. And one reason is he actually thinks that rather than evening out that gap, it will bring jobs back to America and reopen factories here. So that's a separate explanation.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
All his explanations contradict one another and cancel each other out. If you do one, you're not gonna get another. What you've brought up is one of the things he talks a lot about is this will bring manufacturing back to America. But the bottom line is Americans mostly don't want the kinds of jobs that are overseas in China right now or in Bangladesh. That's why they are over there.
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What in the World is Happening with Your 401(k) & Tariffs?? | Jessica Yellin with What We Need to Know
We are able to buy much less expensive clothing and goods, et cetera, because they don't have our labor laws. And they require human beings to do things we would never stand for here. And in fact, China is trolling us.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
But I don't want people to rush to the conclusion that that's going to happen. And it's good to notice when the system is slowing things down and saying, uh-uh, we're not letting that happen. Right. So that's one point on the board for that.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
One money that I'm obsessed with is Trump says he's going to establish a crypto reserve, which we don't have spent a lot of time on it, but I want people to know that we have strategic reserves for things like oil or medical supplies. We have had gold, but it's an asset where if there's a crisis, you have a thing you need.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Like we can't get those medical supplies, but we can dip into the closet where we keep them. So this is like survival stuff.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
This is the idea about reserves. Yes, it's like the government's go bag. Okay. And he's just said we want a go bag of crypto. Oh gut, because that will get you through the night. Crypto is a digital number keeper on the computer. It's not a thing you need to dip into in a crisis.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
It's really a transfer of taxpayer dollars into crypto funds, into these five cryptos that Trump's supporters are invested in. And it is a way to sort of formalize the crypto market to make those investors profitable. I mean, there's no other way to say it.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
It's a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to some of the wealthiest investors in America, which is happening in the backdrop as they're saying we need to cut Medicaid and change Social Security. It's a currency. It's publicly accessible. Anybody could buy in. And we do. You could say that about American gold currency. Our dollar doesn't have you don't eat dollars when you're hungry.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
And they would argue that they need this as a backstop in a time of crisis. Right. Crypto is the future, they say. And America should be leading in this new future tech future. And one can have a debate on that, but the idea of just funneling this money into these companies at this time is wild when they're saying we need to downsize everything.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
And it's so bad that one of Peter Thiel's protégés, who helped stand up the Trump pack, who is one of Trump's biggest donors, has said, cut it out, guys. This isn't cool. Like, not into it. And there's another whole thing there, which is the tech elite at odds, like who's getting rich off everything.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
I thought you were only enriching the AI, bros. So we can come back to that another time. We also can't talk about the money piece without acknowledging this week Trump slapped these massive tariffs on Canada and Mexico and increased tariffs on China. China and on cue as predicted by every legitimate economist left, right and center. The stock market tanked.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
We got in a retaliatory trade war and it's impacted interest and bond markets and everybody in Wall Street's like hand-wringing. Volatility is great for wealthy investors because they make bets on all this. But for regular folks, it means prices are already going up. It means, you know, your 401k is going to go down.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
And it means a huge amount of instability that's going to ripple through the economy. At the same time that when Trump cancels all these contracts for USAID, for DOD, for HUD, whoever it is, Veteran Small Businesses. Bing, bing, bing, bing. You got the answer.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
I mean, somebody I respect tweeted, he'll have the biggest, this administration has the distinction of firing more veterans than any presidency in history. So, Tariffs, tanking, Social Security, downsizing, disabling it. Medicaid seems to be on the chopping block. At the same time, you have this crypto fund that's out there.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Trump is also, there's a story that he's selling access to himself for a million dollars a seat at Mar-a-Lago. For his personal pocket. I think it's going into a pack. Ist mein Wunsch.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Legal Defense Funds oder Spenden, wer weiß. Aber es ist alles fungibel, richtig?
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
I mean, can I just say it's so weird we're having this conversation. It's just, it's wild. Like growing up, this was the party, the Republican Party was the party of, you know, Ja, genau. What the hell is going on? So, since our last episode, Trump had an Oval Office meeting where Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, was there, J.D.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Vance, our Vice President, was there, and they welcomed in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And it was the craziest performative ambush you can imagine. I've never, I mean... Every foreign policy hand there is was gobsmacked. No one's ever seen anything like this happen in American modern political history. It was shameful. As an American, I was ashamed. So, should we do a quick explainer?
