1 00:00:00,501 --> 00:00:05,242 Melissa Hortman led the House Democratic Caucus in Minnesota. 2 00:00:05,462 --> 00:00:18,605 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. 3 00:00:18,606 --> 00:00:25,227 On June 14, 2025, a man named Vance Luther Belter put on a police uniform. 4 00:00:25,267 --> 00:00:28,938 He got himself a fake badge, drove to her home. 5 00:00:29,241 --> 00:00:36,684 He knocked on her door the way a cop knocks on your door, with the implied authority of the state behind his fist. 6 00:00:36,725 --> 00:00:38,025 And he shot her. 7 00:00:38,466 --> 00:00:40,486 He then shot her husband Mark. 8 00:00:40,487 --> 00:00:42,528 They both died in their home. 9 00:00:42,529 --> 00:00:48,331 That same night, he shot state Senator John Hoffman and his wife, and they survived. 10 00:00:48,332 --> 00:00:53,534 When investigators searched Balter's car, they found a list, nearly seventy names. 11 00:00:53,674 --> 00:00:57,176 Democratic lawmakers, abortion providers, 12 00:00:57,316 --> 00:01:01,239 People he'd researched, people he'd planned for. 13 00:01:01,500 --> 00:01:03,442 Here's the thing about that list. 14 00:01:03,442 --> 00:01:05,243 It wasn't a fantasy. 15 00:01:05,324 --> 00:01:07,446 It was a logistics document. 16 00:01:07,446 --> 00:01:12,990 He had names, he had addresses, and he had a uniform that let him walk right up. 17 00:01:13,171 --> 00:01:16,134 He had done the work, he had driven the routes. 18 00:01:16,134 --> 00:01:18,355 This was operational. 19 00:01:18,536 --> 00:01:23,160 And I want to be clear about what kind of moment this is. 20 00:01:23,202 --> 00:01:30,177 The US Capitol Police investigated nearly fifteen thousand threats in twenty twenty five. 21 00:01:30,258 --> 00:01:33,520 That's a sixty percent jump in one year. 22 00:01:33,760 --> 00:01:45,129 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 23 00:01:45,129 --> 00:01:46,790 mansion on fire. 24 00:01:46,931 --> 00:01:52,735 Didn't vandalize it, set it on fire while the governor's children were inside. 25 00:01:53,166 --> 00:01:55,801 So the people who run this country are scared. 26 00:01:55,983 --> 00:01:57,204 Genuinely. 27 00:01:57,406 --> 00:01:58,949 Materially scared. 28 00:01:58,949 --> 00:02:02,035 And I'm not going to pretend that fear isn't real. 29 00:02:02,286 --> 00:02:05,340 But here's what keeps coming back up. 30 00:02:05,502 --> 00:02:10,710 When the powerful get scared, they don't build a moat around all of us. 31 00:02:10,992 --> 00:02:12,374 They build it around themselves. 32 00:02:28,118 --> 00:02:29,128 Welcome to the Overlap. 33 00:02:29,128 --> 00:02:34,570 This is the show about systems of power, labor, and American injustice. 34 00:02:34,570 --> 00:02:40,151 The places where those three things rub up against each other until something catches fire. 35 00:02:40,151 --> 00:02:40,911 I'm Joshua. 36 00:02:40,911 --> 00:02:42,391 Thank you for being here. 37 00:02:42,512 --> 00:02:51,534 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. 38 00:02:51,534 --> 00:02:53,994 Will, I hope you've eaten an actual meal today. 39 00:02:53,994 --> 00:02:55,975 Save some energy for the fact check. 40 00:02:55,975 --> 00:02:56,765 Okay. 41 00:02:56,908 --> 00:03:04,271 I want to talk about a moat, not a metaphorical one, or not only a metaphorical one. 42 00:03:04,692 --> 00:03:09,954 I want to talk about the actual physical fortification of the White House. 43 00:03:10,395 --> 00:03:19,959 The fences, the bunkers, the ballroom that turns out to be a shed sitting on top of an entire military industrial complex. 44 00:03:20,080 --> 00:03:25,082 The closed parks, the snipers who can see a thousand yards in every direction. 45 00:03:25,083 --> 00:03:26,603 And here's why now. 46 00:03:26,639 --> 00:03:28,200 Here's why this week. 47 00:03:28,200 --> 00:03:32,183 Here's why the first week of june twenty twenty six. 48 00:03:32,184 --> 00:03:41,170 Because as of late May, workers were laying the foundation for a ninety thousand square foot ballroom, where the East Wing used to be. 49 00:03:41,211 --> 00:03:48,897 They demolished the East Wing in October, you might remember that, demolished a bunker that had stood since nineteen forty two. 50 00:03:48,897 --> 00:03:56,092 This was the one Franklin Roosevelt built after Pearl Harbor, the one that sheltered Dick Cheney on september eleventh. 51 00:03:56,343 --> 00:03:57,483 To make room. 52 00:03:57,824 --> 00:04:05,249 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. 53 00:04:05,249 --> 00:04:08,751 The White House is the new green zone. 54 00:04:08,752 --> 00:04:10,112 The green zone. 55 00:04:10,333 --> 00:04:15,616 Like in Baghdad, you might not be familiar with green zones. 56 00:04:15,657 --> 00:04:18,238 They have blast walls and they have checkpoints. 57 00:04:18,238 --> 00:04:24,212 The occupying power walls itself off from the people it claims to govern. 58 00:04:24,213 --> 00:04:25,564 That's the comparison. 59 00:04:25,564 --> 00:04:33,549 American journalists looking at the seat of American power and they reach for Baghdad, Iraq. 60 00:04:33,990 --> 00:04:35,851 So here's the thing I want to do today. 61 00:04:35,851 --> 00:04:41,074 I want to take the history seriously because this didn't start in twenty twenty five. 62 00:04:41,335 --> 00:04:47,078 It didn't start in twenty twenty four or in twenty sixteen. 63 00:04:47,329 --> 00:04:49,200 It started with Roosevelt. 64 00:04:49,201 --> 00:04:56,745 It accelerated under Obama, believe it or not, and became a performance under Trump in twenty twenty. 65 00:04:56,996 --> 00:05:00,137 And I want to take the the present seriously, right? 66 00:05:00,137 --> 00:05:07,361 The dollars, the lawsuits, the judge who said stop, and the appeals court that said, no, just keep going. 67 00:05:07,362 --> 00:05:14,295 Because both things are true at once, like our White House press secretary likes to say. 68 00:05:14,373 --> 00:05:16,133 The threat is real. 69 00:05:16,154 --> 00:05:18,054 Melissa Hortman is dead. 70 00:05:18,054 --> 00:05:19,255 That's real. 71 00:05:19,256 --> 00:05:28,319 And the response that the moat, the wall, the underground complex, the bunker is not about protecting democracy. 72 00:05:28,600 --> 00:05:32,641 It's about protecting a person from people. 73 00:05:32,921 --> 00:05:36,562 And these are very different projects, right? 74 00:05:36,703 --> 00:05:38,853 Those are very, very different projects. 75 00:05:38,853 --> 00:05:40,064 Let's get into it. 76 00:05:40,344 --> 00:05:43,285 I want to take you back to nineteen forty two. 77 00:05:43,485 --> 00:05:45,886 The United States had just entered World War II. 78 00:05:45,886 --> 00:05:47,967 Pearl Harbor was December. 79 00:05:48,288 --> 00:05:51,269 The country is genuinely afraid. 80 00:05:51,270 --> 00:05:56,033 Afraid in a way that's for once proportionate to the actual threat. 81 00:05:56,033 --> 00:05:57,574 There are real enemies. 82 00:05:57,574 --> 00:05:59,634 There are real bombers. 83 00:05:59,795 --> 00:06:02,616 The fear has a return address. 84 00:06:02,867 --> 00:06:07,880 And Franklin Roosevelt's administration starts digging under the east wing of the White House. 85 00:06:07,880 --> 00:06:09,621 They built a bomb shelter. 86 00:06:09,935 --> 00:06:19,958 Reinforced concrete, secure communications, a place where basically the president could just keep on governing if bombs fell on Washington. 87 00:06:20,138 --> 00:06:31,021 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. 