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September 5th, 2023, Washington, D.C.

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A federal judge sentences Enrique Tarrio to 22 years in federal prison.

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Seditious conspiracy.

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The longest sentence handed down for any January 6th defendant.

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And here's the thing about Enrikay Tarrio that I need you to hold on to.

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He wasn't just some fringe guy who wandered in from outside the movement.

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He was built by the movement.

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The Proud Boys

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didn't and doesn't exist in a vacuum.

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They were recruited through the same rallies, the same rhetoric, the same fundraising
emails, the same infrastructure that the MAGA apparatus spent years constructing and

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perfecting and pointing at its enemies.

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The machine worked exactly as it was designed.

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And then on January 6th, 2021, someone forgot to check which direction it was facing.

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to the tune of about 22 years.

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a 22 year sentence.

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And then January, 2025 Trump pardons him.

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So the machine that built him aimed him and then watched a federal court put him away for
two decades.

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That same machine reaches back in and pulls him out.

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Like nothing happened.

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Like the 22 years was just a rounding error.

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It's less like a pardon and more like a loop completing.

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And that is exactly what it is.

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And Tadrio is not the only one.

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He's just the clearest example of something much larger that we've been watching happen in
slow motion for years.

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The MAGA movement spent a decade building a war machine, fundraising infrastructure, media
infrastructure, legal infrastructure, a mobilization apparatus of genuine scale and

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sophistication.

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And somewhere along the way, it stopped being able to tell the difference between its
enemies

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and its own members.

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And that's what we're here to talk about today.

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And welcome back overlap listeners.

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I am Joshua.

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And I will.

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And listen, before we get into it Joshua, I have to say I've been waiting for this one.

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Yeah, Will's actually been texting me about this one for three weeks.

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Maybe.

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as far as you know.

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Because every time I thought I understood the shape of this story, he sent me another
document and then it got more complicated.

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I sent you to the House Select Committee final report at 1130 on a Tuesday.

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You did.

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You did do that.

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My wife was not well pleased.

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My sincerest apologies

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She's heard it all before.

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Okay.

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So overlap listeners, we are genuinely glad you're here this week because this one is
going to take you somewhere.

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This is not a comfortable episode, but it is, I think, an important one.

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And I want to be honest with all of you about what we're doing today.

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Yeah, we're not here to dunk on anybody, although we're probably going to do a little bit
of that.

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That's not what this show is, right?

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What we're here to do is trace a specific arc, a very specific, very documented arc of how
a political movement builds infrastructure, what that infrastructure actually does, and

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what happens when the machine actually gets turned around.

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Because here's what caught my attention.

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DOGE, the famous Elon Musk operation, the Department of Government Efficiency, the
unelected advisory body, excuse me, with access to federal payment systems, by February

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25, it had cut roughly $2 billion, $2 billion, not $2 trillion, lest you be misled on
that, in federal contracts and grants.

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And a significant portion of those cuts landed in red state districts, rural hospitals,
agricultural subsidies, veteran services.

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Republican members of Congress started pushing back almost immediately.

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That's Republican members, the same party as the president, in case anybody's keeping
track.

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The people whose constituents donated to his movement voted for his movement, built this
movement from the ground up with small dollar donations and yard signs and showing up at

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rallies in January in Washington, DC.

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rallies in case you can't see the air quotes.

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And this is where the systems metaphor that lives rent-free in my brain becomes
unavoidable, right?

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You build a load balancer, you build it to distribute traffic, to protect the system, to
route pressure away from critical infrastructure.

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But if you set it up the wrong way, if you misconfigure it, if the rules that governing
it, right, governs where the traffic goes are wrong from the beginning,

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really doesn't matter how powerful that machine is.

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It doesn't matter what size the GPU is or how much RAM or how big the CPU.

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It will route the damage straight into the nodes that you need the most.

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And there are real people inside those metaphorical notes.

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I think that's what we need to remember today.

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Yeah, so that's the whole episode.

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Today we're walking you through how the machine got built, what it was built to do, and
exactly who it is hitting right now.

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So make sure you stay with us.

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Let's start with Anthony Kennedy.

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January 1st, 2010, the Supreme Court issues the Citizens United versus the FEC, and
Kennedy writes the majority opinion.

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And the line that matters, the line that built this machine, is this one.

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Independent expenditures.

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including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of
corruption.

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That's the sentence.

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That's the load-bearing wall of every single thing that comes from the Citizens United
decision.

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And we really need to understand what that sentence did in practice.

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Before Citizens United, there were limits.

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They weren't perfect.

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They weren't airtight.

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But there were limits on how much money corporations and outside groups could pour
directly into influence apparatus of an election.

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After that sentence, the floodgates opened, not metaphorically, but structurally.

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The technical term is super PAC.

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The practical term is unlimited.

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You can now raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on political messaging as long as
you don't technically coordinate with the campaign.

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And technically coordinate became one of the most aggressively lawyered phrases in
American political history.

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If you needed a clue as to where this was headed, Mitch McConnell celebrated that ruling
publicly, enthusiastically.

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He'd been fighting campaign finance restrictions for years, and he genuinely believed, or
at least argued publicly consistently, that money in politics was a free speech issue and

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Citizens United was his vindication.

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And here's what I'd like you to hold on to about that moment, because it matters for
everything that happens afterwards.

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The people celebrating Citizens United in 2010 believed they were building infrastructure
for the conservative movement broadly, for the Chamber of Commerce, for corporate

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interests, for the traditional Republican donor class.

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At that time they were not thinking about Steve Bannon.

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They were not thinking about Brad Parscale running digital operations for a real estate
developer from Queens who was going to hoover up small dollar donations from retirees in

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Florida.

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They built a highway.

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They just didn't control what got on it.

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You know that's the thing about infrastructure.

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You build it for your purposes and then it just exists out in the world and other people
decide to use it for theirs.

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Fast forward three years to 2013, and this one is more complicated because the grievance
here is not exactly manufactured.

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The IRS, under a division run by uh Lois Lerner, had been scrutinizing applications for
the 501C4 tax-exempt status.

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you volunteer with an organization, nonprofit, usually they're in the 50C3 category, and
donations you make to them are typically tax-deductible.

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This one is the C4.

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It's a political entity and those donations are not tax deductible.

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It's basically the kind that actually lets you make donations and you do the political
organizing without actually disclosing how much money or where you're sending it or who

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you're sending it to.

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And they were basically flagging applications that had words like tea party or patriot in
the name.

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If you were alive during that time, you know what that group brought about.

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So that's what the IRS was doing.

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And then Darryl Issa turned it into a congressional firestorm.

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Ted Cruz turned it into a fundraising email.

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the, right?

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Though you'd have to it to him in Mexico, right?

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Depending on what's going on in Texas.

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But the conservative grassroots, people who genuinely believe the government was targeting
them based on their political beliefs, that belief became foundational.

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Now the inspector general report confirmed that progressive groups were also flagged,
right?

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The process was kind of a mess.

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It wasn't some sort of clean partisan targeting operation the way it has and still is
portrayed on television and in congressional hearings.

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But here's the thing about this grievance infrastructure, right?

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Accuracy is kind of not the point.

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The point is the story.

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And the story was the government is your enemy.

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The establishment is your enemy.

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You cannot trust the institutions.

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You need your own parallel system.

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And we talk about parallel systems here quite a bit.

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And then they built one and that's what people miss.

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The response to the IRS controversy wasn't just outrage.

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It was organization.

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They got to work.

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I mean, they accelerated an entire ecosystem of conservative groups, fundraising
platforms, media outlets, all of which were operating explicitly outside the traditional

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Republican party structure.

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Because remember, no technical coordination with the party.

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Yes, so that was outside and eventually in competition with it, which is important to
denote.

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because the Republican Party thought it was going to benefit from all this energy, and it
did for a while.

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for a while.

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So 2016, right?

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And this is where we need to actually talk about Brad Parscale because Brad Parscale is
not a household name.

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It's not somebody you'd recognize, but he is genuinely one of the most consequential
digital operatives in recent American political history and not in a way that gets

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discussed enough among the people who know.

