The Moat Around the Whitehouse: Democracy at Risk

Melissa Hortman led the House Democratic Caucus in Minnesota.

Speaker Emerita, a woman who spent two decades doing the unglamorous work of state government, budgets, committee hearings, the stuff nobody puts on a poster.

On June 14, 2025, a man named Vance Luther Belter put on a police uniform.

He got himself a fake badge, drove to her home.

He knocked on her door the way a cop knocks on your door, with the implied authority of the state behind his fist.

And he shot her.

He then shot her husband Mark.

They both died in their home.

That same night, he shot state Senator John Hoffman and his wife, and they survived.

When investigators searched Balter's car, they found a list, nearly seventy names.

Democratic lawmakers, abortion providers,

People he'd researched, people he'd planned for.

Here's the thing about that list.

It wasn't a fantasy.

It was a logistics document.

He had names, he had addresses, and he had a uniform that let him walk right up.

He had done the work, he had driven the routes.

This was operational.

And I want to be clear about what kind of moment this is.

The US Capitol Police investigated nearly fifteen thousand threats in twenty twenty five.

That's a sixty percent jump in one year.

Pennsylvania's Governor Josh Shapiro, you might remember him as a presidential candidate in the Democratic process early on last time, his family was asleep when someone set his

mansion on fire.

Didn't vandalize it, set it on fire while the governor's children were inside.

So the people who run this country are scared.

Genuinely.

Materially scared.

And I'm not going to pretend that fear isn't real.

But here's what keeps coming back up.

When the powerful get scared, they don't build a moat around all of us.

They build it around themselves.

Welcome to the Overlap.

This is the show about systems of power, labor, and American injustice.

The places where those three things rub up against each other until something catches fire.

I'm Joshua.

Thank you for being here.

And a quick word to my partner in this thing, Will, who I know is somewhere right now with about four tabs open, fact checking something that I'm gonna say wrong.

Will, I hope you've eaten an actual meal today.

Save some energy for the fact check.

Okay.

I want to talk about a moat, not a metaphorical one, or not only a metaphorical one.

I want to talk about the actual physical fortification of the White House.

The fences, the bunkers, the ballroom that turns out to be a shed sitting on top of an entire military industrial complex.

The closed parks, the snipers who can see a thousand yards in every direction.

And here's why now.

Here's why this week.

Here's why the first week of june twenty twenty six.

Because as of late May, workers were laying the foundation for a ninety thousand square foot ballroom, where the East Wing used to be.

They demolished the East Wing in October, you might remember that, demolished a bunker that had stood since nineteen forty two.

This was the one Franklin Roosevelt built after Pearl Harbor, the one that sheltered Dick Cheney on september eleventh.

To make room.

And on the first of June, a major outlet ran a piece with a headline I haven't really been able to stop thinking about.

The White House is the new green zone.

The green zone.

Like in Baghdad, you might not be familiar with green zones.

They have blast walls and they have checkpoints.

The occupying power walls itself off from the people it claims to govern.

That's the comparison.

American journalists looking at the seat of American power and they reach for Baghdad, Iraq.

So here's the thing I want to do today.

I want to take the history seriously because this didn't start in twenty twenty five.

It didn't start in twenty twenty four or in twenty sixteen.

It started with Roosevelt.

It accelerated under Obama, believe it or not, and became a performance under Trump in twenty twenty.

And I want to take the the present seriously, right?

The dollars, the lawsuits, the judge who said stop, and the appeals court that said, no, just keep going.

Because both things are true at once, like our White House press secretary likes to say.

The threat is real.

Melissa Hortman is dead.

That's real.

And the response that the moat, the wall, the underground complex, the bunker is not about protecting democracy.

It's about protecting a person from people.

And these are very different projects, right?

Those are very, very different projects.

Let's get into it.

I want to take you back to nineteen forty two.

The United States had just entered World War II.

Pearl Harbor was December.

The country is genuinely afraid.

Afraid in a way that's for once proportionate to the actual threat.

There are real enemies.

There are real bombers.

The fear has a return address.

And Franklin Roosevelt's administration starts digging under the east wing of the White House.

They built a bomb shelter.

Reinforced concrete, secure communications, a place where basically the president could just keep on governing if bombs fell on Washington.

Where the chain of command could survive, where the constitutional order could persist even if everything above the ground was just broken down into gravel.

It gets a name eventually the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the POC.

You've probably heard it without knowing the acronym, because it's where they took Dick Cheney on september eleventh, two thousand one.

He was reportedly underground within minutes of the second tower being hit, the vice president of the United States sitting in a chair in a bunker built by a man who'd been

dead for fifty six years, watching the f towers fall on a screen like most of us were.

And the continuity of government, the idea that the Republic

A form of democracy keeps running, was supposed to live down there.

That's what the room was built for.

Now, think of the logic of 1942 for a second, because the logic actually holds up.

There's a war, there's an external enemy, you build one secure room so that the constitutional order survives a decapitation strike.

That's honestly, I mean, that's that's a defensible thing.

For a country to do, you protect the institution so that the institution outlives the person, the man in this scenario.