88 00:06:31,022 --> 00:06:36,874 It gets a name eventually the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the POC. 89 00:06:36,875 --> 00:06:43,567 You've probably heard it without knowing the acronym, because it's where they took Dick Cheney on september eleventh, two thousand one. 90 00:06:43,867 --> 00:06:53,520 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 91 00:06:53,520 --> 00:06:59,952 dead for fifty six years, watching the f towers fall on a screen like most of us were. 92 00:07:00,372 --> 00:07:04,853 And the continuity of government, the idea that the Republic 93 00:07:04,979 --> 00:07:10,553 A form of democracy keeps running, was supposed to live down there. 94 00:07:10,974 --> 00:07:12,735 That's what the room was built for. 95 00:07:12,735 --> 00:07:18,681 Now, think of the logic of 1942 for a second, because the logic actually holds up. 96 00:07:18,681 --> 00:07:28,068 There's a war, there's an external enemy, you build one secure room so that the constitutional order survives a decapitation strike. 97 00:07:28,429 --> 00:07:32,392 That's honestly, I mean, that's that's a defensible thing. 98 00:07:32,575 --> 00:07:41,826 For a country to do, you protect the institution so that the institution outlives the person, the man in this scenario. 99 00:07:41,826 --> 00:07:45,540 Well, if it's a president in every scenario, it's been a man. 100 00:07:45,791 --> 00:07:48,273 The institution outlives the man. 101 00:07:48,273 --> 00:07:50,475 Hold on to that, because we're gonna need it, right? 102 00:07:50,475 --> 00:07:55,739 Cause here's what happened to that nineteen forty two bunker. 103 00:07:55,919 --> 00:07:59,041 In October of twenty twenty five, they tore it down. 104 00:07:59,042 --> 00:08:03,305 The whole East Wing just demolished to build a ballroom. 105 00:08:03,306 --> 00:08:13,084 The thing Roosevelt built to keep our republic alive through bombs was knocked down to make room for a venue. 106 00:08:13,335 --> 00:08:19,108 Now that's a sentence I want you to like really absorb for a moment. 107 00:08:19,109 --> 00:08:30,677 The bunker built to preserve democratic governance through a world war demolished for a party room. 108 00:08:30,678 --> 00:08:32,079 But I'm getting ahead of myself. 109 00:08:32,079 --> 00:08:40,435 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. 110 00:08:40,826 --> 00:08:44,459 And Trump is a huge part of this story, but the digging, right? 111 00:08:44,459 --> 00:08:46,851 The secret digging, that is bipartisan. 112 00:08:46,851 --> 00:08:48,652 That is institutional. 113 00:08:48,653 --> 00:08:59,200 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. 114 00:08:59,601 --> 00:09:02,123 Now, what's the big dig? 115 00:09:02,604 --> 00:09:05,215 Officially, it's it's a utility upgrade, right? 116 00:09:05,215 --> 00:09:07,767 Routine maintenance, nothing to see here. 117 00:09:07,848 --> 00:09:09,809 Unofficially, the AP 118 00:09:10,004 --> 00:09:14,226 Takes a look and says, No, this is like way beyond a utility upgrade. 119 00:09:14,226 --> 00:09:19,838 We're talking about sprawling, multi-story underground structure near the West Wing. 120 00:09:19,938 --> 00:09:29,321 Truckload after truckload of concrete, steel beams, heavy structural work that doesn't have any obvious utility justification. 121 00:09:29,422 --> 00:09:30,592 And the scale of it, right? 122 00:09:30,592 --> 00:09:38,065 The footprint, the depth, the materials involved, none of it matched what the administration was actually describing it to be. 123 00:09:38,316 --> 00:09:40,957 And there's a detail in there that's easy to miss. 124 00:09:40,957 --> 00:09:44,337 The subcontractors, the guys like pouring the concrete. 125 00:09:44,398 --> 00:09:48,119 They were ordered by law not to talk to anyone. 126 00:09:48,119 --> 00:09:55,161 They were told to tape over the company information on their trucks, tape over the logos, make yourselves invisible. 127 00:09:55,161 --> 00:10:00,142 You are here, but officially you are not here, and the work you are doing does not exist. 128 00:10:00,143 --> 00:10:01,983 Tape over the logos. 129 00:10:01,984 --> 00:10:06,551 So you've got a secret underground facility being built at the seat of the company. 130 00:10:06,551 --> 00:10:17,894 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 131 00:10:17,894 --> 00:10:19,344 transparency. 132 00:10:19,544 --> 00:10:24,525 And look, I I have uh I have affection for President Obama. 133 00:10:24,525 --> 00:10:32,007 He is the first president that changed my mind to the political standing that I came from. 134 00:10:32,007 --> 00:10:36,488 The the i i it it began to open my views about. 135 00:10:36,727 --> 00:10:42,140 The Democratic Party as a whole, but but liberalism on the left side of the center. 136 00:10:42,621 --> 00:10:49,764 But he gave speeches about how sunlight is a good disinfectant, and he ordered them to tape over the logo. 137 00:10:50,015 --> 00:10:52,056 Did they tell us what it was? 138 00:10:52,057 --> 00:10:52,617 No. 139 00:10:52,617 --> 00:10:54,318 I mean they they said utilities, right? 140 00:10:54,318 --> 00:10:57,699 The AP says no, it's not really utilities. 141 00:10:57,950 --> 00:10:59,631 And we don't fully know. 142 00:10:59,631 --> 00:11:09,155 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. 143 00:11:09,155 --> 00:11:11,716 I mean there are I'm sure there have been people down there. 144 00:11:11,716 --> 00:11:18,555 There there's gotta be cleaners and and you know, toilet scrubbers and maintenance and engineering technicians who handle. 145 00:11:18,555 --> 00:11:20,215 you know, utility lines and things. 146 00:11:20,215 --> 00:11:24,796 But we have no idea what is actually down there. 147 00:11:24,797 --> 00:11:27,897 And I'm not telling you to do like a it's both sides thing. 148 00:11:27,897 --> 00:11:28,478 I'm not. 149 00:11:28,478 --> 00:11:39,500 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. 150 00:11:39,501 --> 00:11:40,942 It's an institutional one. 151 00:11:40,942 --> 00:11:46,403 The executive branch, the presidency, the seat of the presidency 152 00:11:46,530 --> 00:11:54,986 As a body, as an apparatus, has a permanent appetite for fortification, for protection, right? 153 00:11:54,986 --> 00:12:03,870 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. 154 00:12:04,011 --> 00:12:10,233 Under threat, the institution's first instinct is dig, pour concrete, go deeper. 155 00:12:10,574 --> 00:12:14,938 Now Obama did it quietly, with tape over the logos. 156 00:12:14,938 --> 00:12:21,060 You barely notice the project because it was presented as kind of boring and and the trucks were anonymous. 157 00:12:21,060 --> 00:12:24,091 It was just, you know, concrete truck after concrete truck. 158 00:12:24,572 --> 00:12:28,613 Trump now Trump does it like a carnival act. 159 00:12:28,613 --> 00:12:31,755 It's a show, and that's the real change here, right? 160 00:12:31,755 --> 00:12:34,875 That's the thing I want you to sort of track from here. 161 00:12:35,016 --> 00:12:38,537 Not from like no wall to wall. 162 00:12:38,537 --> 00:12:42,098 We've had walls, we've had bunkers since nineteen forty two. 163 00:12:42,159 --> 00:12:43,919 There've always been fences. 164 00:12:43,919 --> 00:12:52,257 There's always been barriers, always been layer after layer of security between you, just a normal person and the Oval Office. 165 00:12:52,508 --> 00:13:01,560 The shift is from security as like this quiet institutional necessity to security as a performance of power. 166 00:13:01,740 --> 00:13:09,361 From the thing you do because you have to, to the thing you do because you want everyone else to see you doing it. 167 00:13:09,702 --> 00:13:14,943 Because the wall itself sends a message, and the wall is the statement. 168 00:13:15,194 --> 00:13:22,055 And the cleanest example of that shift, the founding document really of security as performance is 169 00:13:22,328 --> 00:13:24,528 Is june first, twenty twenty. 