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Right, he was Trump's digital director for the 2016 campaign, correct?

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Yes, Trump's digital director and what Parscale built along with the infrastructure that
would eventually become WinRed, W-I-N-R-E-D, was a small dollar online fundraising

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mechanism that was technically extraordinary.

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Like from a pure engineering standpoint, they were doing things with email list
segmentation and donation page optimization that were really ahead of the curve.

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And through that, they raised about $280 million in 2016, which was at the time a
staggering number for a small dollar online fundraisers.

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But the architecture of how they raised it, right?

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That's what actually matters because we're not just asking.

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They were not just asking for donations, right?

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They were selling this urgency like this.

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had to be done now and time is wasting and they were selling threat.

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A lot like Fox News.

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The emails were calibrated to produce a specific emotional, like somatic response.

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You are under attack.

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The enemy is at the gates.

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Your donation is the last line of defense.

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Send now.

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Alright, I want to stop there because I think people who haven't been on the inside of one
of those email lists don't fully understand what we're describing.

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These weren't just aggressive, your classic aggressive fundraising emails, you know, it
wasn't just the classic bag.

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They were, and I don't use this word lightly, psychologically engineered.

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The subject lines, the countdown timers, the language about matching funds, and that often
didn't work the way they implied.

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I mean, everything was carefully crafted.

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Yeah, pre-checked boxes for recurring donations, which, that'll be a bigger story later,
but the point is, in 2016, they built this machine that ran on manufactured emergency.

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And it worked.

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$280 million worth of campaign donations, it was working.

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And then 2020 happened and the emergency became real, or at least it became the thing they
told donors was real.

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Trump loses the election, depending on who you ask, right?

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And within days, the Save America Pack and allied groups launched what becomes the Stop
the Steal fundraising operation.

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$250 million more, not part of the original 280, 250 more in the weeks after the election,
weeks after the election.

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So the House Select Committee on January 6th documented this in their final report.

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$250 million raised in the name of fighting the stolen election for legal challenges for
protecting the integrity of the vote.

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and the money did not go to legal challenges.

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Not primarily.

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Not even close to primarily.

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The select committee found that the Save America PAC actually transferred $40 million to a
nonprofit called the America First Policy Institute, which is not a law firm, which did

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not file election lawsuits.

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The money went to Trump's political operation, to events, to a hotel that Trump owned, to
allied organizations.

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Let's sit with that for a minute, dear audience, because the donors, and we're going to
talk about specific donors in a later segment, but the people who sent that money sent it

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because they believed the election had been stolen.

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They sent it because they were told their donation would fund the legal fight to prove it.

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And it didn't.

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You know what that is, technically, in any other context, right?

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Yeah, if a charity told you that your donation was going to feed children and it went to
the CEO's vacation home, we have a legal term for that.

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We have several legal terms for that and some not so polite terms for that.

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So I wanna be precise here because the legal situation is still, still ongoing and
complicated.

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The fine print on some of these solicitations was technically broad enough to allow the
transfers.

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That's not an accident.

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That is a designed system.

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That's someone somewhere making sure that the fine print covered what they actually
already intended to do.

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I mean, if they didn't leave the boxes unchecked for repeated donations and things like
that, if it was down to that manufacturer, down to that level of detail, you know that

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this was not an accident.

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But here's what gets me.

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The people who built that architecture built it using the infrastructure that Citizens
United created.

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The super PACs, the dark money vehicles, the 501C4 that didn't have to disclose as donors.

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I every one of those decisions from 2010 forward made this easier to do.

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Yes, that infrastructure that they built, that super highway of money, it got well used.

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And it got used by people who were in some cases the same people who built it.

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In other cases, just people who figured out the on-ramp.

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And then January 6th, which is where the mobilization infrastructure, the email lists, the
rally networks, the social media amplification systems and algorithms, all of it, turns in

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a direction that I don't even think the people running it really anticipated.

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I mean, look, maybe some of them did.

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That's a question that I honestly can't answer.

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Yeah, and you wonder why we talk about a war machine.

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I mean, by January 6th, have Rudy Giuliani at the ellipse saying, trial by combat.

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Mo Brooks is there.

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And then the crowd that this machine spent years building, building with urgency, building
with threat language, building with the explicit message that the enemy is inside the

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gates and normal rules do not apply.

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That crowd heads for the Capitol.

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And here's the thing.

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I want you to understand about the January 6th revelations, right?

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What it revealed about this machine, the proud boys, the oath keepers, these organizations
recruited using the exact same emotional infrastructure and stimuli, the same language of

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an existential threat inside the gates, right?

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The same framework of the enemies within.

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Stuart Rhodes built the Oath Keepers by targeting military veterans and law enforcement
officers, people with real training to hurt and kill people with the message that the

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constitutional order was under attack and they were the last defense.

217
00:16:18,273 --> 00:16:25,468
And Enrique Tario built the Proud Boys into a national organization with chapters and
hierarchy and operational coordination.

218
00:16:25,649 --> 00:16:27,930
These were not random people who showed up angry.

219
00:16:27,930 --> 00:16:30,171
These were organizations with planning.

220
00:16:30,600 --> 00:16:35,754
Organizations that use the movement's infrastructure to recruit, to fundraise, to
communicate.

221
00:16:35,894 --> 00:16:44,272
And on the 6th January, they use that infrastructure to coordinate an attack on the actual
building where Congress was certifying our election.

222
00:16:44,272 --> 00:16:48,492
So Tario got 22 years, Rhodes got 18.

223
00:16:48,652 --> 00:16:50,212
Seditious conspiracy.

224
00:16:50,212 --> 00:16:53,852
The longest sentence is handed down for January 6 offenses.

225
00:16:53,858 --> 00:16:56,871
And then Trump pardoned him, like we said in the intro.

226
00:16:57,189 --> 00:17:06,594
Which is, I mean, you build a machine, the machine does what you built it to do, the
people who operated it at its most extreme get convicted of seditious conspiracy, and then

227
00:17:06,594 --> 00:17:11,692
the person at the top, the person who the whole machine was built for, pardons them.

228
00:17:11,693 --> 00:17:13,395
Yeah, that's not a malfunction, right?

229
00:17:13,395 --> 00:17:14,616
Nothing went wrong.

230
00:17:14,616 --> 00:17:15,957
And I want to be clear about that.

231
00:17:15,957 --> 00:17:19,941
That is the system operating as designed by the people who designed it.

232
00:17:20,002 --> 00:17:29,181
So the question we're building toward, the question this whole episode is actually about,
is what happens when that system starts hitting the people who actually funded it, who

233
00:17:29,181 --> 00:17:33,897
voted for it, who showed up in January cold weather to be a part of it?

234
00:17:33,897 --> 00:17:39,477
Because by February 2025, DOGE is cutting rural hospital funding in red districts.

235
00:17:39,477 --> 00:17:47,937
And the veterans who stormed the castle in 2021 are finding out that the VA services they
depend on are in the crosshairs of the next deficiency operation run by the world's

236
00:17:47,937 --> 00:17:49,088
richest man.

237
00:17:49,089 --> 00:17:52,630
And that machine doesn't actually have like a loyalty setting on it, right?

238
00:17:52,630 --> 00:17:54,671
That's what we're gonna show you next.

239
00:17:54,671 --> 00:17:57,102
So let's start with the money, right?

240
00:17:57,102 --> 00:18:01,914
Because the money is always where the pattern is the clearest and we have the records for
it, right?

241
00:18:01,914 --> 00:18:03,295
Like that's the data.

242
00:18:03,295 --> 00:18:10,308
In the weeks that followed after the 2020 election, the stop the steal operation raised
over $250 million, right?

243
00:18:10,308 --> 00:18:16,660
So through the Save America pack and other groups that were aligned with the MAGA
movement.

244
00:18:16,746 --> 00:18:18,062
And the pitch was explicit, right?

245
00:18:18,062 --> 00:18:22,631
This money was going to fight the stolen election in court, fund the legal battles,
protect your vote.