Well, if it's a president in every scenario, it's been a man.

The institution outlives the man.

Hold on to that, because we're gonna need it, right?

Cause here's what happened to that nineteen forty two bunker.

In October of twenty twenty five, they tore it down.

The whole East Wing just demolished to build a ballroom.

The thing Roosevelt built to keep our republic alive through bombs was knocked down to make room for a venue.

Now that's a sentence I want you to like really absorb for a moment.

The bunker built to preserve democratic governance through a world war demolished for a party room.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Let me give you the part of this history that nobody talks about because when we think about fortifying the White House, we think about Trump.

And Trump is a huge part of this story, but the digging, right?

The secret digging, that is bipartisan.

That is institutional.

Twenty eleven, when Barack Obama was president, there's a construction project at the White House, and the media starts calling the White House Big Dig.

Now, what's the big dig?

Officially, it's it's a utility upgrade, right?

Routine maintenance, nothing to see here.

Unofficially, the AP

Takes a look and says, No, this is like way beyond a utility upgrade.

We're talking about sprawling, multi-story underground structure near the West Wing.

Truckload after truckload of concrete, steel beams, heavy structural work that doesn't have any obvious utility justification.

And the scale of it, right?

The footprint, the depth, the materials involved, none of it matched what the administration was actually describing it to be.

And there's a detail in there that's easy to miss.

The subcontractors, the guys like pouring the concrete.

They were ordered by law not to talk to anyone.

They were told to tape over the company information on their trucks, tape over the logos, make yourselves invisible.

You are here, but officially you are not here, and the work you are doing does not exist.

Tape over the logos.

So you've got a secret underground facility being built at the seat of the company.

Of American power, and the workers are just told to make their own employer invisible under a democratic president, a constitutional law professor, a guy who ran on

transparency.

And look, I I have uh I have affection for President Obama.

He is the first president that changed my mind to the political standing that I came from.

The the i i it it began to open my views about.

The Democratic Party as a whole, but but liberalism on the left side of the center.

But he gave speeches about how sunlight is a good disinfectant, and he ordered them to tape over the logo.

Did they tell us what it was?

No.

I mean they they said utilities, right?

The AP says no, it's not really utilities.

And we don't fully know.

Whatever's underneath the West Wing was built in twenty eleven, and we still, to this day, we don't have any sort of public accounting of what it actually is.

I mean there are I'm sure there have been people down there.

There there's gotta be cleaners and and you know, toilet scrubbers and maintenance and engineering technicians who handle.

you know, utility lines and things.

But we have no idea what is actually down there.

And I'm not telling you to do like a it's both sides thing.

I'm not.

I'm telling you this because the impulse to like dig down to build secret to to to wall off yourself is not a partisan issue.

It's an institutional one.

The executive branch, the presidency, the seat of the presidency

As a body, as an apparatus, has a permanent appetite for fortification, for protection, right?

It just gets louder or quieter depend on depending on who's the person occupying that seat and what's happening in the country around them.

Under threat, the institution's first instinct is dig, pour concrete, go deeper.

Now Obama did it quietly, with tape over the logos.

You barely notice the project because it was presented as kind of boring and and the trucks were anonymous.

It was just, you know, concrete truck after concrete truck.

Trump now Trump does it like a carnival act.

It's a show, and that's the real change here, right?

That's the thing I want you to sort of track from here.

Not from like no wall to wall.

We've had walls, we've had bunkers since nineteen forty two.

There've always been fences.

There's always been barriers, always been layer after layer of security between you, just a normal person and the Oval Office.

The shift is from security as like this quiet institutional necessity to security as a performance of power.

From the thing you do because you have to, to the thing you do because you want everyone else to see you doing it.

Because the wall itself sends a message, and the wall is the statement.

And the cleanest example of that shift, the founding document really of security as performance is

Is june first, twenty twenty.

You remember December of twenty twenty?

Yeah.

George George Floyd was killed on May twenty fifth, and protests erupted in every American city within days, all at the same time, on a scale that on a scale the country has never

seen since the nineteen sixties.

And in Washington, protesters had been gathering in Lafayette Square, which is the park.

Directly in front of the White House if you've not been there.

It sits on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue, like across from the North Portico.

And it is by design, like by historical purpose, by like the physical logic of its location, the place where Americans go to make the president hear them.

That's its whole purpose, its whole function.

You stand in Lafayette Square and you yell at that White House, and that and that's what it's for.

Thomas Jefferson designed it that way.

Its proximity is intentional.

And on June first, about 30 minutes before the city's 7 p.m.

curfew, so before anybody was even technically breaking curfew, before they'd even been given a legal reason to disperse, federal law enforcement moved in.

Park police, Secret Service, Bureau of Prisons personnel, the National Guard, and they cleared Lafayette Square.

How'd they do that?

Same way they're doing it now.

Tear gas, pepper balls, smoke canisters, riot shields, batons, people who were standing peacefully, right?

Who really hadn't violated any law, who were still inside the window when they were legally permitted to be there.

Those people got gassed.

The order came from the Attorney General, Bill Barr, the convicted criminal, the served as time felon.