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Yeah, let's just explain what happened. First, the week before, the White House announces that they will take over the tradition of deciding who is in the press corps. That used to be a press decision of who's in the press pool that's allowed in the Oval Office. Is that because of freedom of press or no? opposite.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
It's that he wants, obviously, based on what we're seeing, to stock his events with partisan, I won't even call it media, that's, you know, kind of carries water for him.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
It's gotten so bad that I think of Breitbart as like the legacy press of the right wing like at least they have reporters who ask questions that then they share as information sam that's a slippery slope and we're starting to find bright art as our best and last option okay
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
So they had in the Oval Office a reporter from some outlet, I can't remember in what name, but it was one of these like rando places. And Zelensky shows up wearing fatigues, which he always does all the time to kind of project wherever he goes, my people are at war, I stand with my people.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
So he shows up wearing what he always wears. We've always seen. And he does what's a veil, a press availability. They call it in the Oval Office. Whenever the president takes meetings with world leaders, they invite in the press. That's why you see those two people sitting in the yellow gold chairs in front of the fight. And they ask questions and the press leaves.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
It's called a pool spray, is what we call it.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
And that is always, always, always true. And that used to be my job. I was one of the reporters who would get escorted into the Oval Office and shout the questions and then run out and tell everybody what happened. So I've been there many times and it was unthinkable to imagine what they were seeing. So they're in the chairs. One of these rando reporters from new outlet on the far right says,
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
asked Zelensky a rude question about why is he dressed so disrespectfully in the Oval Office. Side note, do we not remember that Elon Musk stood behind the president wearing a baseball cap and a Doge T-shirt? Like, it's not a problem when he does it, but it is a problem when the leader of a country at war, whatever. Obviously, it's deeply cynical, felt like a setup.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
It was Trump. He's like, good call. And keep in mind, there are photographs of stuff happening in the Oval Office we haven't seen before under Trump that's like, what? What is this? So the meeting goes on. We're going to skip through everything except this. As they're having their conversation, it is awkward. I will admit, it was weird and strained, but fine.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Trump was meant to get Zelensky to sign a minerals deal. They're agreeing to ship us their precious assets because that's what we use for AI and electric vehicles or money from it.
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steps in, interjects, and says to Zelensky a few things, including, I'm paraphrasing, this is not exact, your behavior here is disrespectful. He uses the word disrespectful. Why haven't you thanked President Trump? Why haven't you thanked us? Now, Zelensky travels the world, has gone to Congress, has gone all across America, or to many places in America, saying thank you.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Gratitude is not a thing he's lacked. But what is that? Disrespect Trump is trigger words, right, for Trump. Und es war fast so, als ob es eine Planung war, um einen Angriff zu machen. Ich weiß nicht, ob Trump daran war. Ich kann es nicht sagen. Aber Trump hört diese Dinge und geht plötzlich von weich-schmuckig zu enttäuscht, richtig?
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Und sie beginnen, auf Zelensky zu gangen, ihn zu fragen, warum er sie nicht dankt. Warum bist du nicht mehr respektvoll? Und es wird in dieses Scham-Down, wie ich es sagen würde, ein Showdown, aber es war, er schämte ihn. Es war ein Angriff. It was like the deal fell apart. Right there in the Oval Office, the deal fell apart.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
The reporting is they went to separate rooms and then Zelensky was meant to have a lunch, was meant to sign the minerals deal, have a lunch and a press conference with the president.
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Wir sind auf Capitol Hill. Ich bin in die Stadt gekommen, um die gemeinsame Session des Kongresses zu besuchen. I agree. And I think we both look great under the circumstances. I know.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
And it's worth always remembering that he seems to take the side of Russia. Yes. Yes. Okay. Just thought that might be relevant to the context. Now, is there a way in which this worked for Zelensky in that, you know, this minerals deal is thuggery and this really highlighted the extent to which America is thugging him around? Sure. But
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
He's already coming back and saying, what can we do to make this deal work? To fast forward, this set off alarms across Europe. Europe has now held an emergency summit. European leaders met with Zelensky, got his back big time. You know, Lech Walesa from Poland put out a statement saying it was shameful of America that the hero here is Zelensky and not Putin. The basic takeaway is the U.S.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
has now aligned its foreign policy with Russia against Europe and Ukraine. So much so that one of the most senior officials in the Kremlin said that the U.S. and Russia are now aligned on foreign policy. And I've been asking people in my interviews and reporting, if Russia attacked a country in Europe, whose side do you think the US would take now?