246
00:18:22,631 --> 00:18:25,738
And remind me again how much we had actually went to election litigation.

247
00:18:25,738 --> 00:18:26,870
It was just a fraction.

248
00:18:26,870 --> 00:18:28,421
It was practically a rounding area.

249
00:18:28,421 --> 00:18:32,377
So the House Select Committee documented that right in their report.

250
00:18:32,377 --> 00:18:38,004
The money went to his political operation, to events, to vendors connected to the Inner
Circle.

251
00:18:38,004 --> 00:18:44,361
So the donors thought they were funding lawyers, but they were just funding the operation
of that apparatus.

252
00:18:44,362 --> 00:18:47,043
And this is not a first time this trick has been played.

253
00:18:47,043 --> 00:18:52,316
This is the exact same mechanism we traced in segment one through the Tea Party Pack
ecosystem.

254
00:18:52,556 --> 00:18:56,838
Same pre-checked recurring donation boxes, the same emergency language.

255
00:18:56,878 --> 00:19:01,060
In me at the gates, send money now, money goes somewhere the donor never intended.

256
00:19:01,061 --> 00:19:02,361
Yeah, WinRed.

257
00:19:02,361 --> 00:19:09,321
So I'm going to talk about WinRed for a second because it's the infrastructure version of
that fraud made into an entire platform.

258
00:19:09,361 --> 00:19:15,681
WinRed is the mandatory small dollar fundraising platform for Republican candidates.

259
00:19:16,041 --> 00:19:28,361
Mandatory in the sense that if you want to access the entire party apparatus, the voting
lists, the calling schedules, the fundraising, you know, campaigns and programs and flyers

260
00:19:28,361 --> 00:19:31,141
and mailers and callers and all those other things.

261
00:19:31,202 --> 00:19:42,121
all those other things that annoy the hell out of all of us, what we get during the big
election season, then you have to run your donations online through WinRed.

262
00:19:42,142 --> 00:19:46,107
And WinRed had pre-checked boxes that enrolled donors.

263
00:19:46,107 --> 00:19:56,267
Oftentimes, your grandma and your grandpa, who are sadly and sadistically still
Republicans for some reason, often low-income donors.

264
00:19:56,535 --> 00:20:00,706
people giving $20 because they believed in the cause, right?

265
00:20:00,706 --> 00:20:12,710
In recurring weekly or monthly charges that they didn't really authorize, in a lot of
ways, these are the same people that are falling for scams, where callers are asking them

266
00:20:12,710 --> 00:20:19,123
to send Bitcoin and their children are in prison and they need gift cards in order to be
able to get them out.

267
00:20:19,123 --> 00:20:19,706
it's...

268
00:20:19,706 --> 00:20:20,127
it's...

269
00:20:20,127 --> 00:20:23,120
you have to laugh a little bit because otherwise you'll cry.

270
00:20:23,120 --> 00:20:25,225
How much money are we talking about here?

271
00:20:25,331 --> 00:20:34,436
The FCC investigation and the Senate Finance Committee inquiry put refunds alone at $122
million.

272
00:20:34,436 --> 00:20:36,797
That's just the refund number, right?

273
00:20:36,797 --> 00:20:40,058
That's not the total that was actually taken.

274
00:20:40,058 --> 00:20:45,140
That was just the amount that got clawed back after people noticed their bank accounts
being drained.

275
00:20:45,141 --> 00:20:48,181
And these people being drained are like the most devoted, right?

276
00:20:48,181 --> 00:20:53,561
They're the people that were willing to give a response to these letters in the first
place, believing their republic was in danger.

277
00:20:53,841 --> 00:20:56,819
Those are the people who got taken for the ride the most, right?

278
00:20:56,819 --> 00:20:59,479
because they were the most trusting, right?

279
00:20:59,479 --> 00:21:04,159
mean, and here's what I want our listeners to understand directly.

280
00:21:04,159 --> 00:21:14,779
If you gave money to any Republican candidate through the online platform between 2020 and
2024, you should go look at your bank statements.

281
00:21:14,979 --> 00:21:21,399
If you are here from, and you were a Republican from 20 to 24, welcome, thanks for being
here.

282
00:21:21,399 --> 00:21:25,278
Thanks for listening, but you should check your bank statements.

283
00:21:25,278 --> 00:21:26,469
to make sure, right?

284
00:21:26,469 --> 00:21:29,891
Not as some sort of like political statement, but as a practical matter.

285
00:21:29,891 --> 00:21:36,777
You should really see with your own eyes and check whether you were enrolled in something
that you didn't sign up for.

286
00:21:36,777 --> 00:21:38,468
This is not like hypothetical, right?

287
00:21:38,468 --> 00:21:53,110
Like the FTC found this, the Senate confirmed it, and $122 million in refunds means $122
million that had to be asked for back, which means there were people who never asked

288
00:21:53,110 --> 00:21:54,480
and never got it.

289
00:21:54,481 --> 00:21:59,884
And of course the philosophical problem here that I keep coming back to is that the
mechanism requires belief.

290
00:22:00,105 --> 00:22:05,608
This doesn't work on cynics, it works on people who genuinely convinced that their system
was under attack.

291
00:22:05,788 --> 00:22:09,881
The more sincere the donor, the more of a target they are within that system.

292
00:22:09,882 --> 00:22:11,423
like just like hypnotism right?

293
00:22:11,423 --> 00:22:15,727
It's the people who are who are the least prone to hypnosis right?

294
00:22:15,727 --> 00:22:20,621
They're the true believers and that's not like the feature right?

295
00:22:20,621 --> 00:22:24,355
Like sorry that's the feature not the bug.

296
00:22:24,355 --> 00:22:28,968
It's the feature like I usually say it's not the bug it's not a bug it's a feature.

297
00:22:28,975 --> 00:22:29,975
Right.

298
00:22:29,975 --> 00:22:37,115
And then you get to Project 2025, which is a whole different kind of machine, not a
fundraising operation, but a blueprint for governance.

299
00:22:37,116 --> 00:22:40,336
And the Heritage Foundation launched it formally in 2022.

300
00:22:40,337 --> 00:22:50,577
Kevin Roberts, Paul Dans, Russell Vaught, $22 million to build a 900-page manual for
dismantling the entire federal government and replacing career civil servants with

301
00:22:50,577 --> 00:22:52,021
political loyalists.

302
00:22:52,443 --> 00:22:59,783
By this point, if you don't know what Project 2025 is, you need to listen to some of our
previous podcasts, specifically the one about Russ Vought.

303
00:22:59,784 --> 00:23:07,164
Russ Vought specifically because Vought is the through line that I don't think enough
people have actually tracked here, right?

304
00:23:07,164 --> 00:23:19,444
He ran the Center for Renewing America, which took almost four and a half million dollars
in donations between 2021 and 2023, specifically to develop the Project 2025 policy

305
00:23:19,444 --> 00:23:20,231
framework.

306
00:23:20,231 --> 00:23:28,356
And then in January of 2025, of course, like we all know, he becomes the director of the
Office of Management and Budget.

307
00:23:28,356 --> 00:23:34,999
He is now implementing from inside the executive branch, the blueprint that he was paid to
write from outside of it.

308
00:23:35,000 --> 00:23:41,569
which is not just a revolving door, our favorite revolving door uh system here, it's
actually a planned deployment.

309
00:23:41,952 --> 00:23:43,652
And that's exactly what it is, right?

310
00:23:43,652 --> 00:23:57,272
The mechanism they built, Schedule F, this is the executive order that allows the
administrative to reclassify federal workers in policy influencing positions as at-will

311
00:23:57,272 --> 00:24:03,552
employees, which sounds, you know, bureaucratic until you understand what it means in the
real world.

312
00:24:03,552 --> 00:24:11,072
It means that on January 20th, 2025, the administration had every single piece in place.

313
00:24:11,093 --> 00:24:17,507
to begin mass firings across the DOJ, the FBI, the State Department, and dozens of other
agencies.

314
00:24:17,507 --> 00:24:22,606
Career professionals who had served across multiple administrations were gone overnight.