He walked through the scene himself, surveyed the crowd and said attack.

And then minutes later the president walks across the cleared square, walks across the ground they had just poured tear gas onto, past the smoke still hanging in the air to

Saint John's Episcopal Church, which sits on the north side of Lafayette Square.

The church that has held prayer services for presidents since James Madison.

The church whose own rector.

was one of the people the gas had had gotten to and driven away.

And he holds up that Bible for the photo.

That's it.

That's what it was for.

That man walked across a park and held up a book for a camera.

And here's what they didn't want you to know.

Earlier in those protests, Trump had spent time in the bunker, the Roosevelt bunker, right?

The Peac.

While their protests were their loudest outside, while the crowds were the biggest, the president was underground.

Now that lootin that news, like news anywhere, it didn't sit well with somebody, and it was leaked.

Somebody told a reporter, right, and that's the image, right?

The president of the United States hiding underground with his hands covering his widow eyes, his widow hands covering his widow eyes while the country burned above him.

And that image got out.

And apparently he was pissed.

Not at like the danger of it all, at the the leak, at the image of himself as a man who hides.

A man who goes underground, a mole man, if you will.

So the gas, the Bible, the walk, read it again, right?

That's not security.

It's the opposite of the bunker.

It's a man who got called out for being a coward, staging a performance of dominance on the specific spot where days before he'd been humiliated.

That bunker was weakness.

The screen.

Like square clearing out was the correction.

That's that's that's the logic.

There's no chess here.

Like this is just just as bad checkers.

And by the end of that week, one point seven miles of new fencing around the White House complex, one point seven miles of new fencing around the ellipse, around Lafayette Square,

described the time a as without precedent in the modern era.

Era, era, era.

The kind of perimeter that had never been set up.

Around the people's house outside of an active military emergency.

No precedent.

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer demanded he take it down.

I'm assuming they wrote a sternly worded letter.

They called Lafayette Square a place, and I want to quote this, where Americans can gather to freely exercise their constitutional rights in close proximity to the White House.

In close proximity to the White House.

The proximity?

Yeah, that's the whole thing.

That's what was being walled off.

Not a threat, a proximity, the ability of people to stand close enough to our seat of power that the people inside could not just pretend that they didn't exist.

And everybody said, well, it's temporary.

All of the Trump apologists, well it's an emergency measure.

The fence comes down when things calm down.

Things were calmed down by August.

But by September the protests had largely moved on.

That fence was still there.

The fence did not come down.

And now in twenty twenty six, that fence is permanent.

That's how it always goes, right?

The emergency measure that becomes furniture.

The temporary fence that's still there six years later, except now, it has a name, it has a budget line, and much like the monkeys in the electrical ladder room, nobody can really

quite remember the official moment.

It stopped being temporary and just became the way that things are.

And investigators later confirmed it.

The Interior Department's own inspector general, a House Committee report.

The square wasn't cleared for security, it was cleared to install fencing and stage a photo op.

The inspector general's report found that officials had been coordinating on the fence installation before the order was clear.

Like before the order was even given.

The protesters were moved so the fencing crew could come in, and that's the whole story.

So the institution didn't outlive the man.

The man rearranged the institution around himself.

And then he made sure that that rearrangement stuck.

And that's the bridge to now because everything that happened in twenty twenty was a one off, right?

It w as an outrage, but without precedent emergency.

All of this has now been built in concrete.

Literally.

I mean, they're pouring the foundation as we're having this podcast, as you're listening.

So let's look at this machine that they're building.

So, what does the moat actually look like in 2026?

Let me walk you around it.

I'll give you the full picture because when when you see all of it together, not just the ballroom, not just the fence, but the whole collection.

It kind of lands differently.

In January of twenty twenty six, more fencing goes up around Lafayette Square, and not new fencing replacing like old fencing, additional fencing.

The perimeter expands, the buffer zone grows.

May the ellipse.

That big open lawn on the south side of the White House complex, the one where they they light the national Christmas tree every year.

The one that is by law, by by the statute that created it supposed to be open to the public, closed.

Barriers installed, like full vehicle barriers.

And the lawn where families have stood for decades to watch the tree lighting, the lawn where citizens have gathered for inauguration crowds visible from the South Portigo is

closed.

Now sure, they're erecting an annoying UFC octagon on the White House lawn right now.

But that's not about America.

Entry from the east side of the White House, that is currently impossible.

The construction barriers and the ballroom project have made it physically inaccessible.

You cannot approach the grounds from the east direction.

At least half a dozen of Trump's cabinet members and senior staff have moved into military housing.

Think about what that means.

The people who run the federal government, like the secretaries of major departments, senior White House officials, no longer feel safe living in the city that the government

runs.

They have retreated inside military perimeters.

They have decided that Washington DC, the capital of the country that they administer, is not safe enough for them to sleep in without a fence and a guard and a gun between them

and the city.

The Secret Service is investigating forty percent more cases than the same period last year.

Seven more times more cases involving people with mental health issues.

The deputy director, um, man named Matthew Quinn, said the threat environment had, and I'm gonna use his exact words, gone exponential.