170 00:13:24,929 --> 00:13:26,809 You remember December of twenty twenty? 171 00:13:27,060 --> 00:13:27,461 Yeah. 172 00:13:27,461 --> 00:13:39,414 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 173 00:13:39,414 --> 00:13:41,904 seen since the nineteen sixties. 174 00:13:41,905 --> 00:13:48,320 And in Washington, protesters had been gathering in Lafayette Square, which is the park. 175 00:13:48,320 --> 00:13:51,302 Directly in front of the White House if you've not been there. 176 00:13:51,502 --> 00:13:56,706 It sits on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue, like across from the North Portico. 177 00:13:56,706 --> 00:14:10,185 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. 178 00:14:10,205 --> 00:14:12,286 That's its whole purpose, its whole function. 179 00:14:12,286 --> 00:14:16,879 You stand in Lafayette Square and you yell at that White House, and that and that's what it's for. 180 00:14:17,127 --> 00:14:19,557 Thomas Jefferson designed it that way. 181 00:14:19,638 --> 00:14:22,458 Its proximity is intentional. 182 00:14:22,459 --> 00:14:26,320 And on June first, about 30 minutes before the city's 7 p.m. 183 00:14:26,320 --> 00:14:37,343 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. 184 00:14:37,343 --> 00:14:44,865 Park police, Secret Service, Bureau of Prisons personnel, the National Guard, and they cleared Lafayette Square. 185 00:14:45,305 --> 00:14:46,505 How'd they do that? 186 00:14:46,828 --> 00:14:47,829 Same way they're doing it now. 187 00:14:47,829 --> 00:14:54,043 Tear gas, pepper balls, smoke canisters, riot shields, batons, people who were standing peacefully, right? 188 00:14:54,043 --> 00:15:02,449 Who really hadn't violated any law, who were still inside the window when they were legally permitted to be there. 189 00:15:02,609 --> 00:15:04,690 Those people got gassed. 190 00:15:04,691 --> 00:15:13,038 The order came from the Attorney General, Bill Barr, the convicted criminal, the served as time felon. 191 00:15:13,082 --> 00:15:18,243 He walked through the scene himself, surveyed the crowd and said attack. 192 00:15:18,244 --> 00:15:28,027 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 193 00:15:28,027 --> 00:15:32,668 Saint John's Episcopal Church, which sits on the north side of Lafayette Square. 194 00:15:32,669 --> 00:15:37,690 The church that has held prayer services for presidents since James Madison. 195 00:15:37,850 --> 00:15:40,651 The church whose own rector. 196 00:15:40,767 --> 00:15:45,776 was one of the people the gas had had gotten to and driven away. 197 00:15:46,238 --> 00:15:48,862 And he holds up that Bible for the photo. 198 00:15:48,863 --> 00:15:49,984 That's it. 199 00:15:50,166 --> 00:15:52,379 That's what it was for. 200 00:15:52,630 --> 00:15:57,503 That man walked across a park and held up a book for a camera. 201 00:15:57,504 --> 00:15:59,096 And here's what they didn't want you to know. 202 00:15:59,096 --> 00:16:04,230 Earlier in those protests, Trump had spent time in the bunker, the Roosevelt bunker, right? 203 00:16:04,230 --> 00:16:05,310 The Peac. 204 00:16:05,651 --> 00:16:12,616 While their protests were their loudest outside, while the crowds were the biggest, the president was underground. 205 00:16:12,617 --> 00:16:21,283 Now that lootin that news, like news anywhere, it didn't sit well with somebody, and it was leaked. 206 00:16:21,284 --> 00:16:25,057 Somebody told a reporter, right, and that's the image, right? 207 00:16:25,057 --> 00:16:36,515 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. 208 00:16:36,695 --> 00:16:38,416 And that image got out. 209 00:16:38,667 --> 00:16:40,948 And apparently he was pissed. 210 00:16:41,289 --> 00:16:47,413 Not at like the danger of it all, at the the leak, at the image of himself as a man who hides. 211 00:16:47,413 --> 00:16:51,855 A man who goes underground, a mole man, if you will. 212 00:16:51,856 --> 00:16:55,548 So the gas, the Bible, the walk, read it again, right? 213 00:16:55,548 --> 00:16:57,838 That's not security. 214 00:16:58,199 --> 00:17:00,419 It's the opposite of the bunker. 215 00:17:00,560 --> 00:17:11,484 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. 216 00:17:11,735 --> 00:17:14,175 That bunker was weakness. 217 00:17:14,176 --> 00:17:14,899 The screen. 218 00:17:14,899 --> 00:17:18,095 Like square clearing out was the correction. 219 00:17:18,237 --> 00:17:19,941 That's that's that's the logic. 220 00:17:19,941 --> 00:17:20,943 There's no chess here. 221 00:17:20,943 --> 00:17:23,699 Like this is just just as bad checkers. 222 00:17:23,950 --> 00:17:37,496 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, 223 00:17:37,636 --> 00:17:42,887 described the time a as without precedent in the modern era. 224 00:17:42,887 --> 00:17:44,487 Era, era, era. 225 00:17:44,488 --> 00:17:48,640 The kind of perimeter that had never been set up. 226 00:17:48,724 --> 00:17:54,132 Around the people's house outside of an active military emergency. 227 00:17:54,383 --> 00:17:55,703 No precedent. 228 00:17:55,703 --> 00:18:00,025 Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer demanded he take it down. 229 00:18:00,025 --> 00:18:03,526 I'm assuming they wrote a sternly worded letter. 230 00:18:03,886 --> 00:18:16,090 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. 231 00:18:16,341 --> 00:18:19,723 In close proximity to the White House. 232 00:18:19,724 --> 00:18:20,684 The proximity? 233 00:18:20,684 --> 00:18:22,365 Yeah, that's the whole thing. 234 00:18:22,546 --> 00:18:24,147 That's what was being walled off. 235 00:18:24,147 --> 00:18:38,339 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. 236 00:18:38,590 --> 00:18:41,352 And everybody said, well, it's temporary. 237 00:18:41,533 --> 00:18:44,595 All of the Trump apologists, well it's an emergency measure. 238 00:18:44,595 --> 00:18:47,057 The fence comes down when things calm down. 239 00:18:47,058 --> 00:18:49,199 Things were calmed down by August. 240 00:18:49,200 --> 00:18:52,543 But by September the protests had largely moved on. 241 00:18:52,543 --> 00:18:54,384 That fence was still there. 242 00:18:54,685 --> 00:18:56,666 The fence did not come down. 243 00:18:56,667 --> 00:19:00,290 And now in twenty twenty six, that fence is permanent. 244 00:19:00,541 --> 00:19:02,101 That's how it always goes, right? 245 00:19:02,101 --> 00:19:05,802 The emergency measure that becomes furniture. 246 00:19:06,282 --> 00:19:22,257 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 247 00:19:22,257 --> 00:19:24,287 quite remember the official moment. 248 00:19:24,287 --> 00:19:27,978 It stopped being temporary and just became the way that things are. 249 00:19:28,229 --> 00:19:29,801 And investigators later confirmed it. 250 00:19:29,801 --> 00:19:34,576 The Interior Department's own inspector general, a House Committee report. 251 00:19:34,837 --> 00:19:40,082 The square wasn't cleared for security, it was cleared to install fencing and stage a photo op. 252 00:19:40,543 --> 00:19:49,373 The inspector general's report found that officials had been coordinating on the fence installation before the order was clear. 253 00:19:49,624 --> 00:19:52,526 Like before the order was even given. 254 00:19:52,777 --> 00:19:58,040 The protesters were moved so the fencing crew could come in, and that's the whole story. 255 00:19:58,041 --> 00:20:01,263 So the institution didn't outlive the man. 256 00:20:01,744 --> 00:20:05,126 The man rearranged the institution around himself. 257 00:20:05,127 --> 00:20:08,129 And then he made sure that that rearrangement stuck. 258 00:20:08,380 --> 00:20:13,085 And that's the bridge to now because everything that happened in twenty twenty was a one off, right? 