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Chapter 1: What is the billionaire problem discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Bullwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We got another doubleheader for you today in segment two. Catherine Pompilio has a bombshell lawfare story out today that reveals many, many, many, many more January 6th pardoned recipients have committed subsequent crimes than previously known. Shocker. No kidding. Criminals do criming. Yeah, that's interesting. Story 11.
There he is. Now you know who's first. He's the author of the Triad newsletter, which you better have signed up for. He's a pinball wizard. He's a 2026 People's Champion for his work on that very newsletter. It's JVL. What's up, man? Hey, babe. It is good to be here with you, my friend.
Chapter 2: How do pardoned January 6th participants commit new crimes?
Thank you for doing this, you know, doing a little extra podcast work this week. You got the secret podcast tomorrow, every Friday. If people haven't signed up for Bulwark Plus yet.
I'm not on the secret tomorrow. They're going to do it without me because tomorrow's Flash's graduation.
There's a secret, but you're not in it? There is a secret, but it's a no JVL secret. That's a secret guest. Every Friday, at least one of JVL and Sarah have a bonus behind the paywall podcast for you. And congratulations on Flash's graduation. Thank you. Man, what a young man you've raised.
Chapter 3: What insights does Katherine Pompilio provide on the January 6th pardons?
All right, let's do some politics. I know you love foreign policy and believe that people care deeply about it, so I wanted to start with that. I feel like... It should have been kind of bigger news. I don't know. The House passed a war powers resolution yesterday, and it directed Trump to remove U.S.
armed forces from hostilities with Iran unless Congress votes to declare war, authorizes using military force, which is kind of an interesting concept. This is one of those stories for me that's like – Well, on the one hand, it is better than what could have been, right? Which is everybody just allowing Trump to do whatever he wants.
Like, on the other hand, it's far short of what we would wish for our Democratic Republic. Only four Republicans voted with all the Democrats on this. Fitzpatrick, Massey, Davidson, Tom Baird of Michigan. Notable that all the Democrats have now come along. And there were a handful of stinkers at the beginning of this war, even the last neocons.
Former neocons were like, this is the stupidest shit we've ever seen. A couple of Democrats got fooled by it. So all the Democrats have gotten in line, four Republicans voting for this. What did you make of it? It's pretty bad for Trump, I think.
Oh, bad for Trump. Great. Bad for Trump. I thought you meant bad for... America. No, no. It's it's like reasonably good for America. Yeah. I mean, I sort of lost my mind. Nobody cares about these things. Like I get hung up on words because of what I do for a living. But when Rubio was testifying on the Hill this week, he said that the war is over. It was like, oh, the war.
Oh, there was a war because you motherfuckers have been telling us for 90 days now that this isn't a war. It's not a war, not a war, not a war. You know, because the word war has a legal meaning. It's not a euphemism. It's a it's a thing that requires actual like, you know, they're they're a chain of legal things which has to happen when you are in a war.
And the administration just lied about not being in a war. And now that they are trying to get more on Marco in a second.
But similarly, he said that we could have a deal. Today, tomorrow, any day.
And you know what? He's right. We could have a deal any day now. And eventually we will have a deal. And when we do, all the people who said we could have a deal anytime soon will be proven right. And they can go out and say, look at me. Look at me. I was there. No, it's good. I would say it probably doesn't help the negotiating position of President Trump.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the House's war powers resolution?
Which is a very rare case of the bulwark. I forget where you were on this, but many of us at the bulwark overestimating Trump. You never hear that. We never get critiqued for us overestimating Trump too much. But that was what I thought he was going to do from the beginning.
Totally. I assumed that the whole thing would be over in four days because I just thought he can't be this stupid. He does have political self-preservation instincts. So in a weird way, if this helps Trump have someone else to blame for America's loss. then maybe that encourages him to finally pay the Iranians whatever they need to be paid and get out.
Like, that actually winds up being better for America than continuing to drag this out. Because, I mean, you had Luke Russert on the other, you know, yesterday. Yeah. And he said, you know, hey, we're not going to have the straight open until the end of the summer, at least. If true, let me put it this way. If you could go back to the markets...
in the early April and say, by the way, the Strait of Hormuz is going to be closed through Labor Day, people would have lost their damn minds.
But they haven't. This has been a JVL beat. I think we hit another S&P high the other day. Yeah, I think that's right.
Because why not? I mean, I wrote a long piece about this a couple months ago with a madman theory of the stock market, which is that madman theory doesn't do much for you in foreign policy. But in the stock market, it does fundamentally change things. When everybody knows that the market is constantly being manipulated and that everything is chaos...
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Chapter 5: How does the madman theory relate to stock market behavior?
It does mean that chaos is the baseline assumption. And so why trade on that, right? Or why trade down on that? Instead, you just take whatever, whenever there is a momentary gain, go out and take the momentary gain because you know that it's all irrational fundamentally anyway. I think that's where we are. I mean, how do you think of it?
I loved that triad. We'll put a link to it in the show notes because that theory works for me as good as any. I think I raised it on the Joe Weisenthal podcast because he follows this stuff as close as anybody, closer than anybody. I mean, I don't know when he sleeps. And he seems flummoxed by why things aren't worse. And I do think that that...
kind of unites this notion that like, okay, well, if there's some fundamental growth happening in the economy, which right now it's happening by AI, maybe that bubble pops eventually. So you know that there's like this fallback stability and you have all this craziness and manipulation happening. Then like in the moments when craziness is not happening, there's a run-up, right? Yeah. Why not?