That's not not a bureaucratic word, right?

Like that's not like a legal term.

This guy is scared.

Or he's at least alarmed.

Three times in four weeks, gunfire broke out near the White House while agents were protecting the president or the vice president.

Three separate incidents in four weeks.

By the time they added up the third one, it wasn't a pattern, it was just like a routine, it was a condition.

And on the roof you can see snipers that can see a thousand yards in every direction.

Now look, I'm not gonna stand here and tell you that there's no threat.

I opened this episode with a murdered state legislator, right?

The threat is real.

The numbers are real.

And Matthew Quinn he might be a butthead, but he's not wrong.

And here's the question that keeps popping up over and over.

And look, I want to be honest that I'm genuinely chewing on this, not just like performing the answer that I already have.

When the threat goes up, who gets protected?

Because here's what the moat is not, right?

The moat is not more protection for state legislatures and their homes.

Melissa Hortman didn't have a sniper on her roof.

She had a front door, like the rest of us.

The moat is not a protection for healthcare providers on Beltler's hit list.

The clinic workers, the doctors, the nurses who show up every day knowing that their name might be on some spreadsheet somewhere.

And you know, I mean, these people have to use Excel, they're not using modern solutions.

It's not protection for the school board members getting death threats over library books.

It's not protection for the election workers who are

Who have now started needing police escorts to count ballots?

The moat is protection for one building, one office, one man.

And it is expensive.

Let me give you the dollars because the dollars are where the story becomes uh undeniable.

The ballroom.

90,000 square feet.

When Trump first announced it.

in July of twenty twenty five, he said two hundred million dollars, and this is important, right?

This is the part I need you to kind of remember.

He promised it would be at no charge to the taxpayer whatsoever.

He said it would be privately funded.

He said it will cost the American people nothing.

By October, the estimate was three hundred million.

By this year, four hundred million.

The project that was going to cost taxpayers zero dollars in six months of planning doubled in cost before a single pound, a single yard of concrete was poured.

And then the no charge to the taxpayer thing just falls apart completely because the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican controlled, not one Democratic opposition play,

requests one billion biblion dollars in additional security funding tied to this project.

two hundred and twenty million of that sum is specifically labeled ballroom security improvements.

So the thing that was gonna cost you nothing now has a one billion dollars security ask attached to it.

Moving through a Republican Senate, the math on no charge to the taxpayer doesn't work anymore.

It's funny how that works, right?

And then in March of this year, 2026, Trump again said the quiet part out loud.

He says, and I'm quoting this directly, the military is building a big complex under the ballroom.

He describes the ballroom as essentially a shed.

A shed.

His words, not mine.

The four hundred million dollar ballroom with the chandeliers and the tacky gold finishes.

And the venue capacity for heads of state, that's the shed, right?

That's the cover story.

That's the the tape over the truck logo.

The real project is the military complex underneath.

The one we're not getting dimensions on.

The one we're not getting line by line budget items for.

The one we're not getting a public description of just a big complex.

The military is building it, that's all we know.

Same playbook, right, as Obama's big dig, routine sounding project on the surface, secret structure below, no transparency about what's actually down there.

And if you ask too many questions, you're told you don't understand the security implications.

Here's this th the thing about how they they push this through, right?

There's a process for changing the White House grounds.

Especially if you're all about the rule of law, there is a process for how that happens.

They're supposed to be, anyway.

The National Capital Planning Commission reviews major construction projects in Washington.

The Commission of Fine Arts weighs in on the projects that affect historic and architecturally significant sites.

Environmental review is required.

Congressional authorization is required for spending of this magnitude.

Those aren't bureaucratic obstacles, they are the designed mechanisms by which the public retains some influence over what happens to its property.

The White House is public property.

Those processes exist because of that fact.

They blew past all of it.

No prior review for the Planning Commission, no environmental impact statement, no congressional authorization.

They literally tore down the East Wing, a historic structure, before any of the required review processes had finished.

Before they'd even been properly initiated, the bulldozers just went in and before the paperwork.

They also cut down two magnolia trees in the process.

Trees that were planted in nineteen forty two and nineteen forty seven.

Trees that had been on the White House grounds for almost eighty years were

About the same time that Trump's been alive, just gone.

Because they were in the way.

The Commission of Fine Arts opened a public comment period.

They received two thousand comments.

Now this is a record number for this process.

Ninety nine percent of those comments were opposed to the project.

Two thousand people took time out of their lives to formally register their objection.

Ninety nine percent of them said no.

And it didn't matter.

You want to know how it cleared the National Planning Commission?

Eight to one.

On April second, and here's the detail that should stop you cold, the chair of that commission, the man presiding over the vote to approve Trump's ballroom, is a man named

Will Sharf.

Very close to Sharp, who also happens to be Trump's staff secretary.

The president's own staffer chairs the commission that approves the president's project.

He literally presides over that process.

He calls the vote, he announces the outcome.

That's not oversight.

That's a man approving his own boss's homework while sitting in the chair that's supposed to belong to the public interest.

Did the public get a say?

Well, technically yes.

Two thousand comments.

Did it matter?

No.

Eight to one.