315
00:24:22,607 --> 00:24:25,560
And it bears noting that some of those people were Trump supporters.

316
00:24:25,892 --> 00:24:29,253
Some of those people were absolutely Trump supporters.

317
00:24:29,253 --> 00:24:33,935
And that's the part that should really land for you guys who are listening out there.

318
00:24:33,935 --> 00:24:37,796
The machine does not check your voter registration before it fires you.

319
00:24:37,796 --> 00:24:40,817
Schedule F does not have some sort of loyalty exemption.

320
00:24:40,817 --> 00:24:48,438
If you're a career civil servant in a policy influencing role, you are vulnerable
regardless of who you voted for.

321
00:24:48,438 --> 00:24:55,891
Regardless of how many rallies you attended, regardless of how many times you stormed the
Capitol, broke a window, and shit on Nancy Pelosi's desk.

322
00:24:55,891 --> 00:24:57,365
Which brings us to Elon Musk.

323
00:24:57,365 --> 00:25:05,302
And we should talk precisely here because I think the vagueness or imprecision about how
people talk about Doge actually obscures just how alarming it really is.

324
00:25:05,452 --> 00:25:06,298
Please.

325
00:25:06,299 --> 00:25:12,776
Elon Musk donated $277 million to Trump and the Republican causes in the 2024 election
cycle.

326
00:25:13,037 --> 00:25:14,238
That is not a typo.

327
00:25:14,238 --> 00:25:17,761
That is not a misstatement.

328
00:25:17,761 --> 00:25:18,722
$277 million.

329
00:25:18,722 --> 00:25:28,852
And in return, or alongside that, or as part of the same transaction, depending on how
cynical you want to be, he gets handed the reins of the newly formed Department of

330
00:25:28,852 --> 00:25:31,814
Government Efficiency, which is not a department at all.

331
00:25:32,063 --> 00:25:37,627
has no statutory authority, and has been given total access to federal payment systems and
personnel databases.

332
00:25:37,628 --> 00:25:46,946
And SpaceX, Musk's other company, has received over $15 billion with a B in federal
contracts.

333
00:25:47,067 --> 00:25:55,524
So the man cutting federal spending has 15 billion reasons to make sure certain federal
spending doesn't get cut.

334
00:25:55,525 --> 00:25:57,885
think the slogan is Mars or bust.

335
00:25:57,886 --> 00:26:07,326
But the cuts that did happen, that is the part that genuinely surprised me when I looked
at the numbers, the Doge operation by February 2025 had cut roughly $2 billion in federal

336
00:26:07,326 --> 00:26:08,826
contracts and grants.

337
00:26:09,106 --> 00:26:16,317
And a significant portion of those cuts landed in red state districts, as we said before,
rural hospitals, agricultural subsidies, VA services.

338
00:26:16,317 --> 00:26:25,963
And when those Republican members of Congress started pushing back out loud and on the
record because their constituents would not let their phones stop ringing as to why the

339
00:26:25,963 --> 00:26:29,276
hospital 30 miles away was suddenly losing federal funding.

340
00:26:29,276 --> 00:26:31,518
Yeah, suddenly they're guilty of ethics violations.

341
00:26:31,518 --> 00:26:33,620
The machine, as you said, doesn't have a loyalty setting.

342
00:26:33,620 --> 00:26:35,151
I think that was the right thing to point out.

343
00:26:35,151 --> 00:26:36,701
And it's structural.

344
00:26:36,701 --> 00:26:38,202
It's not accidental.

345
00:26:38,442 --> 00:26:47,306
When you build a system optimized for extraction, whether it's extracting money from
donors or compliance from government employees or political power from institutions, that

346
00:26:47,306 --> 00:26:50,387
system doesn't suddenly become nurturing when it turns on its own base.

347
00:26:50,387 --> 00:26:52,108
It does what it was built to do.

348
00:26:52,109 --> 00:26:58,855
And here is where the historical through line from segment one really becomes undeniable.

349
00:26:58,855 --> 00:27:08,092
We talked about how the post-Watergate reforms created the architecture that the money
eventually learned to route around, right?

350
00:27:08,092 --> 00:27:14,148
Citizens United in 2010 just blew the doors off of what was left of that architecture.

351
00:27:14,289 --> 00:27:17,666
And what Citizens United enabled, what anti-

352
00:27:17,666 --> 00:27:34,052
than he Kennedy's majority opinion explicitly protected was the flow of unlimited money
into political speech, which sounds mostly principled until you watch $250 million raised

353
00:27:34,052 --> 00:27:41,535
in the name of election integrity get entirely redirected into a political operation while
the donors thought they were funding lawsuits.

354
00:27:41,535 --> 00:27:46,415
Kennedy wrote that the appearance of corruption was not enough to justify restricting
speech.

355
00:27:46,416 --> 00:27:49,336
That actual quid pro quo corruption was the standard.

356
00:27:49,337 --> 00:27:55,917
And what we have watched since 2010 is a 15 year demonstration of exactly how much
extraction can happen below that standard.

357
00:27:55,918 --> 00:28:06,750
Yeah, I want to end on kind of Ronna McDaniel, Ronna McDaniel, because I think she's kind
of the case study that makes this personal in a way that the amounts and the dollars and

358
00:28:06,750 --> 00:28:09,373
all of that stuff doesn't actually make it personal.

359
00:28:09,720 --> 00:28:12,838
Okay, I didn't know we were going there, but let's talk about McDaniel.

360
00:28:12,857 --> 00:28:22,937
So, Ronna McDaniel spent years as the RNC chairwoman, building the Republican party
apparatus in direct service of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

361
00:28:23,117 --> 00:28:26,397
She defended him publicly through two impeachments.

362
00:28:26,397 --> 00:28:30,477
She redirected party resources toward his priorities.

363
00:28:30,597 --> 00:28:34,437
She was a loyal operator of this machine.

364
00:28:34,437 --> 00:28:38,857
And then in March of 2024, Trump's people decided she had to go.

365
00:28:38,917 --> 00:28:41,377
She was pushed out of the RNC chairmanship.

366
00:28:41,571 --> 00:28:53,757
Her replacement was Michael Watley and Lara Trump, Trump's daughter-in-law, you might
remember, who then redirected RNC's resources entirely toward Trump's legal defense fund.

367
00:28:53,758 --> 00:28:57,146
Which is a remarkable thing to do with a national party's infrastructure.

368
00:28:57,427 --> 00:29:00,509
And then NBC News hired her as a contributor.

369
00:29:00,590 --> 00:29:14,681
And within days, MAGA media figures, including voices at properties connected to NBC,
attacked her credibility so ferociously that NBC rescinded the contract before she had

370
00:29:14,681 --> 00:29:16,902
been seen on air one time.

371
00:29:17,123 --> 00:29:22,016
She built the machine and that machine ate her in less than a news cycle.

372
00:29:22,017 --> 00:29:28,104
There's something almost Shakespearean about it, except that Shakespeare at least gave his
tragic figures a little more time on stage.

373
00:29:28,105 --> 00:29:32,405
I think that's the dark humor and I'm kind of moving past it.

374
00:29:32,405 --> 00:29:39,525
Here's what I want to leave you with from this segment because this is the briefing that
really matters, right?

375
00:29:39,525 --> 00:29:49,325
The system we're describing, the fundraising infrastructure, the Schedule F, governance
blueprint, the Doge operation, the WinRed platform, these are not separate things.

376
00:29:49,525 --> 00:29:57,805
They are all pieces and cogs and components of a single machine that was built over 15
years.

377
00:29:57,913 --> 00:30:10,003
using the legal architecture that Citizens United provided, the donor energy that the Tea
Party movement generated, and the digital tools that Brad Parscale in the 2016 campaign

378
00:30:10,003 --> 00:30:11,524
really pioneered.

379
00:30:11,524 --> 00:30:21,543
And that machine is now running at full capacity inside the federal government with Vought
at the OMB with, I mean, no longer anymore, but Musk running Doge, which is now completely

380
00:30:21,543 --> 00:30:22,994
a defunct organization.