259 00:20:13,085 --> 00:20:17,100 It w as an outrage, but without precedent emergency. 260 00:20:17,351 --> 00:20:19,752 All of this has now been built in concrete. 261 00:20:19,752 --> 00:20:20,263 Literally. 262 00:20:20,263 --> 00:20:25,076 I mean, they're pouring the foundation as we're having this podcast, as you're listening. 263 00:20:25,557 --> 00:20:29,298 So let's look at this machine that they're building. 264 00:20:29,549 --> 00:20:33,031 So, what does the moat actually look like in 2026? 265 00:20:33,111 --> 00:20:34,732 Let me walk you around it. 266 00:20:34,733 --> 00:20:43,348 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. 267 00:20:43,349 --> 00:20:45,450 It kind of lands differently. 268 00:20:45,451 --> 00:20:54,535 In January of twenty twenty six, more fencing goes up around Lafayette Square, and not new fencing replacing like old fencing, additional fencing. 269 00:20:54,535 --> 00:20:58,057 The perimeter expands, the buffer zone grows. 270 00:20:58,057 --> 00:21:00,199 May the ellipse. 271 00:21:00,599 --> 00:21:07,292 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. 272 00:21:07,383 --> 00:21:14,066 The one that is by law, by by the statute that created it supposed to be open to the public, closed. 273 00:21:14,067 --> 00:21:17,288 Barriers installed, like full vehicle barriers. 274 00:21:17,289 --> 00:21:27,314 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 275 00:21:27,314 --> 00:21:28,394 closed. 276 00:21:28,645 --> 00:21:35,312 Now sure, they're erecting an annoying UFC octagon on the White House lawn right now. 277 00:21:35,312 --> 00:21:37,173 But that's not about America. 278 00:21:37,424 --> 00:21:40,366 Entry from the east side of the White House, that is currently impossible. 279 00:21:40,366 --> 00:21:45,931 The construction barriers and the ballroom project have made it physically inaccessible. 280 00:21:45,931 --> 00:21:49,013 You cannot approach the grounds from the east direction. 281 00:21:49,264 --> 00:21:55,549 At least half a dozen of Trump's cabinet members and senior staff have moved into military housing. 282 00:21:55,830 --> 00:21:57,371 Think about what that means. 283 00:21:57,371 --> 00:22:05,848 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 284 00:22:05,848 --> 00:22:06,778 runs. 285 00:22:06,779 --> 00:22:10,190 They have retreated inside military perimeters. 286 00:22:10,411 --> 00:22:21,536 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 287 00:22:21,536 --> 00:22:22,676 and the city. 288 00:22:22,927 --> 00:22:29,369 The Secret Service is investigating forty percent more cases than the same period last year. 289 00:22:29,370 --> 00:22:33,631 Seven more times more cases involving people with mental health issues. 290 00:22:33,632 --> 00:22:44,696 The deputy director, um, man named Matthew Quinn, said the threat environment had, and I'm gonna use his exact words, gone exponential. 291 00:22:44,697 --> 00:22:46,868 That's not not a bureaucratic word, right? 292 00:22:46,868 --> 00:22:48,938 Like that's not like a legal term. 293 00:22:48,938 --> 00:22:50,959 This guy is scared. 294 00:22:50,960 --> 00:22:53,021 Or he's at least alarmed. 295 00:22:53,022 --> 00:23:00,667 Three times in four weeks, gunfire broke out near the White House while agents were protecting the president or the vice president. 296 00:23:00,667 --> 00:23:04,870 Three separate incidents in four weeks. 297 00:23:04,871 --> 00:23:10,865 By the time they added up the third one, it wasn't a pattern, it was just like a routine, it was a condition. 298 00:23:11,116 --> 00:23:16,700 And on the roof you can see snipers that can see a thousand yards in every direction. 299 00:23:17,141 --> 00:23:21,444 Now look, I'm not gonna stand here and tell you that there's no threat. 300 00:23:21,695 --> 00:23:25,084 I opened this episode with a murdered state legislator, right? 301 00:23:25,084 --> 00:23:26,006 The threat is real. 302 00:23:26,006 --> 00:23:27,591 The numbers are real. 303 00:23:27,591 --> 00:23:31,369 And Matthew Quinn he might be a butthead, but he's not wrong. 304 00:23:31,620 --> 00:23:35,363 And here's the question that keeps popping up over and over. 305 00:23:35,363 --> 00:23:42,869 And look, I want to be honest that I'm genuinely chewing on this, not just like performing the answer that I already have. 306 00:23:42,869 --> 00:23:46,051 When the threat goes up, who gets protected? 307 00:23:46,302 --> 00:23:49,945 Because here's what the moat is not, right? 308 00:23:49,945 --> 00:23:54,268 The moat is not more protection for state legislatures and their homes. 309 00:23:54,268 --> 00:23:56,380 Melissa Hortman didn't have a sniper on her roof. 310 00:23:56,380 --> 00:23:59,074 She had a front door, like the rest of us. 311 00:23:59,074 --> 00:24:04,949 The moat is not a protection for healthcare providers on Beltler's hit list. 312 00:24:04,949 --> 00:24:13,216 The clinic workers, the doctors, the nurses who show up every day knowing that their name might be on some spreadsheet somewhere. 313 00:24:13,216 --> 00:24:17,920 And you know, I mean, these people have to use Excel, they're not using modern solutions. 314 00:24:17,920 --> 00:24:24,185 It's not protection for the school board members getting death threats over library books. 315 00:24:24,186 --> 00:24:26,680 It's not protection for the election workers who are 316 00:24:26,680 --> 00:24:31,342 Who have now started needing police escorts to count ballots? 317 00:24:31,593 --> 00:24:38,017 The moat is protection for one building, one office, one man. 318 00:24:38,017 --> 00:24:39,978 And it is expensive. 319 00:24:39,979 --> 00:24:45,661 Let me give you the dollars because the dollars are where the story becomes uh undeniable. 320 00:24:45,962 --> 00:24:47,242 The ballroom. 321 00:24:47,483 --> 00:24:49,664 90,000 square feet. 322 00:24:50,144 --> 00:24:51,873 When Trump first announced it. 323 00:24:51,873 --> 00:24:56,638 in July of twenty twenty five, he said two hundred million dollars, and this is important, right? 324 00:24:56,638 --> 00:24:59,070 This is the part I need you to kind of remember. 325 00:24:59,070 --> 00:25:03,254 He promised it would be at no charge to the taxpayer whatsoever. 326 00:25:03,254 --> 00:25:05,766 He said it would be privately funded. 327 00:25:05,766 --> 00:25:09,139 He said it will cost the American people nothing. 328 00:25:09,390 --> 00:25:12,933 By October, the estimate was three hundred million. 329 00:25:13,184 --> 00:25:15,787 By this year, four hundred million. 330 00:25:15,787 --> 00:25:28,479 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. 331 00:25:28,730 --> 00:25:40,439 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, 332 00:25:40,540 --> 00:25:49,006 requests one billion biblion dollars in additional security funding tied to this project. 333 00:25:49,007 --> 00:25:56,773 two hundred and twenty million of that sum is specifically labeled ballroom security improvements. 334 00:25:57,024 --> 00:26:04,660 So the thing that was gonna cost you nothing now has a one billion dollars security ask attached to it. 335 00:26:04,940 --> 00:26:12,506 Moving through a Republican Senate, the math on no charge to the taxpayer doesn't work anymore. 336 00:26:12,757 --> 00:26:14,418 It's funny how that works, right? 337 00:26:14,758 --> 00:26:20,262 And then in March of this year, 2026, Trump again said the quiet part out loud. 338 00:26:20,262 --> 00:26:26,606 He says, and I'm quoting this directly, the military is building a big complex under the ballroom. 339 00:26:26,607 --> 00:26:29,809 He describes the ballroom as essentially a shed. 340 00:26:30,050 --> 00:26:31,170 A shed. 341 00:26:31,171 --> 00:26:32,832 His words, not mine. 342 00:26:33,012 --> 00:26:38,756 The four hundred million dollar ballroom with the chandeliers and the tacky gold finishes. 