The record number of objections produced the same result as zero objections.

Would it?

And look, there's more coming, I apologize.

On march fourteenth, twenty twenty six, a proposal emerged for a thirty three thousand square foot underground security screening center beneath Sherman Park, southeast of the

White House.

Seven screening lanes, before you could reach the White House grounds at all, you would have to enter a park, descend underground, pass through seven lanes of security screening,

and then surface somewhere near the building.

The operational target is July 2028, six months before Trump's term would end.

No cost estimate, just the design, just the intent.

Under a park, you enter the people's house by tunneling under a public park through a facility the public had no meaningful voice in actually approving.

There was a judge who tried to stop it.

His name is Richard Leon.

The federal district judge in Washington.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued.

The lawsuit was filed in December.

It was December twelfth, twenty twenty five.

And Judge Leon issued a preliminary injunction.

He looked at the project, looked at the authorizing statutes, and ruled very clearly that no law gave the president the authority to demolish and rebuild the White House grounds

without congressional authorization.

He said stop construction.

Whatever you're building, stop until this is sorted out.

Of course, as is the MO now, the administration immediately appealed this, and the DC Circuit Court of Appeals issued an administrative stay, keep building.

The stay ran through June fifth, which when I recorded this was this week.

So while the lawsuit about whether any of this is even legal is still actively pending, the foundation is being poured.

Concrete is going into the ground, work is continuing.

Because once the concrete's down, the question becomes more academic.

You can win the lawsuit.

You can get a ruling that says the whole thing was unauthorized and illegal and never should have happened, but that concrete will still be there.

The structure will still be there.

Being right after the fact doesn't unbreak a plate.

The violation becomes permanent, and permanent violations have a way of becoming facts on the ground that everyone eventually works around.

So that's the mechanism, right?

That's the whole mechanism in its simplest form.

Move faster than the law, build it before the courts can get a ruling, make the violation a done deal so any additional rulings after the fact is in your favor, arrives in a world

the ruling can't really change.

When the argument after it stops mattering.

And I sit with this and I I do.

Because part of me wants there to be like a villain cartoonish enough.

You can just point and say, look that guy, get rid of that guy, and we're done.

But the big dig was Obama.

The original bunker was Roosevelt.

The impulse to fortify, to dig underground, to make the executive safe and hidden, that's institutional.

That predates any single president, whether it be the first or the last.

What Trump added wasn't the digging.

What he added was the contempt, the the openness of it, the what are you gonna do about it kind of genus quaavit.

Ninety nine percent of you filed comments saying no.

Eight to one approved, concrete's poor, and what are you gonna do about it?

The judge said stop, the appeals court said keep going.

What are you gonna do about it?

That's the machine.

That's what it looks like when it's running full speed ahead.

Take a breath.

I want to tell you about April twenty fifth, twenty twenty six.

Because this is the event that the administration reaches for to justify all of it.

This is the proof they offer, and I want you to actually understand what happened.

I I want you to understand what the administration does with what happened because those are very different things.

They're two dim diametrically opposed, unrelated, correlated but not causated things.

A man named

Cole Thomas Allen, thirty-one years old from Torrance, California.

He bought a 12-gauge pump action shotgun on August 17th.

So he'd been armed, had been equipped for eight months before he actually did anything about it.

Whatever he was planning, he had time to think about it.

On april twenty fifth, he took a train from Los Angeles to Washington, DC, cross country, days on that train.

And when he got there, he checked into the Washington Hilton, which is the venue for the White House Correspondence Center.

The big event every year was

The one that's been a Washington institution for over a hundred years or whatever, where the president and the press corps and about twenty six hundred people informal wear all

sit in this hotel ballroom on Connecticut Avenue and they ate chicken and they listen to jokes.

Trump was there, Vice President Vance was there.

Senior cabinet officials, twenty six hundred people in a single room.

And around eight forty PM, Allen ran through the magno whatever device that detects metal.

Carrying the shotgun.

And he shot a Secret Service officer in the chest.

Now look, that officer lived because of a you know, a bulletproof vest.

The round hit him center mass and the vest stopped it.

That officer went home.

That officer's family got to keep their their dad, you know, their husband, whatever, because somebody at some point made sure that that he was wearing a bulletproof vest.

Before the attack, Allen actually sent an email to his family and and his uh old boss and it's and he signed it Cole friendly federal assassin Allen.

Now, the DOJ found that Trump was the intended target.

Now, I want to be careful here because this is exactly the kind of moment where it would be easy to lose the point.

And I don't want to do that.

This was a real assassination attempt.

A man with a loaded shotgun inside the security perimeter of an event where the president was present, an officer took around in the chest.

That officer has a family who received a phone call that night that it

That it's not nothing, right?

It's the opposite of nothing.

The threat is real.

And I keep saying it because I need you to to understand that I it's it's true and I believe it's true.

And I want you to hear that in your ears when I say what comes after this.

So here's what comes after this within days.

Some say it was within minutes.

Trump called this shooting as justification for the ballroom.

The ballroom.

The four hundred million dollar ballroom with the secret military complex underneath, the one being poured right now.