381
00:30:22,994 --> 00:30:26,218
But Cash Patel as well, still at the FBI.

382
00:30:26,218 --> 00:30:28,956
running into issues with his drinking problems lately.

383
00:30:28,957 --> 00:30:37,837
And Newmall, the aging boomers who funded it, voted for it and gave their $20 a week on
recurring donations are now watching their rural hospital lose funding.

384
00:30:38,197 --> 00:30:43,977
Their VA services get reviewed for cuts and their neighbor who worked at the FBI for 20
years gets walked out of the building.

385
00:30:44,345 --> 00:30:54,438
And those veterans who stood outside the Capitol in that cold January day, the small
donors who got enrolled in recurring charges they didn't ask for, the party officials who

386
00:30:54,438 --> 00:31:03,820
spent years building infrastructure and then got humiliated out of their jobs in a single
news cycle, they're all inside the same pattern.

387
00:31:03,820 --> 00:31:05,602
Which is the pattern we traced from the beginning, right?

388
00:31:05,602 --> 00:31:09,965
I mean, the machine was never built to protect, it was built to concentrate power.

389
00:31:10,346 --> 00:31:17,322
And just like the guillotine, once you concentrate that power in a war machine, it doesn't
ask who votes for it before it lands on you.

390
00:31:17,323 --> 00:31:18,804
And it really doesn't matter, right?

391
00:31:18,804 --> 00:31:23,007
If we build a hammer, hammer has one job.

392
00:31:23,007 --> 00:31:24,487
It's to hit a nail.

393
00:31:24,888 --> 00:31:28,430
So it doesn't matter if you're a blue nail or a red nail.

394
00:31:28,771 --> 00:31:31,112
It's meant to hit nails.

395
00:31:31,212 --> 00:31:37,477
So coming up now, we're going to talk about what it actually means for the people who are
figuring that out right now.

396
00:31:37,477 --> 00:31:41,999
The ones who F-A'd and now they're F-O'ing.

397
00:31:42,220 --> 00:31:46,252
So let's start with Enrique Tario.

398
00:31:46,253 --> 00:31:46,583
Right.

399
00:31:46,583 --> 00:31:55,185
We talked about him in the beginning because I think, I think his story is the one that
contains the most, I don't know what the right word is, compression, right?

400
00:31:55,185 --> 00:32:02,106
Everything we've been describing for the last two, 20 minutes or so live inside of what
happened to just him.

401
00:32:02,106 --> 00:32:03,130
Well, let's start there then.

402
00:32:03,130 --> 00:32:04,132
Who is he?

403
00:32:04,587 --> 00:32:09,130
So we talked about him earlier, but he is the national chairman of the Proud Boys.

404
00:32:09,130 --> 00:32:17,295
He built that organization, or at least the version of it that became the nationally
visible apparatus that is using the exact infrastructure we've talked about.

405
00:32:17,295 --> 00:32:27,351
The rallies, the social media algorithms and amplification, the MAGA aesthetic for
whatever that means, and the MAGA rhetoric in the sense that they were fighting on the

406
00:32:27,351 --> 00:32:28,434
edge of something like

407
00:32:28,434 --> 00:32:29,525
really big, right?

408
00:32:29,525 --> 00:32:32,728
Like some this historic movement that's finally going to take America back.

409
00:32:32,728 --> 00:32:34,060
And he believed that.

410
00:32:34,060 --> 00:32:37,133
I do think that he did believe that for everything in the record.

411
00:32:37,133 --> 00:32:43,309
It seems like he genuinely believed he was part of a movement that was going to change the
country.

412
00:32:43,310 --> 00:32:46,243
And for his part, he organized that movement around January 6th.

413
00:32:46,243 --> 00:32:47,223
He did.

414
00:32:47,543 --> 00:32:49,743
organized around January 6th.

415
00:32:49,743 --> 00:32:53,143
He wasn't physically inside the Capitol during the breach.

416
00:32:53,163 --> 00:33:03,643
But as the prosecution established, he was the central planner for everything that
happened, the coordination, the communications, the strategic intent.

417
00:33:03,783 --> 00:33:11,323
In United States versus Tarrio case number 21, CR 175, the US District Court for the
District of Columbia.

418
00:33:11,363 --> 00:33:15,991
In May of 2023, he was convicted of seditious conspiracy.

419
00:33:15,991 --> 00:33:20,191
And that was from a DOJ press release from September 5th of 2023.

420
00:33:20,192 --> 00:33:23,257
And seditious conspiracy is not a minor charge.

421
00:33:23,574 --> 00:33:28,794
No, it's the most serious charge that exists short of treason, right?

422
00:33:28,794 --> 00:33:30,994
Which is immediately punishable by death.

423
00:33:31,014 --> 00:33:41,314
And in September of 2023, he was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison, like we talked
about earlier, which was the longest sentence handed down.

424
00:33:41,394 --> 00:33:47,245
The second longest was 18, that Eric guy who, was his organization again?

425
00:33:47,245 --> 00:33:49,205
The other proud boys.

426
00:33:49,205 --> 00:33:51,485
I forget the name of that organization.

427
00:33:51,567 --> 00:33:54,667
Yeah, I'm sure they're proud to call themselves something.

428
00:33:55,147 --> 00:33:57,467
But let's sit with that 22 year number for a second.

429
00:33:57,467 --> 00:34:00,587
I mean, that's when we say 22 years, that sounds like, it's a verdict.

430
00:34:00,587 --> 00:34:02,027
It's a data point.

431
00:34:02,207 --> 00:34:07,867
We've been talking about it in terms of comparison with other sentences, but at the end of
the day, it's a human life.

432
00:34:08,267 --> 00:34:15,007
Um, you know, that is depending on how old when you go in, I mean, that's your forties,
your fifties, some of the prime years, maybe.

433
00:34:15,007 --> 00:34:18,883
Here's when your body changes and your parents pass on and your kids grow up and

434
00:34:18,883 --> 00:34:20,445
That's not an abstraction.

435
00:34:20,446 --> 00:34:31,039
Yeah, he went in believing he was really serving something, Like he thought he was a
Nelson Mandela type and that the movement had his back, that he was doing sanctioned,

436
00:34:31,039 --> 00:34:36,866
encouraged, celebrated by the people at the top of the apparatus he'd given years of his
life to building.

437
00:34:37,362 --> 00:34:38,568
And so what happened?

438
00:34:38,568 --> 00:34:41,033
Well, he sat in prison for over a year.

439
00:34:41,033 --> 00:34:47,276
And then in January 2025, when obviously Trump finally pardoned him, he was let go.

440
00:34:47,276 --> 00:34:50,358
Which sounds like a resolution until you think about what it actually means.

441
00:34:50,634 --> 00:34:52,466
Well, what does it mean to you?

442
00:34:52,844 --> 00:34:55,304
Well, it means that the pardon wasn't about Enrique Tario.

443
00:34:55,304 --> 00:34:58,430
It was about the movement's relationship with its own mythology.

444
00:34:58,671 --> 00:35:01,504
Trump pardoning the January 6th defendants is a political act.

445
00:35:01,504 --> 00:35:02,855
It's a message.

446
00:35:03,056 --> 00:35:04,958
It's infrastructure management.

447
00:35:05,139 --> 00:35:08,253
Tario was just useful on the way in and became useful again on the way out.

448
00:35:08,253 --> 00:35:11,767
But the 22 months he sat in a cell, those months don't get pardoned.

449
00:35:11,767 --> 00:35:13,118
Those are just gone.

450
00:35:13,119 --> 00:35:14,650
And the machine used him, right?

451
00:35:14,650 --> 00:35:15,410
Completely.

452
00:35:15,410 --> 00:35:21,352
And then the machine decided when he was done being used, he could just go.

453
00:35:21,353 --> 00:35:31,177
So Stuart Rhodes is the second person I want to talk about and his story sits kind of
right next to Tario's, but has a different texture to it because of who Rhodes was before

454
00:35:31,177 --> 00:35:32,167
all of this.

455
00:35:32,168 --> 00:35:33,272
All right, tell me.