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
A few weeks ago we talked about this on the show and I said we'd side with Europe and now I'm not so sure.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Yes, and so that people don't completely panic. It doesn't mean that we don't have cyber defenses that are active here, but there is a constant invisible war between the US and our adversaries in the digital space, where they're doing ops against us, we're doing counter-ops against them, and we're also in their stuff looking around to understand what they're planning.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
and what they're capable of doing against us. Now, reportedly, Secretary Hegsath has said, we're going to drop the start part where we're rooting around in their system. Now, is it possible, like, I've talked to some DOD folks who are like, So who knows what's really going on, but they definitely want the message out.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
And the US also leaked today that we're stopping our intelligence sharing with Ukraine, which is... Holy shit, that's huge. So part of what the US has given Ukraine in addition to military support is eyes. So we have this elaborate intelligence network and we can tell them we see Russian movements here, we see this active thing here, why don't you, and we assist.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
So they're on the ground doing, but we could be in sort of symbolically in their ears helping to inform. And the administration says no longer.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
So I'll add two things. One is the UK has stepped in. And an important realignment, if you want to zoom out and look at big picture changes, is Europe ever since World War II has said, we're allied with the US. The US spends all this money on defense. We're going to, as an alliance, rely on the US to help defend us against Russia and China, more so Russia.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Jetzt sagen sie, wir können nicht auf die USA verlangen, also müssen wir alle kollektiv investieren in unsere eigene gemeinsame Verteidigung. Du wirst also sehen, dass Europa anfängt, seine eigene militärische Spende zu stärken, seine eigenen Kräfte zu stärken, als eine Vereinigung, die von den USA entfernt ist.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Und London hat beantragt, dass sie der Ukraine einen 2,5-Billionen-Dollar-Lohn geben wird, um zu helfen, was die USA nicht tun werden. Und sie werden russische besiegelte Aspekte nutzen, um das zu helfen. So Ukraine is getting support from Europe, but this distance is growing with the US. And the question is, why are we doing this? Are we doing this?
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
The charitable explanation is this is a negotiating posture and it's meant to force Zelensky to accept territorial concessions and other concessions to end the war. Obviously, the less charitable version is we are breaking our democratic ties. We are breaking down our democratic institutions and We are realigning with Russia and our global relationships are changing.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
You know, there's two different dynamics to it. One is just how partisan the speech itself was. And, you know, we can talk about the president said a lot of untruths as usual and was partisan, explicitly divisive in ways I've never seen in office before, where he taunted Democrats and who won't applaud for this or that while then turning around and lying about things.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
It's so hard to understand. Yes. And is this where we're going? I don't know. Like, I don't know if the Republicans up on Capitol Hill will accept and tolerate that as it becomes more and more clear what we're doing. I don't know if people won't march in the streets and try to do what they can to stop this. Like, I don't know. I don't know what's inevitable. I don't think anything's inevitable.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
I've interviewed people who cover authoritarianism all over the world in history. It's not inevitable. But they're just breaking shit.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
I'd add this, that one way I think of this administration is Trump is out front as the performer, keeping us entertained, distracted, angry, engaged. And behind the scenes doge in the form of Elon Musk and a bunch of hackers and tech elite who are looking to privatize and get rich and control things, have partnered up with these Project 2025 Technocrats. Heritage Foundation. Heritage Foundation.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
They're the, you know, really want to conservative values, Gilead, all that. My sense is Doge and Project 2025 folks are on this mission to change and break as much as possible, as fast as possible. They are ahead of where the Republican Party even wants to be. And at some point there's going to be coming to terms, where the members of Congress are like, you can't take us off this cliff.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
And the question is, how soon will that happen and how far off the cliff will we get before that happens? And so I think that's a helpful way to think about it. Trump's out front tap dancing. Who knows how much he understands about what's really happening. These tech elite and far right technocrats have made this pact and are trying to break quickly. And the question is, Yes.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Get your people to be accountable, whether they're Republican or Democrat. Call them and tell them to do their job.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
And then on the other hand, so that's the president, among the Democrats, there was a real sense of, I don't want to say disarray, it was just lack of clarity, you know? Some Democrats, they said that they won't walk in. It's a tradition to walk the president in with Democrats and Republicans walking together. So you have a bipartisan support of whoever your president is, is American tradition.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Democrats said we won't do that this year. But on the other hand, and you saw them hold up little signs like at an auction that said, you know, Stop stealing our Medicaid or whatever it was. Don't take our Medicaid.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