343 00:26:38,870 --> 00:26:42,802 And the venue capacity for heads of state, that's the shed, right? 344 00:26:42,802 --> 00:26:43,802 That's the cover story. 345 00:26:43,802 --> 00:26:46,663 That's the the tape over the truck logo. 346 00:26:46,664 --> 00:26:50,445 The real project is the military complex underneath. 347 00:26:50,706 --> 00:26:53,186 The one we're not getting dimensions on. 348 00:26:53,207 --> 00:26:56,498 The one we're not getting line by line budget items for. 349 00:26:56,498 --> 00:27:02,230 The one we're not getting a public description of just a big complex. 350 00:27:02,481 --> 00:27:04,882 The military is building it, that's all we know. 351 00:27:05,133 --> 00:27:14,958 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. 352 00:27:15,179 --> 00:27:19,691 And if you ask too many questions, you're told you don't understand the security implications. 353 00:27:19,942 --> 00:27:22,487 Here's this th the thing about how they they push this through, right? 354 00:27:22,487 --> 00:27:26,084 There's a process for changing the White House grounds. 355 00:27:26,335 --> 00:27:31,533 Especially if you're all about the rule of law, there is a process for how that happens. 356 00:27:31,784 --> 00:27:33,825 They're supposed to be, anyway. 357 00:27:33,825 --> 00:27:38,906 The National Capital Planning Commission reviews major construction projects in Washington. 358 00:27:38,906 --> 00:27:46,048 The Commission of Fine Arts weighs in on the projects that affect historic and architecturally significant sites. 359 00:27:46,049 --> 00:27:48,389 Environmental review is required. 360 00:27:48,610 --> 00:27:53,091 Congressional authorization is required for spending of this magnitude. 361 00:27:53,091 --> 00:28:01,359 Those aren't bureaucratic obstacles, they are the designed mechanisms by which the public retains some influence over what happens to its property. 362 00:28:01,359 --> 00:28:03,549 The White House is public property. 363 00:28:03,690 --> 00:28:07,410 Those processes exist because of that fact. 364 00:28:07,571 --> 00:28:09,711 They blew past all of it. 365 00:28:10,131 --> 00:28:16,333 No prior review for the Planning Commission, no environmental impact statement, no congressional authorization. 366 00:28:16,333 --> 00:28:24,315 They literally tore down the East Wing, a historic structure, before any of the required review processes had finished. 367 00:28:24,455 --> 00:28:31,347 Before they'd even been properly initiated, the bulldozers just went in and before the paperwork. 368 00:28:31,348 --> 00:28:34,382 They also cut down two magnolia trees in the process. 369 00:28:34,824 --> 00:28:39,250 Trees that were planted in nineteen forty two and nineteen forty seven. 370 00:28:39,370 --> 00:28:43,297 Trees that had been on the White House grounds for almost eighty years were 371 00:28:43,548 --> 00:28:46,759 About the same time that Trump's been alive, just gone. 372 00:28:46,760 --> 00:28:48,220 Because they were in the way. 373 00:28:48,471 --> 00:28:51,382 The Commission of Fine Arts opened a public comment period. 374 00:28:51,382 --> 00:28:53,413 They received two thousand comments. 375 00:28:53,413 --> 00:28:55,483 Now this is a record number for this process. 376 00:28:55,483 --> 00:28:59,654 Ninety nine percent of those comments were opposed to the project. 377 00:29:00,095 --> 00:29:05,016 Two thousand people took time out of their lives to formally register their objection. 378 00:29:05,156 --> 00:29:07,557 Ninety nine percent of them said no. 379 00:29:07,557 --> 00:29:08,797 And it didn't matter. 380 00:29:09,048 --> 00:29:11,940 You want to know how it cleared the National Planning Commission? 381 00:29:12,160 --> 00:29:13,381 Eight to one. 382 00:29:13,561 --> 00:29:24,399 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 383 00:29:24,399 --> 00:29:25,729 Will Sharf. 384 00:29:25,980 --> 00:29:30,043 Very close to Sharp, who also happens to be Trump's staff secretary. 385 00:29:30,043 --> 00:29:34,946 The president's own staffer chairs the commission that approves the president's project. 386 00:29:35,445 --> 00:29:37,335 He literally presides over that process. 387 00:29:37,335 --> 00:29:39,896 He calls the vote, he announces the outcome. 388 00:29:39,896 --> 00:29:41,636 That's not oversight. 389 00:29:41,637 --> 00:29:49,198 That's a man approving his own boss's homework while sitting in the chair that's supposed to belong to the public interest. 390 00:29:49,199 --> 00:29:50,399 Did the public get a say? 391 00:29:50,399 --> 00:29:51,619 Well, technically yes. 392 00:29:51,619 --> 00:29:52,680 Two thousand comments. 393 00:29:52,680 --> 00:29:53,660 Did it matter? 394 00:29:53,660 --> 00:29:54,520 No. 395 00:29:54,640 --> 00:29:55,780 Eight to one. 396 00:29:55,781 --> 00:30:00,922 The record number of objections produced the same result as zero objections. 397 00:30:00,922 --> 00:30:01,682 Would it? 398 00:30:01,933 --> 00:30:04,604 And look, there's more coming, I apologize. 399 00:30:04,604 --> 00:30:16,857 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 400 00:30:16,857 --> 00:30:17,867 White House. 401 00:30:18,087 --> 00:30:29,170 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, 402 00:30:29,170 --> 00:30:32,181 and then surface somewhere near the building. 403 00:30:32,432 --> 00:30:38,877 The operational target is July 2028, six months before Trump's term would end. 404 00:30:38,878 --> 00:30:43,722 No cost estimate, just the design, just the intent. 405 00:30:43,723 --> 00:30:54,261 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. 406 00:30:54,262 --> 00:30:55,883 There was a judge who tried to stop it. 407 00:30:55,883 --> 00:30:57,674 His name is Richard Leon. 408 00:30:58,124 --> 00:31:00,465 The federal district judge in Washington. 409 00:31:00,946 --> 00:31:04,108 The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued. 410 00:31:04,108 --> 00:31:06,149 The lawsuit was filed in December. 411 00:31:06,290 --> 00:31:09,571 It was December twelfth, twenty twenty five. 412 00:31:09,672 --> 00:31:12,894 And Judge Leon issued a preliminary injunction. 413 00:31:12,894 --> 00:31:23,401 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 414 00:31:23,401 --> 00:31:25,313 without congressional authorization. 415 00:31:25,313 --> 00:31:27,624 He said stop construction. 416 00:31:27,625 --> 00:31:30,709 Whatever you're building, stop until this is sorted out. 417 00:31:30,960 --> 00:31:42,057 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. 418 00:31:42,308 --> 00:31:47,509 The stay ran through June fifth, which when I recorded this was this week. 419 00:31:47,529 --> 00:31:54,351 So while the lawsuit about whether any of this is even legal is still actively pending, the foundation is being poured. 420 00:31:54,351 --> 00:31:58,032 Concrete is going into the ground, work is continuing. 421 00:31:58,032 --> 00:32:02,733 Because once the concrete's down, the question becomes more academic. 422 00:32:03,033 --> 00:32:04,573 You can win the lawsuit. 423 00:32:04,573 --> 00:32:11,495 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. 424 00:32:11,907 --> 00:32:14,172 The structure will still be there. 425 00:32:14,423 --> 00:32:18,328 Being right after the fact doesn't unbreak a plate. 426 00:32:18,579 --> 00:32:27,931 The violation becomes permanent, and permanent violations have a way of becoming facts on the ground that everyone eventually works around. 427 00:32:28,182 --> 00:32:29,323 So that's the mechanism, right? 