Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday, so I'm here with editor at large, Bill Kristol. Obviously, we're going to spend the whole show today talking about the murder of Alex Preddy by agents of the state, ICE and CBP in Minnesota over the weekend. Usually, I have a little topic outline. for us, Bill. We kind of run through different issues.
And today, I just have Bill rants, Tim rants, Bill rants. So we're just going to take turns screaming into the ether in the hopes that that resonates with somebody. Variety is overrated, you know?
I think consistency of tone is very important in these shows. Since you and I have been, in the last 48 hours, in a pretty angry, genuinely angry and upset mood. Wouldn't you say? I don't know that I've been as upset in the Trump years, really.
Yeah, I don't know. I was pretty upset back around kind of the Lafayette Square time the first term, but I've been rage tweeting. I've been fighting with everyone on the Internet. I can't sleep. I was like rage posting instead of sleeping over the weekend. And I think I had my first cry of the Trump administration, too.
Chapter 2: What incident involving Alex Preddy is discussed?
I was kind of surprised that I didn't cry when when he won. So my first cry. It's fucking terrible what they've done. And I do think it's important that the response is commensurate to the crime. And I think that is where my rage is emanating from. So I guess obviously over the weekend, folks haven't done this.
You can make sure to sign up for the Borg Takes feed because, you know, when stuff's happening over the weekends or at night, we are doing live coverage. So we talked about this a bunch, but that's the first show back since it happens. Just really quick going through the facts and then we can get to our rants.
So this was Saturday morning, and Alex Preddy, as a VA nurse, 37 years old, was videotaping ICE agents in South Minneapolis. We have a bunch of different angles of video at this point to see this, including in the lead-up.
He was in the street, kind of, it looks like maybe directing traffic or something, or it was unclear exactly what he was doing, but he'd moved to the sidewalk, and some ICE CBP agents approach him and a woman, you can't really hear what the woman is saying, but they push the woman to the ground. He is still videotaping pretty and gets in between the agent and the woman and like tries to help her.
And then he gets pushed to the ground, pepper sprayed right in the face at point blank range. He's kneeling and they drag him. And at this point there are probably seven officers surrounding him, seven agents of the state surrounding him, masked of course. And, um, One of the agents you can see in the video disarms him. They see that he's carrying a concealed weapon.
And they take his gun away from him. And then someone shoots him in the back of the head. And then another guy starts shooting him from the front. And 10 shots are fired. He's shot 10 times and killed. Several of the ICE agents then flee the scene, basically. You see one of them cover himself in the mask more. You see another ICE agent cheer it on, clapping, saying boo-hoo to the people watching.
And then the ICE agents try to prevent local police from assessing the scene and doing what police are supposed to do following a shooting. Local Minneapolis police refuse to leave the scene. But there's still a bunch of unanswered questions, including who killed him, where the video is from his phone, etc. So that's like the basic rundown of what happened. We can take it anywhere, Bill.
Where do you want to start? Just one question. I've seen contradictory things on this.
Do we know that they were ICE agents and not Border Patrol agents?
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Chapter 3: How did the Trump administration respond to the murder of Alex Preddy?
You did excellent immediate podcast on Saturday.
I did something with Sam Sunday morning and Adrian actually, which was, I think, quite good. They were both excellent. And. Someone said afterwards that you guys focused a lot on the lying, but, you know, killing is worse than lying. I take that point. But the lying is important. Well, for one thing, it's so much goes to their motives and their what they're doing.
You can imagine things going terribly awry. It happens, obviously, with police forces and other circumstances. And someone shoots someone under some mistake and apprehension. Or maybe there's one bad apple and he really does shoot someone and takes pleasure in it. That's terrible, obviously.
Yeah.
But you could imagine the department as a whole, the organization as a whole, reacting in a certain way. That would mean that you didn't have to say that organization is utterly and totally rotten from the top down.
On the other hand, if the organization goes into 100%, not even cover-up, cover-up would be much too mild to term, flat-out lying, slandering this man who was killed, who seems to be very admirable and impressive, ICU nurse at a VA hospital. But even if he weren't, I mean, just killed in cold blood, and the lying is just up and down the scale, so to speak, it does say a lot.