So there are those. And then there were people wearing pink because that was the original member pussy hat protests in pink. But there is this real divide where some Democrats have argued that if you're saying this is an authoritarian attack on democracy, there is no logic in sitting peacefully and calmly in the chamber. And we want to make a larger demonstration.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
And the Democrats are divided on that. And you could see that last night. Some believe that the Democrats have to stay together. And there are a lot of Democrats in swing districts that voted for Trump. And so they don't want to compromise those people. On the other hand, I interviewed Jasmine Crockett. Oh, God love her and keep her national treasure. She really was on fire.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
And then this Representative Green of Texas. So what happened was toward the beginning of the President's speech, Representative Green of Texas, who's in his 70s, has been in public service his whole life, has seen what protest does in America, right? And has lived through it. Trump started, you know, in on Medicaid and all that. And he stood up and wouldn't sit down, booed the President.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
I've never seen that. in that way all the time I've covered Capitol Hill. And Speaker Johnson had him escorted out. And he later said, you know, I am happy to take whatever punishment is necessary because I'm speaking for those who can't speak. The poor are going to suffer in this country.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
And a whole slew of Democrats walked out because they're like, if we think this is authoritarianism, we're not going to just sit there and take it.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
It's such a weird... Ja, genau. And I'm like, yeah, that's not, there's this separation of powers thing and that's another branch. Right. I went to the third grade.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Then there is the whole, you know, we need, some people would say to me, we need the American public to get loud and pressure government to do something. And that's what's going to put pressure on Congress to act. And then you're like, but they elected you to do that. Democrats are limited in their ability to change directions through Congress right now.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
And increasingly, I think what we're facing is not a left-right challenge, right? Fighting for democracy isn't a Democrat-Republican challenge. It's an all-Americans challenge. And maybe the thing is, it's not about party politics. It's about Americans rising up as Americans. I don't care what party you used to be affiliated with.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Yes. So in the middle of the speech or toward the beginning, he pointed to the gallery and there is Elon Musk standing there smiling, you know, as if he's this savior who's helping to downsize government. Did he have a chainsaw or no chainsaw? No chainsaw this time. That's weird. Not even a gold chain on his neck. I don't know. It's a different look. So a couple of things. One is,
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
You have Doge continuing to do its work. I want to make this very clear. My reporting is that what they're doing inside the agencies and including agencies that are precious and crucial to Americans' survival and well-being, Medicaid, Social Security, is taking steps to disassemble the institution, okay? So,
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
People who are in a position to know tell me that they are firing people who are vital to solving problems. If your grandma and the number on her Medicaid and her Social Security don't match and she can't get her benefits, somebody has to problem solve that and marry them, right? The people who help with that being fired, right? The basic fundamentals of how it works are they're getting rid of it.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
They're even getting rid of, they've listed for sale the buildings that are Sie sind also auch innerhalb des Sozial- und Sicherheitssystems und lügen darüber, was sie finden. Der Präsident in seiner Rede ging weiter und weiter und weiter darüber, wie Menschen, die über 130 sind, Beneficien sammeln. Und da das nicht möglich ist, ist es offensichtlicher Fraud.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Well, people inside tell me, no, this is the Dunning-Kruger effect showing up, which is a syndrome in which you say you know so much because you are so uninformed, you don't understand what you're talking about. And they just don't understand how data is recorded at Social Security. In the beginning that made sense, now it's a lie. So Trump's lying about Social Security. The question is why?
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Are people talking about that? Yes and no. It's not to take it away, it's to break it so badly that recipients are desperate, struggling, literally starving without medications, suffering, and then desperate for any help. And that will give the government an excuse to say, We have to privatize this.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
And Elon Musk is going to take this over and put Social Security, I'm just, this is a hypothetical, let's say on X. And X is going to be the financial platform for all government transactions, including your Social Security. It'll be much more efficient. We won't need these buildings. We won't need these employees, blah, blah, blah.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Right. We can't know because it's all very it's the least transparent government takeover we've ever seen. But that's the assumption. There are a lot of stages along the way where courts can step in and, you know, the people can make a difference. So I don't want people to panic that this is inevitable, but it is evident based on everything we talked about that they are.