428 00:32:29,323 --> 00:32:32,055 That's the whole mechanism in its simplest form. 429 00:32:32,055 --> 00:32:43,455 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 430 00:32:43,455 --> 00:32:45,626 the ruling can't really change. 431 00:32:45,626 --> 00:32:48,468 When the argument after it stops mattering. 432 00:32:48,719 --> 00:32:51,320 And I sit with this and I I do. 433 00:32:51,321 --> 00:32:55,974 Because part of me wants there to be like a villain cartoonish enough. 434 00:32:56,188 --> 00:32:59,990 You can just point and say, look that guy, get rid of that guy, and we're done. 435 00:33:00,241 --> 00:33:02,142 But the big dig was Obama. 436 00:33:02,322 --> 00:33:04,864 The original bunker was Roosevelt. 437 00:33:05,044 --> 00:33:15,532 The impulse to fortify, to dig underground, to make the executive safe and hidden, that's institutional. 438 00:33:15,592 --> 00:33:20,906 That predates any single president, whether it be the first or the last. 439 00:33:21,157 --> 00:33:23,388 What Trump added wasn't the digging. 440 00:33:23,468 --> 00:33:33,032 What he added was the contempt, the the openness of it, the what are you gonna do about it kind of genus quaavit. 441 00:33:33,033 --> 00:33:36,354 Ninety nine percent of you filed comments saying no. 442 00:33:36,354 --> 00:33:39,835 Eight to one approved, concrete's poor, and what are you gonna do about it? 443 00:33:40,016 --> 00:33:42,687 The judge said stop, the appeals court said keep going. 444 00:33:42,687 --> 00:33:44,137 What are you gonna do about it? 445 00:33:44,518 --> 00:33:45,338 That's the machine. 446 00:33:45,338 --> 00:33:48,179 That's what it looks like when it's running full speed ahead. 447 00:33:48,430 --> 00:33:49,460 Take a breath. 448 00:33:49,711 --> 00:33:54,024 I want to tell you about April twenty fifth, twenty twenty six. 449 00:33:54,345 --> 00:34:00,450 Because this is the event that the administration reaches for to justify all of it. 450 00:34:00,701 --> 00:34:03,587 This is the proof they offer, and I want you to actually understand what happened. 451 00:34:03,587 --> 00:34:10,079 I I want you to understand what the administration does with what happened because those are very different things. 452 00:34:10,079 --> 00:34:16,654 They're two dim diametrically opposed, unrelated, correlated but not causated things. 453 00:34:16,734 --> 00:34:17,768 A man named 454 00:34:17,768 --> 00:34:21,674 Cole Thomas Allen, thirty-one years old from Torrance, California. 455 00:34:21,716 --> 00:34:26,093 He bought a 12-gauge pump action shotgun on August 17th. 456 00:34:26,344 --> 00:34:31,459 So he'd been armed, had been equipped for eight months before he actually did anything about it. 457 00:34:31,459 --> 00:34:34,361 Whatever he was planning, he had time to think about it. 458 00:34:34,362 --> 00:34:41,708 On april twenty fifth, he took a train from Los Angeles to Washington, DC, cross country, days on that train. 459 00:34:41,708 --> 00:34:48,615 And when he got there, he checked into the Washington Hilton, which is the venue for the White House Correspondence Center. 460 00:34:48,616 --> 00:34:50,838 The big event every year was 461 00:34:51,089 --> 00:35:01,635 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 462 00:35:01,635 --> 00:35:06,197 sit in this hotel ballroom on Connecticut Avenue and they ate chicken and they listen to jokes. 463 00:35:06,197 --> 00:35:08,438 Trump was there, Vice President Vance was there. 464 00:35:08,438 --> 00:35:12,540 Senior cabinet officials, twenty six hundred people in a single room. 465 00:35:12,541 --> 00:35:20,225 And around eight forty PM, Allen ran through the magno whatever device that detects metal. 466 00:35:20,476 --> 00:35:21,977 Carrying the shotgun. 467 00:35:22,228 --> 00:35:25,551 And he shot a Secret Service officer in the chest. 468 00:35:25,552 --> 00:35:30,595 Now look, that officer lived because of a you know, a bulletproof vest. 469 00:35:30,596 --> 00:35:34,018 The round hit him center mass and the vest stopped it. 470 00:35:34,299 --> 00:35:35,940 That officer went home. 471 00:35:36,000 --> 00:35:46,649 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. 472 00:35:46,929 --> 00:35:57,217 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. 473 00:35:57,468 --> 00:36:02,673 Now, the DOJ found that Trump was the intended target. 474 00:36:02,793 --> 00:36:09,858 Now, I want to be careful here because this is exactly the kind of moment where it would be easy to lose the point. 475 00:36:10,079 --> 00:36:11,600 And I don't want to do that. 476 00:36:11,961 --> 00:36:13,852 This was a real assassination attempt. 477 00:36:13,852 --> 00:36:21,708 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. 478 00:36:21,708 --> 00:36:25,641 That officer has a family who received a phone call that night that it 479 00:36:25,642 --> 00:36:27,323 That it's not nothing, right? 480 00:36:27,323 --> 00:36:28,923 It's the opposite of nothing. 481 00:36:28,923 --> 00:36:30,364 The threat is real. 482 00:36:30,524 --> 00:36:36,886 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. 483 00:36:36,987 --> 00:36:41,728 And I want you to hear that in your ears when I say what comes after this. 484 00:36:41,729 --> 00:36:44,430 So here's what comes after this within days. 485 00:36:44,681 --> 00:36:46,612 Some say it was within minutes. 486 00:36:46,612 --> 00:36:50,955 Trump called this shooting as justification for the ballroom. 487 00:36:50,975 --> 00:36:52,216 The ballroom. 488 00:36:52,276 --> 00:37:01,122 The four hundred million dollar ballroom with the secret military complex underneath, the one being poured right now. 489 00:37:01,122 --> 00:37:04,463 He pointed at Cole Allen and said, See, this is why. 490 00:37:04,904 --> 00:37:07,285 This is what we're protecting against. 491 00:37:07,536 --> 00:37:13,381 And then his acting attorney general, Todd Blanch, got on X and 492 00:37:13,452 --> 00:37:20,195 Created an excretion publicly calling on the National Trust for Historic Preservation to drop their lawsuit. 493 00:37:20,195 --> 00:37:24,737 Not a private communication, a public letter to the editor. 494 00:37:24,918 --> 00:37:35,723 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 495 00:37:35,723 --> 00:37:38,654 assassination attempt as the leverage. 496 00:37:38,655 --> 00:37:43,437 Basically, a man tried to shoot the president, your lawsuit's getting in the way of his safety, drop it. 497 00:37:43,438 --> 00:37:44,779 You see the move? 498 00:37:45,239 --> 00:37:51,301 The shooting happening in a in in a hotel, the Washington Hilton on Connecticut Connecticut Avenue Northwest. 499 00:37:51,301 --> 00:37:52,782 Not the White House. 500 00:37:52,782 --> 00:37:55,183 Cole Allen didn't try to breach the White House fence. 501 00:37:55,183 --> 00:37:59,345 He didn't he didn't approach the new perimeter or test the new barriers. 502 00:37:59,345 --> 00:38:04,367 He just bought a ticket to an event the president was attending at a hotel across town. 503 00:38:04,367 --> 00:38:06,948 Walked in through the front door and shot an officer. 504 00:38:07,199 --> 00:38:08,796 At the metals detectors. 505 00:38:09,047 --> 00:38:13,510 ballroom being built at the White House would not have stopped Cole Allen. 506 00:38:13,761 --> 00:38:20,165 The underground screening facility would not have stopped Cole Allen because Cole Allen wasn't at the White House. 507 00:38:20,416 --> 00:38:21,549 I'm gonna say that again. 508 00:38:21,549 --> 00:38:25,057 Cole Allen wasn't at the White House. 509 00:38:25,057 --> 00:38:30,418 The threat and the proposed solution are not in the same location. 510 00:38:30,669 --> 00:38:32,249 But it doesn't have to make any sense. 511 00:38:32,249 --> 00:38:34,430 It just has to be available. 