456
00:35:33,560 --> 00:35:36,733
Stuart Rhodes was the oath keepers founder.

457
00:35:36,773 --> 00:35:42,436
And the oath keepers were not a fringe organization in the way sometimes people assume.

458
00:35:42,436 --> 00:35:52,782
They recruited specifically from the military veterans and law enforcement, active duty
retired people who had sworn an oath to the constitution and who Rhodes told over and over

459
00:35:52,782 --> 00:35:56,064
again that the oath didn't expire when the service did.

460
00:35:56,324 --> 00:36:02,057
And they had a continuing obligation and that the moment was coming when that obligation
would be called in.

461
00:36:02,058 --> 00:36:05,536
And he built some real numbers on that argument, a real membership.

462
00:36:05,536 --> 00:36:06,566
Yes, he did.

463
00:36:06,566 --> 00:36:12,691
A real membership, real infrastructure, real presence at events across the country for
years before January 6th.

464
00:36:12,752 --> 00:36:17,175
He organized a paramilitary presence at the Capitol on January 6th.

465
00:36:17,175 --> 00:36:20,919
The oath keepers were there in a coordinated, structured way.

466
00:36:20,919 --> 00:36:21,189
Right.

467
00:36:21,189 --> 00:36:22,239
This wasn't spontaneous.

468
00:36:22,239 --> 00:36:24,022
This wasn't a bunch of people hopping on a plane.

469
00:36:24,022 --> 00:36:31,469
That case, that was the United States versus Rhodes, which is case number 22, CR 15 for
the legal weirdo heads.

470
00:36:31,469 --> 00:36:33,966
He was convicted of seditious conspiracy.

471
00:36:33,966 --> 00:36:39,113
in November of 2022 and sentenced to 18 years in federal prison in May of 2023.

472
00:36:39,113 --> 00:36:42,913
And these are the men who spent years being told they were the tip of the spear.

473
00:36:42,914 --> 00:36:45,808
Which is exactly the language that the movement used, right?

474
00:36:45,808 --> 00:36:48,411
The tip of the spear, the last line of defense.

475
00:36:48,411 --> 00:36:53,056
The people who understood what was actually at stake while everyone else was asleep.

476
00:36:53,057 --> 00:36:58,127
And the people who used that language and built their rallies and ran the email lists and
collected donations?

477
00:36:58,229 --> 00:37:00,552
Where were they when the sentences came down?

478
00:37:00,719 --> 00:37:02,242
Well, they were running for office.

479
00:37:02,243 --> 00:37:03,878
They were launching podcasts.

480
00:37:03,878 --> 00:37:05,681
They were signing book deals.

481
00:37:05,682 --> 00:37:11,237
I keep thinking about the specific quality of that kind of betrayal, because it's not like
these guys weren't warned, right?

482
00:37:11,237 --> 00:37:13,158
The legal exposure was visible.

483
00:37:13,158 --> 00:37:14,175
The risk was real.

484
00:37:14,175 --> 00:37:15,700
It was documented.

485
00:37:15,900 --> 00:37:22,165
But the movement they had served spent years training them to distrust exactly the
institutions that would have told them to stop.

486
00:37:22,226 --> 00:37:25,308
The courts, the press, the legal system.

487
00:37:25,308 --> 00:37:29,551
The professional class that might have said this is going in badly for you specifically.

488
00:37:29,936 --> 00:37:35,395
Yes, but they were epistemically sealed inside of the apparatus, right?

489
00:37:35,395 --> 00:37:40,101
And the apparatus didn't protect them when the consequences actually arose.

490
00:37:40,102 --> 00:37:42,886
But eventually Trump pardoned Rhodes too, right?

491
00:37:42,886 --> 00:37:44,332
January 2025?

492
00:37:44,335 --> 00:37:44,916
Yeah, he did.

493
00:37:44,916 --> 00:37:51,238
And I want to be careful here because I don't think that the pardon is really meaningless,
right?

494
00:37:51,238 --> 00:37:53,319
And it mattered to those men, right?

495
00:37:53,319 --> 00:38:02,301
But the pardon came after the years, after the sentencing, after that time was actually
served, the machine decided the timeline, not them.

496
00:38:02,302 --> 00:38:08,714
The third story I want to tell is uh kind of different in kind because Ronna McDaniel
didn't actually go to prison, right?

497
00:38:08,714 --> 00:38:10,464
She was a storm building.

498
00:38:10,644 --> 00:38:13,974
She was by most measures one of the most powerful women in the Republican Party.

499
00:38:13,974 --> 00:38:15,841
We talked about her earlier.

500
00:38:15,841 --> 00:38:17,568
This is the one who got pushed out, right?

501
00:38:17,568 --> 00:38:25,911
Yeah, Trump just decided he wanted different leadership at the RNC and that leadership
just redirected those party resources like we talked about earlier directly to his

502
00:38:25,911 --> 00:38:28,255
campaign and the whole Lara Trump thing.

503
00:38:28,255 --> 00:38:30,971
And she was left unwelcome pretty much everywhere,

504
00:38:31,209 --> 00:38:39,962
Yeah, the movement basically just made her toxic to the mainstream institutions that might
have taken her in, you know, like a CEO ship at some other organization.

505
00:38:39,962 --> 00:38:42,875
Because the movement itself had already kind of discarded her.

506
00:38:42,875 --> 00:38:44,989
She really didn't have ground to stand on anywhere.

507
00:38:44,989 --> 00:38:50,171
That's a different kind of cost than 22 years in a federal prison, but I don't think it's
a smaller kind of cost.

508
00:38:50,171 --> 00:38:56,111
I if you think about it, it's what it shows is that the machine doesn't distinguish
between you and the people you intend to target with it.

509
00:38:56,111 --> 00:38:59,994
You know, the ones who carry the guns versus those who carry the briefcases.

510
00:39:00,055 --> 00:39:02,417
When the machine is done with you, it's done with you, right?

511
00:39:02,417 --> 00:39:04,099
It leaves the same thing behind.

512
00:39:04,099 --> 00:39:08,174
A person where there was a person once, sort of a shell of a person left.

513
00:39:08,174 --> 00:39:12,676
Yeah, she gave she gave seven years to an apparatus that was never going to protect her.

514
00:39:12,736 --> 00:39:23,180
She gave Rhodes, sorry, of the the Oath Keepers gave decades of his life to a militia that
the movement celebrated and then watched get prosecuted without meaningful intervention

515
00:39:23,180 --> 00:39:27,003
until it was politically useful for for the intervention.

516
00:39:27,003 --> 00:39:34,596
And then Tario organized, you know, a historic event that the people who encouraged it
spent the next three years saying.

517
00:39:34,596 --> 00:39:35,770
they had nothing to do with it.

518
00:39:35,770 --> 00:39:36,852
They tried to stop it.

519
00:39:36,852 --> 00:39:39,667
They weren't encouraging violence, yada, yada, yada.

520
00:39:39,668 --> 00:39:44,748
Yeah, I think what I want the listener to hold on to here is that these three people are
not the same.

521
00:39:45,048 --> 00:39:46,828
Their choices are not equivalent.

522
00:39:47,228 --> 00:39:52,708
The legal and moral weight of what Tario and Rhodes did is genuinely different from what
McDaniel did.

523
00:39:53,068 --> 00:39:58,569
I'm not going to collapse that into one thing, But the pattern that consumed them is
identical.

524
00:39:58,629 --> 00:40:02,609
The same machine made promises of belonging and protection and purpose.

525
00:40:02,769 --> 00:40:05,869
And when the cost came due, the machine was somewhere else entirely.

526
00:40:05,870 --> 00:40:09,615
The specific weight of specific lives, right?

527
00:40:09,615 --> 00:40:12,598
That's kind of what we said we were gonna talk about.

528
00:40:12,598 --> 00:40:17,544
And I think these three lives, the chairman, the founder, the party official, I think they
kind of hold it.

529
00:40:17,544 --> 00:40:18,525
Not all of it, right?

530
00:40:18,525 --> 00:40:23,000
But enough that you can feel what the shape of this actually is.