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trying to break these systems. And the only strategy Washington has come up with to address it is people have got to suffer enough until they rise up, until every member of Congress is hearing from their constituents, I can't take it, their constituents are freaking out, and then the members go to the White House and are like, sir, you've got to change this.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
And I will say we've seen the White House back off of stuff when Republican members have gone to them and say, sir, we've got to change this.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Yeah, the Republican leadership in the House, Speaker Johnson, has told Republican members that Es ist wie, wenn du es nicht testest, gibt es keine Fälle. Wenn du keine Townhalls hast, wo Leute sprechen können, dann ist niemand verärgert. Ich meine, es wird endlich rausgehen. Aber ich denke, das geht zurück zu unserer größeren Gespräche, die wir vorher hatte, über drei Strategien für Doge.
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Und was wir sprechen, ist diese mittlere Strategie, wo sie genug ausmanteln, damit sie es privatisieren können. Und bis jetzt scheint es so zu sein, dass das die wichtigste logische Erklärung für das, was sie tun. Ich sage, du hast den FAA-Kontrakt für SpaceX erwähnt. So far as we know at this moment, SpaceX has taken part of the FAA's contract, but not all.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
So maybe there are still pieces in the system that follow rules. I will also say, as we're recording this, the Supreme Court just ruled against the Trump administration on its foreign aid freeze. Sie sagen, nein, du kannst nicht diesen massiven Außen-Aid-Verlust machen, wie du geplant hast. Du musst mit den Gerichten, die wir beantragt haben, aufhören, uns zu erklären, was du tust.
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Amanda & Jessica Follow the Money: Who’s Getting Rich and Who’s Getting Cheated
Sie geben ihnen Homework, um zurückzukehren und zu erklären, wie das mit dem, was der Kongress benötigt hat, verbindet. We have to see how that shakes out. But all of this that we're talking about is, you know, there's a tension in what we're doing, which is we want to explain the context of what these disparate pieces could add up to. And that's why we talk about privatization.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And I thought that Justice Crawford, I'm calling her that, her acceptance speech was so beautiful. And she said to Wisconsin voters, you've shown America how it's done. You fended off an attack on democracy. She said, justice cannot be bought. And it was such a lovely message. And then just a visual contrast to what else is happening in Washington.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
She was on stage surrounded by women exclusively, not just surrounded, only women standing behind her. And frankly, let's just women in their 50s, adult women in some cases a lot. And she went around and said, I want to thank them by name, each of them justices who were elected.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And it just is such a stark contrast and reminder that there is this other version of America that is alive and, you know, rising.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And that's gone well so far for America. I would say, yeah. You know, it's like, I can't remember. The stock market has lost some unprecedented amount of gains this year. There's like a lot of talk in the business community that what Trump is really doing is he's giving CEOs a chance to negotiate opportunities to have carve outs and tariffs, which is a form of, can we say it together? Corruption.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
So this was fascinating and didn't get enough coverage in my estimation. There's a woman in Congress, Representative Anna Paulina Luna. She is 35 years old. She had a baby two years ago. She is a very conservative Republican. She was a member of the Freedom Caucus until she quit abruptly over the situation I'm going to discuss. tell you about.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
So Luna decided that she felt that as a mother of a young child, Congress should be more accommodating of young parents. They want a generational change. You want young voices in there. And she teamed up with some Democrats to push for a measure that will allow members, elected members of Congress who are new parents, men and women, whoever is having a baby to
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
to take time away from being in Washington and to vote by proxy around the time their kids are born. So what that means is for the 12 weeks around your child's birth, you can be in your home district because if you live in Arizona or California, flying back and forth for votes is a huge burden and you don't wanna expose your brand new infant
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
to like all the germs of a plane at week one so that you could stay home and vote by proxy. Meaning if you're in Washington and I'm home, I'd call you and say, cast my vote no on this and you do it for me. So that was allowed during the pandemic. During COVID, voting by proxy was standard. So it can be done.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