He pointed at Cole Allen and said, See, this is why.

This is what we're protecting against.

And then his acting attorney general, Todd Blanch, got on X and

Created an excretion publicly calling on the National Trust for Historic Preservation to drop their lawsuit.

Not a private communication, a public letter to the editor.

The sitting attorney general of the United States posting publicly calling on a historic preservation nonprofit to abandon civil litigation against the executive branch, using an

assassination attempt as the leverage.

Basically, a man tried to shoot the president, your lawsuit's getting in the way of his safety, drop it.

You see the move?

The shooting happening in a in in a hotel, the Washington Hilton on Connecticut Connecticut Avenue Northwest.

Not the White House.

Cole Allen didn't try to breach the White House fence.

He didn't he didn't approach the new perimeter or test the new barriers.

He just bought a ticket to an event the president was attending at a hotel across town.

Walked in through the front door and shot an officer.

At the metals detectors.

ballroom being built at the White House would not have stopped Cole Allen.

The underground screening facility would not have stopped Cole Allen because Cole Allen wasn't at the White House.

I'm gonna say that again.

Cole Allen wasn't at the White House.

The threat and the proposed solution are not in the same location.

But it doesn't have to make any sense.

It just has to be available.

A real tragedy available to justify a project that was already in motion long before april twenty fifth.

The foundation was being poured before Allen bought that train ticket.

Cole Allen gave them a better story to tell while they poured it.

The concrete and the moral justification arrived in the same news cycle, and that's all that the administration needed.

That's the thing about real fear.

Legitimate, genuine fear is the most powerful political tool in the world for people who want to build walls.

Because you cannot argue against it without sounding like you don't care that an officer took a round in the chest.

And I do care.

Genuinely.

Like I I deeply care about this country.

That officer's survival is not incidental to this story.

It's the best thing in this story.

But caring about that officer and questioning whether a four hundred million dollars ballroom with a secret military complex at the bottom of it approved by the president's

staff built without congressional authorization, over the objection of ninety nine percent of public commenters, caring about the officer and questioning the product, the project,

the ballroom, the

Bunker are not in conflict.

They were made to seem like they're in conflict because somebody needed them to be.

Somebody needed you to feel like skepticism about the ballroom meant indifference to the shooting.

That's the work the fear is doing.

That's what it's for.

That that's that's what Fox News sells to all of the sheeple sitting around watching it twenty four hours a day.

Now I want to go back to Lafayette Square because there's a case there too.

And it's the other side of this exact same coin.

Black Lives Matter DC and a coalition of other organizations sued the federal government over june first, twenty twenty.

That clearing of the of the Lafayette Square.

First Amendment claims, Fourth Amendment claims, the right to peaceably assemble, the right against unreasonable force.

The case argued that what happened in Lafayette Square that evening was not a security operation, but a constitutional violation.

The government used the instruments of force against people, citizens, for exercising the rights those instruments were supposed to protect.

And there's a detail from the litigation that I want to point out.

The Defense Department's lead military officer, the senior official in charge of the operational response that night, wanted to go further.

Before that clearing began, he had asked about deploying two specific weapons on the protesters.

One was an active denial system.

That is a directed energy weapon that works.

Like a microwave by heating the water molecules beneath your skin.

It makes the person receiving this directed energy weapon feel as though their entire body surface is on fire.

It's designed to cause unbearable pain instantly, which drives people away from the area.

Without actually leaving visible marks.

The military calls it a non lethal crowd control tool.

The other was an LRAD, long range acoustic device.

You can look up videos on YouTube of several people creating their own and testing them in various ways, but

The way that it works is that it takes focused sound at physically painful intensity levels, which disorients the person and makes the area around the device unbearable to

physically exist in.

He wanted to use these weapons on peaceful Americans standing in a public park exercising their constitutional right to assemble in front of the House, the White House, the

people's house.

Now they didn't use them, right?

But the the reason that they didn't use them is not because somebody said no.

The reason is that the National Guard units deployed that night

didn't physically have those weapons in their inventory that day.

Inventory, logistics, not policy, not restraint, not somebody in command who looked at a crowd and said, These are citizens, I'm not gonna do this.

Just well, it's not in the truck.

That case settled in April of twenty twenty two.

The Park Police and Secret Service agreed to revise their protest policing policies.

The Interior Department's Inspector General had already figured out that the clearing was done in direct consult consultation with Attorney General Bill Barr, specifically to

install fencing.

A House Committee report found that Trump likely directed the entire thing for the photo op.

The settlement was real.

The policy revisions were real, but the square is still fenced.

The perimeters stayed expanded.

The precedent of federal force clearing people from the public space in front of the White House, that precedent was set.

And precedents are important because they have gravity.

So here's the pattern.

I've laid it bare across two cases.

Cole Allen, man with a shotgun in a hotel, gets used to justify walling off the people's house, justifies the ballroom, justifies the billion dollar security ask, justifies

billing building a military complex bunker underground beneath the venue where the president wants to entertain.

Greatest show on earth, people.

And the people in Lafayette Square, the people exercising the exact constitutional right that the square was designed to protect.