531
00:40:23,227 --> 00:40:24,877
You can definitely feel it.

532
00:40:25,348 --> 00:40:26,639
So here's where we are.

533
00:40:26,639 --> 00:40:31,113
You've spent, I don't know, 30, 40 minutes with us inside of this architecture, this
thing.

534
00:40:31,113 --> 00:40:32,084
We know who built it.

535
00:40:32,084 --> 00:40:34,186
We know who it consumed.

536
00:40:34,186 --> 00:40:36,638
You know that the consumption wasn't a bug.

537
00:40:36,638 --> 00:40:38,210
It was kind of the design.

538
00:40:38,210 --> 00:40:40,812
The machine was never built to protect the people who operated it.

539
00:40:40,812 --> 00:40:43,935
It was built to generate political energy.

540
00:40:43,935 --> 00:40:47,919
And when the energy is no longer useful, the people who generated it became expendable.

541
00:40:47,919 --> 00:40:49,300
That's not a theory.

542
00:40:49,300 --> 00:40:51,153
That's what happened to Ron McDaniel.

543
00:40:51,153 --> 00:40:52,627
That's what happened to Stuart Rhodes.

544
00:40:52,627 --> 00:40:54,422
That's what happened with Enrique Tario.

545
00:40:54,422 --> 00:40:57,330
Three very different people with very different moral ledgers.

546
00:40:57,330 --> 00:40:59,547
And the machine left all three of them in the same place.

547
00:40:59,547 --> 00:41:03,690
And I think the synthesis before we get to what you actually do with this is pretty
simple.

548
00:41:04,110 --> 00:41:07,492
Authoritarian adjacent political movements don't protect their own.

549
00:41:07,673 --> 00:41:09,114
They protect the brand.

550
00:41:09,114 --> 00:41:14,957
And when protecting the brand requires sacrificing the people who built it, that sacrifice
happens without ceremony.

551
00:41:15,358 --> 00:41:18,420
The lesson for anyone still inside that machine is pretty clear.

552
00:41:18,440 --> 00:41:25,826
But the lesson for the rest of us, for the people who are watching this from the outside
and trying to figure out what they're supposed to do, that lesson is a little different.

553
00:41:25,826 --> 00:41:28,287
And that's the one I want to spend the last few minutes on.

554
00:41:28,507 --> 00:41:28,977
Yeah.

555
00:41:28,977 --> 00:41:33,841
So here's, here's what we want to talk about first of what you can actually do.

556
00:41:33,841 --> 00:41:39,319
Now I'm not going to pretend for a second that this is going to be quick or easy.

557
00:41:39,319 --> 00:41:43,626
but what we do see is that this machine is eating itself.

558
00:41:43,626 --> 00:41:52,834
We see the, the exits recently in, different offices, we see, articles of impeachment
filed against the department of war.

559
00:41:52,852 --> 00:41:53,672
Secretary.

560
00:41:53,672 --> 00:41:54,452
So it's sorry.

561
00:41:54,452 --> 00:41:55,624
It's still hard for me to say.

562
00:41:55,624 --> 00:41:59,255
We see, you know, Patel is now kind of falling apart.

563
00:41:59,255 --> 00:42:00,826
He's gotten rid of Bondi.

564
00:42:00,826 --> 00:42:02,906
The labor secretary resigned.

565
00:42:02,906 --> 00:42:06,167
I mean, it's we're watching this machine eat itself.

566
00:42:06,167 --> 00:42:07,087
Right.

567
00:42:07,307 --> 00:42:11,771
But there are some things that you can actually do.

568
00:42:11,771 --> 00:42:17,984
So one of the first things I would do is I'd go to the States United Democracy Center at
States United.org.

569
00:42:17,984 --> 00:42:18,724
Right.

570
00:42:18,920 --> 00:42:24,611
And so what they do is they track the kind of institutional capture that we've been
describing, right?

571
00:42:24,611 --> 00:42:34,114
The places where the machinery of elections and governance is being kind of colonized
quietly by people who've made very clear what they want to do with it.

572
00:42:34,174 --> 00:42:37,115
They produce actual research, right?

573
00:42:37,115 --> 00:42:44,096
They file actual legal challenges and they have a tool on their site that lets you see
what's happening in your specific state.

574
00:42:44,096 --> 00:42:46,491
That's where I'd start because it kind of grounds you.

575
00:42:46,491 --> 00:42:50,163
in what's going on around you, not just at the big level, like, what do I do?

576
00:42:50,163 --> 00:42:50,744
What do I do?

577
00:42:50,744 --> 00:42:53,225
But somewhere that you can see it for yourself.

578
00:42:53,225 --> 00:42:59,420
It takes this sort of abstract thing that we've been describing and puts it on a map with
your county and your state and your city.

579
00:42:59,420 --> 00:43:04,524
And I keep coming back to the work being done at the Protect Democracy project at
ProtectDemocracy.org.

580
00:43:04,524 --> 00:43:12,449
They're specifically focused on the structural vulnerabilities that allow what we've been
describing to happen, which is basically, know, like they're, they're, that's what the war

581
00:43:12,449 --> 00:43:13,429
machine is looking for, right?

582
00:43:13,429 --> 00:43:22,965
That's being targeted at those vulnerabilities and places like ProtectDemocracy.org are
going to like, they're, basically finding those holes and they're protecting people from

583
00:43:22,965 --> 00:43:24,695
those vulnerabilities.

584
00:43:24,716 --> 00:43:26,078
They're not a protest organization.

585
00:43:26,078 --> 00:43:27,837
They're not asking for people to march.

586
00:43:27,989 --> 00:43:33,431
They're doing the slower, less visible work of building legal scaffolding that makes the
next chapter harder.

587
00:43:33,572 --> 00:43:35,592
The next attempt harder, I should say.

588
00:43:35,812 --> 00:43:38,881
And that work is genuinely underfunded relative to how important it is.

589
00:43:38,881 --> 00:43:46,577
If you have $20 a month and you want it to go somewhere that actually creates durable
change and that betters our democracy, that's where I'd put it.

590
00:43:46,798 --> 00:43:51,211
And you will have to make sure to check that checkbox for the recurring donations.

591
00:43:51,212 --> 00:43:58,128
For the people like me who actually want to be doing something with their hands, something
that feels a little bit more immediate, we're obviously going to point to Indivisible.

592
00:43:58,128 --> 00:43:59,700
You can go to indivisible.org.

593
00:43:59,700 --> 00:44:06,927
I know that name is familiar to a lot of you who got activated in 2017 and then kind of
drifted away from it.

594
00:44:06,927 --> 00:44:13,943
I'd ask you to go back because what Indivisible does well is exactly what I think about
when I think about systems pressure, right?

595
00:44:13,943 --> 00:44:17,746
They built a model for constituent contact that actually works.

596
00:44:17,746 --> 00:44:26,914
Not the kind where you just like sort of sign the petition and it just goes away and to
avoid somewhere, but the kind where you show up to a district office with 12 other people

597
00:44:26,974 --> 00:44:32,229
and a specific ask with your name on a sign in sheet and that leaves a mark, right?

598
00:44:32,229 --> 00:44:34,961
That gets logged, that change.

599
00:44:35,301 --> 00:44:42,206
sort of changes the calculus for a staffer who's deciding what to put in the weekly
briefing for a member of Congress, right?

600
00:44:42,206 --> 00:44:52,934
A phone call or 12 might not make it, but 12 people showing up and saying, we're here
about this issue is really gonna push that needle a little bit further.

601
00:44:52,934 --> 00:45:00,491
And over the long term, on the years long commitment rather than the this week or today
activities, I want to name something that doesn't get talked about in these conversations

602
00:45:00,491 --> 00:45:04,714
very much, which is the Election Reformers Network at electionreformers.org.

603
00:45:04,994 --> 00:45:09,457
They're focused on the administrative layer of elections, basically the non-glamorous
part, right?

604
00:45:09,457 --> 00:45:12,781
The poll workers, the election administrators, the canvassing boards.