They figured it out and they said, we want this implemented and they have the votes and Republican leadership led by Speaker Johnson said, No way. Bright line. This is so offensive and so wrong. We will go to the mat on this. No. And she's like, let's just give it to a vote of the Congress. If this is all about protecting the sanctity of the vote, shall we put this to a vote? To a vote.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And Representative Luna wanted this to come to a vote, as you're saying. And he said, absolutely not. So what happened? Speaker Johnson used these elaborate procedural moves to to try to prevent Congress from voting on allowing parents to vote by proxy. And this was a shenanigan that happens in Congress all the time.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
Usually when the speaker flexes their muscle in this way, they just get away with it and railroad the other side and the vote never happens. But instead, nine Republicans broke with Speaker Johnson and broke with leadership, voted with all Democrats to say, uh-uh, We demand a vote on this issue. We want a vote on having parents have the right to vote by proxy.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And because of the weird procedures of Congress, because the Republicans broke and this issue failed, there's no vote on the House all week. The House action is frozen. So there's no votes on any of the bills that Speaker Johnson wanted to pass this week, which includes a measure that would have blocked federal judges from putting injunctions on Trump's policies and even the SAVE Act.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
which is that separate bill that will make it harder for everyone to vote, but especially married women, that's not getting a vote this week. Everything's frozen on the House floor until Monday because Speaker Johnson was so opposed to allowing parents to have this proxy vote. One more thing. I'll tell you why.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
Speaker Johnson said it's unconstitutional to allow them a proxy vote, even though it happened during the pandemic. And other members of the Republican leadership said, if we allow parents to vote by proxy, who's to stop cancer patients from voting by proxy from their hospital bed? Real thing, he said. He also said, and what's to stop other members from voting from their boat?
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
The measure clearly says it's only for parents of newborns for the 12 weeks around birth.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
We're seeing for the first time a little bit of Republican resistance to their own leadership. So you saw these members saying, this is so unreasonable, we're willing to flex our muscles and say no. It's a gender issue again, right? This impacts women more than men. It applies to male members as well, but let's be real. And-
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
If you're a young woman in Congress of childbearing age, you got to wonder why does my leadership so hostile to me being able to be a mom and do my job? It's almost as if this is the point. It's literal patriarchy, like exercised on the floor of the House. It's just, there's no way to read it except overt hostility to women of childbearing age holding a job in Congress, right?
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And it's also a generational thing. House has more young members than the Senate, so it's no surprise that you're seeing this fight take place in the House rather than the Senate. But these are just old dudes who don't get it enforcing their will in a way that reflects some stuff we're going to talk about later, just an absolute lack of understanding of what people need in their lives to function.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
So you're seeing the unified Republican front start to fracture. I'd add, you know, last week we saw it with Signalgate where a number of members were like, ah, this is unreasonable. We're going to hold a line on this. Not much has come of that, but they did push for this investigation. in the Pentagon.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
So we're starting to see these fracture lines, more and more of them start to show up and grow. We'll see how much the Elon Musk failures will actually accelerate that.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
He would say that's cutting deals and negotiating because he's an amazing deal maker. That's the art of the deal. OK, if you're in the mafia. But anyway, we don't know what because we're talking before the announcements are coming out. But that the announcement keeps getting rolled back and back and back.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
Yeah. So Donald Trump's immigration policy is turning out to be a big political loser for him. In addition to being morally offensive, horrific violation of American basic rights. rule of law and civil rights, human rights, it's a loser. So much so that Donald Trump himself is backing away from it a little bit. So what happened?