Why not? I noticed... It's got no engagement on the Reddit because people on the Bullwark Reddit love to, you know, when I make a single off-color joke, you know, love to have 200 comment threads about the pros and cons of that. And we appreciate their engagement in your fandom. I thought this was an interesting post. Somebody had it, I think, had one like, but I'm going to raise it here.
So congratulations to you, Redditor. I'm uplifting your content. It was, what if madman theory is true in the Iran negotiations? It's just that we don't have the madman. And I kind of like that. Right. Well, it's whoever's in charge of Iran right now. Right. Like we have the Trump as fucking crazy and deranged as he is because of his desire to not be in war.
Like he is acting a little bit more rationally now. And you've got the Iranians that are doing like the Persian bizarre style negotiation. Yeah. And then you have Bibi who's like desperate to bomb as many Iranians as possible. And so like Trump's madman theory doesn't work because he's been outplanked by two other players in the negotiations.
I kind of liked that about the weakness of Trump's position right now.
Oh.
Yeah, I do too. And in a weird way, I mean, nobody knows the extent to which the Iranian leadership is fractured or not. But to the extent that it can be portrayed as fractured, that helps their negotiating position, right? Because then they can always say, well, we would really love to take this.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of the 'vanilla' Democratic candidates?
The potential weakness of the vet is on Iran getting really hinky. you know, like if it ends up being kind of normal, bad, right? And by 2027, like gas prices are still four bucks a gallon or whatever. It's a little annoying. Things are, you know, there's some geopolitical issues, right? But like in a broad sweep of things, it wasn't just a total catastrophe to regular people, right?
Like maybe there's a geopolitical catastrophe that people like Bob Kagan care about, but right, that like normal people don't. That's survivable if he's on Trump's good side. And then if Trump supports him,
What would you think would be really hinky? What would that look like? Something that becomes a real total economic. It's like a recession, just like a normal recession. Does that count as a debacle?
I think a normal recession would count. I think terrorist attack on us like related to this would count.
With sending troops in and getting involved in a ground war count? I think so. I think so. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. I think Trump understands that.
Yeah, I do too. I don't think that's likely, but I don't think any of those things are 0% chance. No. No, not at all. Yeah. I want to get to you on we talked about this also with Luke yesterday, but you've written, I think, 17 newsletters on the 60 Minutes situation and Barry Weiss. 17 or 18. Yeah.
Yeah. And so I think that matters to me because basically I've been in Scott Pelley's chair. And so for me, I am reliving a dark period of my time in my history.
You're the anchor of CBS News.
I was not the anchor of CBS News, but I was there when a bunch of pro-Trump assholes came in and tried to fuck with my magazine and then murdered the magazine. So, you know, I lost my job because of not being insufficiently Trump.
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Chapter 7: How do California's election processes impact democracy?
But when Trump, what is he, minus 16? At minus 16, it's different. Yeah. And the dynamics auger for different candidates. I will say... In 2020, Joe Biden won more votes than any person who has ever run for president in the history of our fucking country. And he won the second highest percentage of the vote since Reagan's reelect.
So it's not as if plain vanilla candidates haven't demonstrated an ability to win gigantic victories at the top of a ticket in cases where Everything was a shit show. The other candidate is very unpopular. Right, and the candidate is very unpopular.
The counterpoint to that is, I think everybody was like, given how much of a shit show it was in 2020, that level of victory was kind of a failure, actually. Even though you could simultaneously get more in history, but also feel like it needed to be bigger.
Maybe running a candidate like Bernie in 2020... Would have not, you see what I'm saying? Like, again, what I'm saying is if you look at the environment, it is possible that these things are dynamic and that in one environment, you need one kind of candidate to increase your chances of success. And in another kind of environment, you need a different kind.
so now this takes us to the Spencer Pratt race and I wanted there, there are kind of two elements to what's happening in this LA mayor's race that I want to get your take on that's, that are like more relevant to the broader dynamics than like who actually is the mayor of Los Angeles.
And that is, we talked to the next level about this kind of moment that Spencer Pratt type candidates were having. And I threw out the, you know, RuPaul's drag race tool for, for, I will for judging whether or not a candidate has charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. You can check out the acronym if you'd like. Um,
Whatever you think about Pratt or Platner or Tallarico or whatever, like they have those things, right? And that helps you overperform in the internet world. Does that help you overperform on the ballot box? That kind of remains to be seen a little bit. And what we have now is it looked like on election night, there was a lot of crowing from the Spencer Pratt crowd that he had overperformed.
He was going to be in the top two. He might not even make it to the runoff now. Now he's actually the underdog to make it to the runoff, even though he's winning in the raw vote count. Nithya as a progressive challenger to Karen Bass. It seems likely that she is going to pass Pratt. And so just looking at that race, I have two things.
I'm wondering if that informs your view at all about the charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. And also this California counting system. I mean, how bad is this for democracy? Adam Carlson is a guy I follow on social media really good. He said it will probably take a week
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Chapter 8: What are the consequences of wealth hoarding by billionaires?
I know that the Justice Department's anti-weaponization fund, I think, is now dead, according to Blanche. But the Trump administration is no stranger to providing payouts, as they did with Michael Flynn, or just favoring people that they believe have been allies to them or they believe have been politically persecuted.
And so as long as we know who these people are, we can hopefully make the right decisions about how to treat them going forward.
Appreciate that. Everybody go support the work of Lawfare. You guys are doing the Lord's work over there and we'll be talking to you soon. All right. Thank you, Tim. Thanks so much to JVL and to Catherine. We'll be back here tomorrow for a Friday edition of the podcast. We'll see you all then.
Peace.
The Borg Podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.
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