605
00:45:12,781 --> 00:45:18,964
Those are the positions that the movement we've been describing has been quietly targeting
for these last three election cycles.

606
00:45:18,965 --> 00:45:22,905
Filling those positions with people who believe in the process is not exciting work.

607
00:45:22,905 --> 00:45:24,105
It doesn't trend.

608
00:45:24,105 --> 00:45:26,285
You're not going to see it pop up on social media.

609
00:45:26,385 --> 00:45:32,865
But I would argue it's one of the single most important structural things that a motivated
citizen can do between now and the next federal election.

610
00:45:32,881 --> 00:45:33,401
Absolutely.

611
00:45:33,401 --> 00:45:46,937
And these are the people that our current administration is specifically targeting when
they ask for voter registration records from a statewide election for federal purposes.

612
00:45:46,937 --> 00:45:49,678
But here's the thing I do want to be honest about.

613
00:45:49,678 --> 00:45:53,079
None of these organizations are going to save anything by themselves.

614
00:45:53,079 --> 00:45:59,243
None of us listening to this podcast or doing this podcast are going to do anything by
ourselves.

615
00:45:59,669 --> 00:46:03,143
What they need from you and what we need from you is not your money, right?

616
00:46:03,143 --> 00:46:11,834
It's your time and it's your willingness to be a node in a network that applies consistent
pressure over a long period of time.

617
00:46:11,834 --> 00:46:14,317
The machine we've been describing was built over decades, right?

618
00:46:14,317 --> 00:46:16,369
You're not gonna dismantle it in a news cycle.

619
00:46:16,369 --> 00:46:19,414
You're not gonna dismantle it in a presidential term.

620
00:46:19,414 --> 00:46:27,342
Right, because the people that got crushed by this machine we've been talking about got
consumed in the first place because they believed they were belonging to something

621
00:46:27,342 --> 00:46:30,444
powerful and they were going be protected by something powerful.

622
00:46:30,625 --> 00:46:37,842
And the people who are going to stop the next version of this machine, which is being
built as we speak, we don't know necessarily where or by whom, but the next version is

623
00:46:37,842 --> 00:46:41,334
going to be stopped by people who understand that protection has to be mutual.

624
00:46:41,434 --> 00:46:43,537
You build it together, it doesn't hold.

625
00:46:43,923 --> 00:46:47,403
And that's the actual lesson of most of these podcasts, right?

626
00:46:47,403 --> 00:46:49,323
Not that the machine turns on its own.

627
00:46:49,323 --> 00:46:49,943
We know that.

628
00:46:49,943 --> 00:46:51,283
We've seen it happen, right?

629
00:46:51,283 --> 00:46:55,983
The lesson is that the alternative to a machine is a community.

630
00:46:56,023 --> 00:47:01,143
And communities are built one person at a time with accountability running in every
direction.

631
00:47:01,144 --> 00:47:06,283
which is harder than building a machine, but also the only thing that's ever actually
worked in the long term.

632
00:47:06,284 --> 00:47:15,262
All right, so before we get out of here, uh we start talking about the things that kind of
surprised us from our research and our findings in our episodes.

633
00:47:15,262 --> 00:47:22,348
So I want to say the thing that actually kind of got under my skin this week, and it's not
the big stuff, right?

634
00:47:22,348 --> 00:47:24,953
It's the win-read number.

635
00:47:24,953 --> 00:47:30,815
$122 million in refunds to elderly and low-income Trump donors, right?

636
00:47:30,815 --> 00:47:32,656
People who gave what they had.

637
00:47:32,742 --> 00:47:36,715
and the platform had pre-checked a box that said, keep taking it.

638
00:47:36,956 --> 00:47:44,422
And then when they tried to get their money back, they actually had to go to court to
fight for it and go to the FTC and say, hey, look, this is illegal.

639
00:47:44,422 --> 00:47:46,024
It violates the law.

640
00:47:46,024 --> 00:47:48,147
The machine and the machine didn't care, right?

641
00:47:48,147 --> 00:47:49,618
They didn't care who built it.

642
00:47:49,618 --> 00:47:51,659
They just process transactions, right?

643
00:47:51,659 --> 00:47:55,113
That's the part I really was, I guess, angry about.

644
00:47:55,113 --> 00:47:57,875
What really grinds my gears?

645
00:47:57,955 --> 00:47:59,256
But, uh

646
00:47:59,454 --> 00:47:59,905
Yeah.

647
00:47:59,905 --> 00:48:02,299
So that was from me or these weren't enemies, right?

648
00:48:02,299 --> 00:48:05,925
These were the movement and the platform just ate them anyway.

649
00:48:05,926 --> 00:48:12,772
I think my standout from this week was Ronna McDaniel, not because I have any particular
sympathy for her, but because the timeline is almost surgical.

650
00:48:12,772 --> 00:48:15,213
And she spent years building the apparatus.

651
00:48:15,274 --> 00:48:18,396
She absorbed every humiliation the principal required of her.

652
00:48:18,416 --> 00:48:21,478
She was publicly loyal past any reasonable threshold.

653
00:48:21,579 --> 00:48:31,526
And then within 72 hours, like three days of NBC announcing her hire, the people she
protected in her career and collected like a debt and then...

654
00:48:31,906 --> 00:48:33,267
And then they just spit her out.

655
00:48:33,267 --> 00:48:34,868
They chewed her up and spit her out.

656
00:48:34,868 --> 00:48:37,790
They did not honor the contract, the real contract.

657
00:48:38,091 --> 00:48:41,333
But I guess the contract was always you serve the machine and the machine serves itself.

658
00:48:41,333 --> 00:48:45,405
And so she signed off on that contract, but I just don't think she read the fine print.

659
00:48:45,406 --> 00:48:47,917
Yep, that is absolutely true.

660
00:48:47,918 --> 00:48:50,239
Don't forget, you can find us at fof.foundation.

661
00:48:50,239 --> 00:48:52,539
You can subscribe on Castapod.

662
00:48:52,539 --> 00:48:56,490
That's the platform that runs our website, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

663
00:48:56,490 --> 00:48:58,481
You can leave a review if you're so inclined.

664
00:48:58,481 --> 00:49:00,101
Pretty please, five stars.

665
00:49:00,101 --> 00:49:01,402
It does more than you think it does.

666
00:49:01,402 --> 00:49:04,342
It brings our podcast to more people.

667
00:49:04,563 --> 00:49:07,003
And then I'll say this and I'll let Will close this out.

668
00:49:07,003 --> 00:49:13,075
So Steve Bannon raised $25 million to build a wall that didn't get built.

669
00:49:13,076 --> 00:49:20,716
He got pardoned for defrauding the people who gave him the money and is currently
broadcasting daily from what appears to be a boat.

670
00:49:20,717 --> 00:49:22,917
This machine is not a meritocracy.

671
00:49:22,917 --> 00:49:25,417
It's not even a particularly good racket.

672
00:49:25,417 --> 00:49:30,697
It's just very loud and it's been running longer than most people have been paying
attention to it.

673
00:49:30,697 --> 00:49:32,117
So pay attention.

674
00:49:32,117 --> 00:49:35,608
Maybe don't give anybody a $25 million for a wall.

675
00:49:35,608 --> 00:49:40,248
And maybe check that the machine you're building, well first of all, don't build any
machines.

676
00:49:40,488 --> 00:49:50,208
Read the fine print and all, well, yeah, not war machines that turn on your own country,
preferably, but yeah, if you're building a machine, read the contracts, read the fine

677
00:49:50,208 --> 00:49:58,228
print, stay out of the way, make sure it's not gonna get turned around and pointed at you
one day because, I mean, that's really not what democracy's about.

678
00:49:58,228 --> 00:50:01,988
And I hope that if you got nothing else out of this episode, you got that out of it.

679
00:50:02,308 --> 00:50:03,648
Until next time.

680
00:50:03,649 --> 00:50:04,896
Yeah, that's it.

681
00:50:04,896 --> 00:50:06,681
That's the overlap.

682
00:50:06,855 --> 00:50:07,646
Bye!