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
So this week, the administration went to court and said in court, these are the judges, these are lawyers for Trump who are defending Trump's deportation policies, admitted in court that because of a, quote, administrative error, their words, a man with no criminal record, was forcibly removed off the streets of America and put into that torture prison in El Salvador.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And they told the judge that they either have no ability or no desire to help get him out. We can talk about all of that and who this man is and the horror of this. It's one of the most chilling stories I've ever read about or had to report in America.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
But what's interesting is since this news has come out, not only you see Ann Coulter has spoken out, Joe Rogan has spoken out, and he was taken under the assumption that the Alien Enemies Act is in play. Donald Trump said, oh, I didn't sign that. That was Marco Rubio who signed that, which is... There was an executive order that Trump used his big Sharpie pen and signed and held up.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And one of the conversations I'm hearing behind closed doors is it's because they're working out the deals. Trump has said, I'm very open to deals.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
He's like he signed the Alien Enemies Act. And now he's a little bit distancing himself from it. The numbers on this actual thing are really negative because Americans understand that what happened here and it's happening to students in a different way. But in this case, The Atlantic reported that this man came here in 2011 fleeing gang violence in El Salvador. He has no criminal record.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
He has a disabled child who's nonverbal. He was picking up his disabled child from childcare when he was surrounded by ICE agents. He had to call his wife to come take his child. Who is an American citizen. The wife and child are American citizens. Yes, child and wife are Americans. And this man had a protected status in America. He had previously, years prior,
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
gone before an immigration judge who said you are protected from deportation because of the risk of gang violence if you are sent home.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
Despite all that, these ICE agents surround him and he has now been taken to that torture prison in El Salvador. And I call it that because it's well documented that prisoners routinely die there from excessive violence, outright torture, and what's been called, quote, unhealthy conditions. And so he is in this hellhole with no access to lawyers, no hope for escape, and no criminal record.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And he's one of five men that I know of whose lawyers have presented very documented evidence that their clients have no criminal record and are in a similar situation. And in his case, uniquely, the Trump administration acknowledges that he was wrongly taken because of a, quote, administrative error. And they have no desire or interest in getting him out.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
I mean, in essence, they're condemning this man to death. He was taken off the streets of America, disappeared into a hole, and they're essentially... condemning him to either a life that's unthinkable or actual death. And his lawyer has argued that the U.S. should be required to withhold payment to El Salvador because the U.S.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
is paying the prison about $6 million a year to hold these people, that they should withhold payment to get him back. Obviously, the government can get him back if they choose to. They're claiming that they don't have jurisdiction. Right.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And I just want to underscore that he and these other men, in fact, all the men who are there, were deprived the most basic foundation of our legal system, which is due process. That nobody is sent to their death or to prison or to torture or out of the country without without being able to be told what the charges are against them, mount a defense in court with legal representation.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
So Wisconsin was maybe the most closely watched and certainly most expensive race since Donald Trump was elected for state Supreme Court. And the liberal-backed judge, Susan Crawford, won. And she won handily. And this is despite the fact that Elon Musk poured more than $20 million between himself and his allies. into trying to get her opponents, the conservative-backed judge, elected.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
Our whole legal system is based on that. If we don't have that, we're living in an authoritarian state where anybody can be thrown into jail for any reason. And they have just shown that they're willing to do that. This is happening at the same time that they're saying this judge has no right to even weigh in on this, that our judicial system doesn't matter.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And this is about as chilling a sign that they want to lean into authoritarian control as there could be. And that people without any charges, basically if they can do it to him, what else are they willing to do? Yes. It's a test.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
Thank you.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
Musk wanted the conservative on the court because this seat decides the direction of the court. Wisconsin is the swingiest of swing states. Trump won it. And let's just bottom line it. For Musk, the motivation seems to be foremost of all the possible reasons that Wisconsin has this rule that says car manufacturers can't sell their own cars in the state.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And so Tesla is not allowed to sell Teslas through dealerships there. And he wants that overturned. So there is a personal monetary reason for his interest there.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
Which he, by the way, said is the most, I'm going to, this is paraphrasing, most important election for the future of humanity. An obscure state Supreme Court election in Wisconsin. Love to all Wisconsinites, important election. Will it decide the future of humanity? I guess Elon Musk said he felt it would, or at least the fate of his stock price. Maybe those two are the same for him.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
turn in history here because the record that was set for the longest speech until now, as I said, was set by Senator Strom Thurmond to block passage of the Civil Rights Act. because he stood against everything that Cory Booker now is, a Black man elected to office who can use his full voice and spirit and life experience to represent Americans who want justice and equality in America.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And he spoke for that, and he changed history in a moment.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