The right that Nancy Pelosi described as happening in close proximity to the White House, as though that proximity were the whole point, which it is, those people got gassed, and

someone wanted to hit them with a heat ray.

It was just bad planning that stopped it.

One group is the reason for the wall, the other group is who the wall is against.

And they're not the same group.

That's the thing I need you to hold right now because it's the center of everything I'm trying to say today.

The threat that justifies the moat and the people the moat keeps out, those are different populations.

The murderer travels by train to a hotel, the protester

Stands in a park with a sign.

The wall doesn't distinguish between either of them.

The wall is not designed to distinguish between them.

The wall was designed to keep the second group away from the first building, and to use the first group as the reason.

That's the architecture of it, physically and politically.

Let's pull this all the way back and show you the shape of it because when you lay the whole timeline out, right?

42 to 2026, Roosevelt to the foundation being poured this week, a shape emerges that I think is worth naming.

1942, Roosevelt digs a bunker so the Republic survives the bombs.

The logic is explicit and genuinely noble.

Protect the institution so the institution outlives the person.

Build the room that keeps the constitutional order order going if the worst happens.

The president matters less than the presidency.

The man dies, the office endures, that's the design.

twenty twenty five, they demolished that exact bunker to build a ballroom for one man with a secret military complex underneath.

The logic has inverted completely.

Now it's rearranged the entire institution so it serves a man.

Remove the structure built for continuity of democracy and

and replace it with a structure for the comfort and power of a very specific occupant.

That's the the through line, right?

Like that's the the the needle that we're threading here.

The institution outlives the man.

That was the whole American idea.

Presidents come and go, the office indoors, the building belongs to the people.

That's why it's called the People's House.

That's not a slogan.

That's not like, you know, flowery language.

That's the architecture of all of it.

The building was designed to be accessible.

The square in front of it was designed for closeness, proximity.

Jefferson didn't leave Lafayette Square there by accident.

The closeness was the design, it was the point.

And that's what we're watching in real time, with concrete being poured this week, is the conversion of the people's house into a personal fortress for the man that currently holds

it.

Not a fortress for the office.

A fortress for the man.

Every piece fits together.

The fence that was without precedent in twenty twenty becomes permanent by twenty twenty six.

The square where Americans gathered in close proximity to the White House is closed, the ellipse closed, entry from the east closed, visitors will soon either enter by tunneling

under a park through a seven lane underground screening facility before they're allowed anywhere near the grounds.

The cabinet has moved to military bases.

Deciding that the capital city is just too dangerous for them to live in, and the snipers see a thousand yards in every direction.

And the public said no.

Well, two thousand people said no, a record number.

Ninety-nine percent of them said no.

And they were overridden eight to one by a commission chaired by the president's own employee.

Here's what that means.

When you follow it to its conclusion, the fortification isn't just physical.

The physical wall is downstream of a different wall, the harder wall, the one that actually matters, the one that determines whether any of this can actually be stopped is

the one around the decision making process itself.

The blowing past the planning commission, the ignoring of public comment, the building before the court can rule, the using of a real shooting to publicly pressure a nonprofit

into dropping a lawsuit.

That's the moat.

That matters most, not the fence.

The fence is a symptom.

The real moat is around accountability, around the ability of anyone, a federal judge, a planning commission, 2,000 citizens filing formal comments, a nonprofit withstanding to

sue, to say no.

And it actually means something.

To say stop and the bulldozers actually stop to win the argument.

And have the argument matter.

And here's why I reached for the green zone at the beginning of this podcast.

Why those American journalists looking at their own capital city reached for Baghdad?

The Green Zone in Baghdad wasn't just walls, it was a way of seeing the world.

It was an occupying authority that had made a fundamental decision.

The population is a threat to be managed, not a people to be served.

The blast walls were the architecture of that decision.

The checkpoints were the architecture of that decision.

The walls said in reinforced concrete, we are separate from you.

We are above you, we are not accountable to you, and you cannot reach us.

That is what blast walls mean, not just protection, a relationship.

When the people who govern you wall themselves off from you, when they move into military bases, when they close the public parks,

When they make you tunnel underground to get near them, when they clear the square with gas and L RADs and acoustic weapons so that a man can walk across it for a camera and a

photo op with a Bible, they're telling you something about how they see you.

You are a threat.

And look, maybe some of you are.

I mean, Cole Allen was, Vance Belter was, the threat is real.

And I'll say it one final time because it has to stay true.

The threat is real, but a democracy that responds to threat by walling off the powerful from everyone, rather than protecting everyone.

That democracy has already made a choice about who matters.

It was decided that the safety of the office, or or more accurately, the safety of the person currently in the office.

matters more than the openness of the office.

And the openness was the whole point.

The openness was not a vulnerability that needed to be fixed.

The openness was in the design.

The proximity was intentional.

Jefferson left the square to be there on purpose.

You cannot have a people's house behind a thousand yard kill zone and still call it the people's house in good faith.

You cannot have a public square

That the public is not permitted to enter.

You cannot have a government of, by, and for the people accessed by tunnel, screened underground, approved eight to one by the president's own secretary clerk, built over the

objections of two thousand voices who exercised the exact process that was supposed to empower them.