So obviously the killing is the most terrible thing. But the lying is so indicative, and it's why it has to be just uprooted root and branch.
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Chapter 4: What details about the actions of ICE agents are revealed?
This isn't a case of it's a police department that's got some problems. It's got one subdivision that's got problems. It's got some bad apples. They don't really like disciplining their own people, so they kind of don't give them as tough a time as they should. We are so far beyond that with this rotten system. I mean, it is something like something out of East Germany or earlier Germany.
Yeah. On the killings being worse, Minnesota police is from David Beer has been doing good coverage of this. Minnesota police has not had to shoot anyone in a year. So, like, the idea that this is the kind of thing that happens, you know, that law enforcement's a tough job and that, you know, sometimes you get into these situations and the police have to defend themselves.
Well, in Minneapolis, police haven't had to discharge their weapon in a year. But in this year, we're now January 26th, there's been a single homicide committed by a resident of Minneapolis. Two now. Two homicides by the masked agents of the state that have come into the city. So, like...
None of any of those other defenses you have laid out that people have offered in the past of law enforcement, where it's a gray area where they've acted, you know, maybe used to excessive force. They should have like, that's not the case here.
Like this is just a totally unnecessary and pointless invasion of the city based on the pretense that there was some Somali fraud in the daycares and how that justifies just roaming through the city's
randomly menacing people and racially targeting people and killing people to your point of it needing to be gotten rid of root and branch i mean the response to this from my vantage point like needs to be get these fucking people out of minneapolis immediately like get them out of minneapolis immediately and i think that a lot of times there can be you know
politicians are trying to decide, like, what's the art of the possible? What can we do here? Once they've killed two people, I don't really see any other potential solution besides getting them out.
I should say this morning, before I get your response, Donald Trump has offered his solution this morning, which is that he sent in Tom Homan, who I guess is the moderating force in this administration, even though he's said tons of noxious shit on Fox about how he wants everybody to be deported, even if they're not violent criminals. And, you know, he
Allegedly took a bag of $50,000 in cash, but he's more moderate than Miller, Noem, and Lewandowski, you know, who have bloodlust for the people of Minneapolis. But Trump has sent him into the city. I guess that's going to be his effort to try to, you know, calm down the...
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the murder on civil rights?
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Remember, with Tavala, dinner is taken care of. Before we get to the Democrats, I want to talk just one more thing about the actual killing and what happened. Because no matter the situation, this would be outrageous, right? Not really in my life. And I guess maybe you could go back to...
like kind of the 90s stuff with, you know, Ruby Ridge or, you know, Waco or something, you know, and there's a ton of differences. But I was like trying to think of like the last time that like the federal government like literally killed Americans, right? And, you know, I guess you could count the drones of some of the American citizens who were with the terrorists over there.
But like in this case, like an American citizen not breaking any laws and the government killed him and then smeared him and is protecting his murder. And what he was actually doing was,
was exercising the most basic fundamental american rights allegedly right like alex preddy was exercising his first amendment right to assembly speech his videotaping agents she's allowed to do he's expressing a second amendment right to carry a weapon he was doing so legally he was permitted to do so and
The government's literal stated rationale for killing him is that they did not like the way he was exercising those two rights. And we have some audio on the second one, but do you have anything on either of that before we listen to these fucking morons? No, it's really a key point, though.
Yeah, they're killing him because he's being a conscientious citizen who actually is trying to, in this case, monitor what agencies of the federal government that have already committed crimes. murder and many, many other crimes, I would say, assaults. He's trying to help out fellow citizens by monitoring them.
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Chapter 6: How do the hosts feel about the role of the federal government?
I guess that is the point here. There is two gradients of people. There are people that are fully on board with the authoritarian project who only think that the Constitution is applicable to their supporters. and friends. And then there's like a second level of people that are a little bit queasy about that, but like not queasy enough to do anything.