It was lovely. And you can find some of those clips if you want to look for them on social media. It's worth taking a minute to find them.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
Thank you. This week, I'm interviewing an amazing professor who works in agriculture, who's going to explain the impact of tariffs on our food supply and food prices and sort of what you can do.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
Well, let's get to that. So there's two things. One is Schimel, the candidate Musk backed, lost by 10 points. That's a lot. That's a huge defeat. And Wisconsinites are really googly eyed about this because they always point out our elections are always razor thin, or as they would say, wafer thin. there's never a landslide win. So when there's a landslide, it's remarkable.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
It's a real repudiation by the voters. Just on the substance, it's also worth noting that the Wisconsin Supreme Court is deciding cases related to reproductive rights, union rights, important union organizing case, and they help decide the districts, how gerrymandered things are. And as a vital swing state, they'll have a say in election results and election procedures.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
So, you know, if the GOP were able and Musk were able to control that court, it could swing not just elections in Wisconsin, but nationally. Yes. So there are larger implications than just Tesla dealerships. Now, to your point that so Musk went to town and he didn't just say this was important. He didn't just give money to the races.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
He also held that town hall where he showed up, wore a cheese head and gave out million dollar checks to two different people. a reprise of the role he played in Pennsylvania during Trump's election that seemingly helped Trump win in November. Just a few months later, Musk doing the same thing not only didn't help his candidate win, but politicos from the state say voters came out to defeat Musk.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
His involvement actually drove turnout for the opponent. And so what you're getting at is like, It seems that this magic touch that Musk was supposed to bring to Republicans is actually the opposite, and he could actually be toxic. They will still want his money, but they're not going to want his presence. And it's not clear that you can get one without the other. That's so interesting.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
Yes. I mean, the judge dressed as Trump for some in a costume as Trump. The voters, you could hear them say it over and over in interviews, the campaign was very much about Musk and Trump. So all the ads had Musk and Trump in them. So it wasn't just, you're electing this guy, Brad, or not electing him. It was a referendum on the administration so far.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And Musk made it, like, even if Democrats had tried that Musk made sure that was the case, right? He gave them that gift. And voters would say, I need balance. I don't like what Doge is doing. I'm a social security recipient. I'm scared about my social security. I don't want Musk in that business. And so this was a real repudiation of Doge and the Trump policy so far.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And it has a couple of implications. Like there's the immediate implication for the court there. There's the... reverberations in Capitol Hill telling members of Congress, hey, if you thought Trump can do all these unpopular things and Musk has some magic wand where he can swoop in and ensure that you get reelected despite it all, here's evidence that's not true.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And then, you know, he in fact pissed off Wisconsinites by talking down to them, wearing the stupid cheese head. Mm-hmm. They said, he's playing us for dumb. We get it. Right, right. Right. And then we should talk about the results of the election in Florida as well, where there were two House seats that were up for re-election in districts Republicans won by huge, huge, huge margins in November.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
You know, what did Trump win by?
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
You know, John King on CNN was talking about the numbers as they were coming in, and somebody said, so where are the blue parts of this district? And he laughed. He said, there are no blue parts. This is just all Republicans in these districts. And Republicans did win the elections in each of those races, but they won it by 15 points less than Trump, right?
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
Such a pleasure, Amanda. And I want to wish you a very happy Liberation Day.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
So they shedded 15% of the support that had been there is gone. Yeah.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And I heard Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader of the House, you know, saying that there are 60 Republicans in the House, six zero. who are in districts that Trump won by 15 points or less. And he said, now there's a target on all their backs. Oh, right. Because if it goes down 15 percent, they've lost that support.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And so now you wake up today, a member of Congress in the Republican Party, knowing that Donald Trump is executing on a suite of policies that's wildly unpopular with the American people, including your constituents, that your party has eroded 15 points off the support. So you are now at neck and neck race or underwater where today, all things being equal, a Democrat would be ahead.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
And you were counting on Elon Musk and his magic wand to come in and somehow make that go away. You've just seen that the voters are not having it and that that magic wand doesn't exist. Do you rethink your approach after today? And do you think about flexing a little muscle and resisting? And will we start to see more cracks in the Republican wall?
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
It's political survival. If nothing else, and everybody was banding together in silence because of their own political survival, the evidence is mounting that saving your own professional skin requires rethinking your strategy, a breaking with Trump or breaking with the party or standing up to the most unpopular policies and not counting on Elon Musk to save you.
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Finally Some Good News! Wisconsin Deals Big Blow to Elon & Trump | Jessica Yellin
No, but it is a good moment to take a beat and say Democrats for the first time had a good day this week. Yes. And we are recording on a day that Donald Trump has declared Liberation Day and he will unveil why at an event he is calling Make America Wealthy Again. It's just, you can't make it up.