512 00:38:34,670 --> 00:38:40,951 A real tragedy available to justify a project that was already in motion long before april twenty fifth. 513 00:38:40,952 --> 00:38:45,433 The foundation was being poured before Allen bought that train ticket. 514 00:38:45,434 --> 00:38:49,355 Cole Allen gave them a better story to tell while they poured it. 515 00:38:49,356 --> 00:38:57,068 The concrete and the moral justification arrived in the same news cycle, and that's all that the administration needed. 516 00:38:57,069 --> 00:38:58,819 That's the thing about real fear. 517 00:38:59,020 --> 00:39:08,242 Legitimate, genuine fear is the most powerful political tool in the world for people who want to build walls. 518 00:39:08,493 --> 00:39:14,354 Because you cannot argue against it without sounding like you don't care that an officer took a round in the chest. 519 00:39:14,414 --> 00:39:15,874 And I do care. 520 00:39:16,295 --> 00:39:16,945 Genuinely. 521 00:39:16,945 --> 00:39:19,836 Like I I deeply care about this country. 522 00:39:19,837 --> 00:39:24,288 That officer's survival is not incidental to this story. 523 00:39:24,539 --> 00:39:26,570 It's the best thing in this story. 524 00:39:26,670 --> 00:39:37,915 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 525 00:39:37,915 --> 00:39:51,640 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, 526 00:39:52,060 --> 00:39:54,041 the ballroom, the 527 00:39:54,417 --> 00:39:57,274 Bunker are not in conflict. 528 00:39:57,525 --> 00:40:02,158 They were made to seem like they're in conflict because somebody needed them to be. 529 00:40:02,339 --> 00:40:08,784 Somebody needed you to feel like skepticism about the ballroom meant indifference to the shooting. 530 00:40:09,044 --> 00:40:11,586 That's the work the fear is doing. 531 00:40:11,587 --> 00:40:12,648 That's what it's for. 532 00:40:12,648 --> 00:40:20,433 That that's that's what Fox News sells to all of the sheeple sitting around watching it twenty four hours a day. 533 00:40:20,714 --> 00:40:25,087 Now I want to go back to Lafayette Square because there's a case there too. 534 00:40:25,088 --> 00:40:27,990 And it's the other side of this exact same coin. 535 00:40:27,991 --> 00:40:35,397 Black Lives Matter DC and a coalition of other organizations sued the federal government over june first, twenty twenty. 536 00:40:35,397 --> 00:40:38,970 That clearing of the of the Lafayette Square. 537 00:40:39,221 --> 00:40:45,514 First Amendment claims, Fourth Amendment claims, the right to peaceably assemble, the right against unreasonable force. 538 00:40:45,514 --> 00:40:53,958 The case argued that what happened in Lafayette Square that evening was not a security operation, but a constitutional violation. 539 00:40:53,959 --> 00:41:02,853 The government used the instruments of force against people, citizens, for exercising the rights those instruments were supposed to protect. 540 00:41:03,104 --> 00:41:07,367 And there's a detail from the litigation that I want to point out. 541 00:41:07,367 --> 00:41:16,873 The Defense Department's lead military officer, the senior official in charge of the operational response that night, wanted to go further. 542 00:41:17,124 --> 00:41:23,528 Before that clearing began, he had asked about deploying two specific weapons on the protesters. 543 00:41:24,589 --> 00:41:26,770 One was an active denial system. 544 00:41:26,770 --> 00:41:31,333 That is a directed energy weapon that works. 545 00:41:31,334 --> 00:41:36,656 Like a microwave by heating the water molecules beneath your skin. 546 00:41:36,907 --> 00:41:45,603 It makes the person receiving this directed energy weapon feel as though their entire body surface is on fire. 547 00:41:45,854 --> 00:41:53,290 It's designed to cause unbearable pain instantly, which drives people away from the area. 548 00:41:53,541 --> 00:41:55,782 Without actually leaving visible marks. 549 00:41:55,782 --> 00:42:00,564 The military calls it a non lethal crowd control tool. 550 00:42:00,815 --> 00:42:05,276 The other was an LRAD, long range acoustic device. 551 00:42:05,417 --> 00:42:11,619 You can look up videos on YouTube of several people creating their own and testing them in various ways, but 552 00:42:11,870 --> 00:42:26,092 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 553 00:42:26,092 --> 00:42:27,844 physically exist in. 554 00:42:28,095 --> 00:42:41,609 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 555 00:42:41,609 --> 00:42:43,469 people's house. 556 00:42:44,950 --> 00:42:46,770 Now they didn't use them, right? 557 00:42:47,021 --> 00:42:51,142 But the the reason that they didn't use them is not because somebody said no. 558 00:42:51,322 --> 00:42:54,751 The reason is that the National Guard units deployed that night 559 00:42:54,751 --> 00:42:58,233 didn't physically have those weapons in their inventory that day. 560 00:42:58,484 --> 00:43:09,373 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. 561 00:43:09,373 --> 00:43:11,925 Just well, it's not in the truck. 562 00:43:12,176 --> 00:43:14,838 That case settled in April of twenty twenty two. 563 00:43:15,239 --> 00:43:20,523 The Park Police and Secret Service agreed to revise their protest policing policies. 564 00:43:20,683 --> 00:43:30,902 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 565 00:43:30,902 --> 00:43:32,312 install fencing. 566 00:43:32,313 --> 00:43:38,137 A House Committee report found that Trump likely directed the entire thing for the photo op. 567 00:43:38,138 --> 00:43:39,279 The settlement was real. 568 00:43:39,279 --> 00:43:44,043 The policy revisions were real, but the square is still fenced. 569 00:43:44,224 --> 00:43:46,206 The perimeters stayed expanded. 570 00:43:46,206 --> 00:43:54,615 The precedent of federal force clearing people from the public space in front of the White House, that precedent was set. 571 00:43:54,866 --> 00:43:57,957 And precedents are important because they have gravity. 572 00:43:57,958 --> 00:43:59,378 So here's the pattern. 573 00:43:59,539 --> 00:44:01,449 I've laid it bare across two cases. 574 00:44:01,449 --> 00:44:13,372 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 575 00:44:13,372 --> 00:44:22,835 billing building a military complex bunker underground beneath the venue where the president wants to entertain. 576 00:44:23,086 --> 00:44:24,777 Greatest show on earth, people. 577 00:44:24,778 --> 00:44:32,784 And the people in Lafayette Square, the people exercising the exact constitutional right that the square was designed to protect. 578 00:44:33,205 --> 00:44:43,613 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 579 00:44:43,613 --> 00:44:46,605 someone wanted to hit them with a heat ray. 580 00:44:46,856 --> 00:44:49,417 It was just bad planning that stopped it. 581 00:44:50,318 --> 00:44:55,281 One group is the reason for the wall, the other group is who the wall is against. 582 00:44:55,281 --> 00:44:57,482 And they're not the same group. 583 00:44:57,742 --> 00:45:03,165 That's the thing I need you to hold right now because it's the center of everything I'm trying to say today. 584 00:45:03,165 --> 00:45:11,029 The threat that justifies the moat and the people the moat keeps out, those are different populations. 585 00:45:11,030 --> 00:45:14,960 The murderer travels by train to a hotel, the protester 586 00:45:14,960 --> 00:45:17,382 Stands in a park with a sign. 587 00:45:17,863 --> 00:45:21,666 The wall doesn't distinguish between either of them. 588 00:45:21,666 --> 00:45:24,689 The wall is not designed to distinguish between them. 589 00:45:24,689 --> 00:45:32,456 The wall was designed to keep the second group away from the first building, and to use the first group as the reason. 590 00:45:32,857 --> 00:45:36,119 That's the architecture of it, physically and politically. 