When the executive branch fortifies itself against the people, democracy is already losing the argument because the argument was supposed to be settled.

The argument was supposed to be you can reach us.

You can stand in the square and yell at the house.

You can stand close enough that the people inside can't just pretend that you're not there.

We are yours.

you.

That proximity, that ability to yell through the fence to hold the sign within sight of the window was the operationalization of the whole idea.

And the moat is the response to that argument.

The concrete foundation being poured this week is the answer to that argument.

The moat says no.

You can't reach us.

We don't have to see you, and we don't have to hear you.

Because we've built something between you and us that you cannot cross.

That's what concrete means.

That's what's being poured this week.

Not just a foundation for a ballroom, a foundation for that answer.

That answer made permanent, made physical, made ours to live with.

So what do you do?

Because I don't I I hate to leave you just angry, you know, just pissed off.

Anger without a door is just despair with extra steps.

And we've got plenty enough to spare.

Let me give you three doors.

Three things.

Each one's different.

Each one is doable.

Each one is connected to a specific lever in this specific fight.

First thing, personal, and and you can do it in five minutes today.

Look up the National Trust for Historic Preservation versus Trump case.

Read the filing.

Savingplaces.org has it, uh, and it's more readable than you'd expect from a legal document.

And I'm not asking you to become a lawyer.

Will shout out to you, brother.

I'm asking you to just know the thing.

I mean, put it into Chat GPT and get a summary or whatever you're gonna do with it.

I want you to be the person in the conversation who understands it and can say, look, here's what the judge found, here's what the appeals court did, here is the specific legal

question that is still pending while the concrete is drying.

The single most powerful thing you can do against a moat around accountability is refuse to be ignorant of what's being decided with your name on it.

Know the case, know the name, read the filing.

Second thing.

Community and financial the legal fight here is being carried by organizations that spend every single day fighting and litigating the limits of executive power, historic

preservation groups, civil liberties organizations, public interest law firms.

These are the same kinds of of organizations that fought the Lafayette Square Clearing and won a settlement that produced real policy changes.

They were doing the work that formal oversight processes have failed us on because the processes have been captured.

Will Sharf chaired the commission.

Now remember, and the courts are the remaining lever.

Find one of these organizations, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the ACLU's DC chapter, throw them twenty bucks or five or whatever you got.

Because these cases are

Expensive.

They cost real money.

And the other side has a a one billion dollar security request moving through a Republican Senate, right?

You tilt the scale by making sure the people doing the legal work can keep doing it.

Voting's not enough anymore.

I want you to show up and vote.

I really do.

Believe me, I want you to vote.

But voting by itself now has not really turned out the way that we all hoped.

Third thing, the political one, and this is not this is the specific.

Contact, call your senator, both of them, and ask them one specific question.

Don't rant, don't give them a speech, just a question.

Will you vote against any appropriation that funds White House ballroom security?

Given that the project bypassed the National Capital Planning Commission and was undertaken without congressional authorization.

Make them answer that specific thing.

Don't let them pivot to whether the threat is actually real.

You already know the threat is real.

I've told it to you.

You can even tell them I told it to you.

That's not the question.

The question is whether your senator will let a billion dollars flow to a project that was approved by eight to one by the president's staff over the objection of ninety-nine

percent of the public, while a federal lawsuit about it being legal is still pending.

The one billion dollar security ask runs through the Senate.

The Senate, you can call them and bug them to the end of the earth.

The Capitol Switch Board is, and write this down.

two zero two two two four three one two one five minutes, one question.

That's it.

Read the thing, fund the fight, make the call.

So the thing ab this week that uh pissed me off was Lafayette Square.

Not the gas or the Bible.

Not not the image of a man walking across the cleared ground.

I think about the name the people's house.

That used to mean something, right?

You could you could stand on the lawn and see the windows and yell.

The distance between you and power was supposed to be small enough

To walk.

That was the design, that was the point of the design.

They're pouring concrete to make that distance permanent, to make it measurable in yards, to make you tunnel under a park, to make the people's house something you can see from a

distance but can't actually reach.

Something you can comment on but can't stop, something that belongs to the people in name and to whoever holds the office in every material fact.

Don't let the wall become the furniture.

That's how it always wins.

Not one catastrophic moment, not a single vote that everyone agrees was the turning point, but by accumulation, by becoming the thing that was just always there, that nobody can

quite remember being built, that feels too permanent to question.

The fence that was without precedent in 2020 feels normal now.

That's the mechanism.

That's how permanence works, right?

It wasn't always there.

Roosevelt built one room for the Republic to survive the bombs.

They built a fortress for a man to survive the people.

And we are allowed.

No, we're required to remember the difference between those two projects.

One was for the institution outliving the man.

The other is for the man outliving the institution.

And right now, this week

With the foundation going in, we are watching the second project get poured in concrete.

I am Joshua.

This has been the overlap.

You can find everything we do at FOF.foundation.

Well, thank you, and thank you to all of you.

Stay close to the house.

It's yours.

We'll see next week.

Bye.