They're just kind of hoping that, you know, maybe cooler heads might prevail. And that's, you know, your Dave McCormick's Kevin Stitt, Oklahoma governor. There have been a handful of Republicans who have said things like, oh, we need an investigation. It was okay for him to be carrying a weapon. But like, none of them are going after Trump.
None of them are saying that the agents should be out of the streets. None of them are saying that they should be unmasked, right? Like, you know, there's a handful of people that are a little bit, which is good, better than nothing, that have gotten a little queasy, but nothing even close to matching the affront to Trump. the rights of the people of Minneapolis.
Yeah, totally. The Wall Street Journal editorial last night was, they seem to put it mostly in terms of it's hurting Trump politically. They didn't seem to terribly, you know, to go on a great length about this man who was murdered or anything like that.
But nonetheless, Trump should pause the operation in Minnesota, which I, you know, was good and is a little bit further than some other people have gone to, not just let's have an investigation or we're perturbed, you know.
But, um, which if I can just get to the demo, which just really quick before the Democrats, can I read a sentence from that fucking wall street journal editorial?
Cause again, it's like horrible. Both sides.
No, go ahead. I'm with you.
It's fine. It's better than nothing. I was sort of disgusted. Susan said, you know, that's even the journal, they seem to be coming around. And, and I mean, she just did the headline and I sort of read it and I was like, you know, I guess, but Oh my God, I can't stand it.
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Chapter 7: What demands do the hosts suggest Democrats should make?
Impeach Noam and Bondi. End the Kavanaugh stops with racial profiling and end the militarization of ICE. Codify a use of force standards so courts can enforce the law against rogue ICE agents. Tear down and replace ICE with an agency that has actual oversight. I don't see any issues with any of those. That's what I would do, too.
Those are good. It's good. It's so much more serious as a matter of actual policy. It's a much more serious response to a real problem than Schumer's sort of, you know, to a few things that vaguely sound tiny bit restrictive.
I mean, I'll take it if they're going to block the DHS funding. I mean, seven appalling Democrats voted for the DHS funding bill in the House. including friend of the show Marie Lusenkamp-Perez, who has lost friend of the show status officially over that vote. I've got some more people I want to yell at. Does that sound good? Excellent. It's not just the Republicans that funded these murders.
There's a bunch of donors and companies that are supporting Trump and enabling him and knew that this was going to be on the agenda. I want to mention just for specific, the 37 donors to Trump's ballroom. The inauguration donors were bad, okay, because we all knew this was going to come. The ballroom donors, that happened after this had all started.
So they knew exactly what they were doing, and they decided it was more important to suck up to Trump and give him the Trump Memorial Ballroom in D.C. than actually, I don't know, maybe support efforts to protect the rights of their own employees. I'm starting to read through them. Altria Group, Amazon, Apple, Booz Allen, Caterpillar, Coinbase, Comcast, Hard Rock.
Google, HP, Lockheed Martin, Meta, Micron Technology, Microsoft, NextEra, Palantir, Ripple, Reynolds American, T-Mobile, Tether, Union Pacific, the Adelsons, the Glazers, they own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Harold Hamm, some other individuals, Kelly Loeffler, the Winklevoss twins. All of those people are... Totally complicit in this. I've not heard from any of them. Maybe I'm missing it.
If people see something about a CEO of one of these companies or one of Trump's big donors speaking out, I will gladly share it. I went to Tim Cook's feed. You notice Apple is on there. Tim Cook went to a screening of the Melania movie on Saturday night after the murder. Tim Cook hung out with Trump and Melania, watched the movie. laughed, shared a rosé, and went to his feed.
Here was his last post. Today, we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 's legacy of service and his commitment to justice and his belief that every one of us has the power to make a difference. I guess Tim Cook doesn't think he has the power to make the difference, even though he's the CEO of one of the wealthiest, most cashflossed companies in world history. I don't know.
Color me not really impressed with posts about someone's commitment to justice who died 60 years ago when you can't speak out at all when your fellow Americans are being killed in the streets. It's not just that you're not speaking out. You're funding the people that are doing it and partying with them in D.C.,
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