591 00:45:36,370 --> 00:45:41,684 Let's pull this all the way back and show you the shape of it because when you lay the whole timeline out, right? 592 00:45:41,684 --> 00:45:50,971 42 to 2026, Roosevelt to the foundation being poured this week, a shape emerges that I think is worth naming. 593 00:45:50,972 --> 00:45:56,075 1942, Roosevelt digs a bunker so the Republic survives the bombs. 594 00:45:56,076 --> 00:45:58,858 The logic is explicit and genuinely noble. 595 00:45:58,858 --> 00:46:02,300 Protect the institution so the institution outlives the person. 596 00:46:02,688 --> 00:46:06,841 Build the room that keeps the constitutional order order going if the worst happens. 597 00:46:06,841 --> 00:46:09,032 The president matters less than the presidency. 598 00:46:09,032 --> 00:46:11,894 The man dies, the office endures, that's the design. 599 00:46:12,014 --> 00:46:19,919 twenty twenty five, they demolished that exact bunker to build a ballroom for one man with a secret military complex underneath. 600 00:46:19,920 --> 00:46:22,011 The logic has inverted completely. 601 00:46:22,011 --> 00:46:27,744 Now it's rearranged the entire institution so it serves a man. 602 00:46:28,185 --> 00:46:31,789 Remove the structure built for continuity of democracy and 603 00:46:31,789 --> 00:46:39,443 and replace it with a structure for the comfort and power of a very specific occupant. 604 00:46:39,694 --> 00:46:41,044 That's the the through line, right? 605 00:46:41,044 --> 00:46:45,076 Like that's the the the needle that we're threading here. 606 00:46:45,076 --> 00:46:48,658 The institution outlives the man. 607 00:46:48,818 --> 00:46:50,898 That was the whole American idea. 608 00:46:50,898 --> 00:46:55,620 Presidents come and go, the office indoors, the building belongs to the people. 609 00:46:55,620 --> 00:46:57,700 That's why it's called the People's House. 610 00:46:58,060 --> 00:46:59,241 That's not a slogan. 611 00:46:59,241 --> 00:47:02,622 That's not like, you know, flowery language. 612 00:47:02,622 --> 00:47:04,922 That's the architecture of all of it. 613 00:47:04,922 --> 00:47:07,255 The building was designed to be accessible. 614 00:47:07,255 --> 00:47:11,837 The square in front of it was designed for closeness, proximity. 615 00:47:11,837 --> 00:47:15,098 Jefferson didn't leave Lafayette Square there by accident. 616 00:47:15,098 --> 00:47:18,059 The closeness was the design, it was the point. 617 00:47:18,060 --> 00:47:29,555 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 618 00:47:29,555 --> 00:47:30,245 it. 619 00:47:30,525 --> 00:47:32,526 Not a fortress for the office. 620 00:47:32,777 --> 00:47:34,377 A fortress for the man. 621 00:47:34,628 --> 00:47:35,758 Every piece fits together. 622 00:47:35,758 --> 00:47:41,530 The fence that was without precedent in twenty twenty becomes permanent by twenty twenty six. 623 00:47:41,550 --> 00:47:52,303 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 624 00:47:52,303 --> 00:47:59,014 under a park through a seven lane underground screening facility before they're allowed anywhere near the grounds. 625 00:47:59,094 --> 00:48:02,009 The cabinet has moved to military bases. 626 00:48:02,009 --> 00:48:08,381 Deciding that the capital city is just too dangerous for them to live in, and the snipers see a thousand yards in every direction. 627 00:48:08,382 --> 00:48:10,122 And the public said no. 628 00:48:10,363 --> 00:48:13,663 Well, two thousand people said no, a record number. 629 00:48:13,824 --> 00:48:15,524 Ninety-nine percent of them said no. 630 00:48:15,524 --> 00:48:21,166 And they were overridden eight to one by a commission chaired by the president's own employee. 631 00:48:21,486 --> 00:48:22,906 Here's what that means. 632 00:48:23,157 --> 00:48:28,294 When you follow it to its conclusion, the fortification isn't just physical. 633 00:48:28,294 --> 00:48:38,357 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 634 00:48:38,357 --> 00:48:42,338 the one around the decision making process itself. 635 00:48:42,339 --> 00:48:52,792 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 636 00:48:52,792 --> 00:48:54,363 into dropping a lawsuit. 637 00:48:54,363 --> 00:48:56,223 That's the moat. 638 00:48:56,438 --> 00:48:58,308 That matters most, not the fence. 639 00:48:58,308 --> 00:49:00,109 The fence is a symptom. 640 00:49:00,110 --> 00:49:12,094 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 641 00:49:12,094 --> 00:49:14,474 sue, to say no. 642 00:49:14,475 --> 00:49:16,815 And it actually means something. 643 00:49:17,055 --> 00:49:23,376 To say stop and the bulldozers actually stop to win the argument. 644 00:49:23,376 --> 00:49:25,733 And have the argument matter. 645 00:49:25,984 --> 00:49:30,002 And here's why I reached for the green zone at the beginning of this podcast. 646 00:49:30,545 --> 00:49:36,348 Why those American journalists looking at their own capital city reached for Baghdad? 647 00:49:36,599 --> 00:49:41,975 The Green Zone in Baghdad wasn't just walls, it was a way of seeing the world. 648 00:49:42,226 --> 00:49:46,851 It was an occupying authority that had made a fundamental decision. 649 00:49:46,851 --> 00:49:52,837 The population is a threat to be managed, not a people to be served. 650 00:49:53,219 --> 00:49:56,742 The blast walls were the architecture of that decision. 651 00:49:56,993 --> 00:50:00,034 The checkpoints were the architecture of that decision. 652 00:50:00,034 --> 00:50:05,817 The walls said in reinforced concrete, we are separate from you. 653 00:50:06,297 --> 00:50:11,199 We are above you, we are not accountable to you, and you cannot reach us. 654 00:50:11,520 --> 00:50:16,582 That is what blast walls mean, not just protection, a relationship. 655 00:50:16,642 --> 00:50:23,648 When the people who govern you wall themselves off from you, when they move into military bases, when they close the public parks, 656 00:50:23,648 --> 00:50:35,907 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 657 00:50:35,907 --> 00:50:41,441 photo op with a Bible, they're telling you something about how they see you. 658 00:50:41,442 --> 00:50:43,242 You are a threat. 659 00:50:43,493 --> 00:50:45,433 And look, maybe some of you are. 660 00:50:45,457 --> 00:50:50,357 I mean, Cole Allen was, Vance Belter was, the threat is real. 661 00:50:50,608 --> 00:50:54,109 And I'll say it one final time because it has to stay true. 662 00:50:54,109 --> 00:51:05,052 The threat is real, but a democracy that responds to threat by walling off the powerful from everyone, rather than protecting everyone. 663 00:51:05,053 --> 00:51:09,114 That democracy has already made a choice about who matters. 664 00:51:09,115 --> 00:51:16,367 It was decided that the safety of the office, or or more accurately, the safety of the person currently in the office. 665 00:51:16,845 --> 00:51:19,826 matters more than the openness of the office. 666 00:51:20,077 --> 00:51:22,437 And the openness was the whole point. 667 00:51:22,698 --> 00:51:26,779 The openness was not a vulnerability that needed to be fixed. 668 00:51:26,900 --> 00:51:29,700 The openness was in the design. 669 00:51:30,021 --> 00:51:31,842 The proximity was intentional. 670 00:51:31,842 --> 00:51:35,043 Jefferson left the square to be there on purpose. 671 00:51:35,043 --> 00:51:42,186 You cannot have a people's house behind a thousand yard kill zone and still call it the people's house in good faith. 672 00:51:42,187 --> 00:51:44,350 You cannot have a public square 673 00:51:44,350 --> 00:51:46,841 That the public is not permitted to enter. 674 00:51:46,842 --> 00:52:00,480 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 675 00:52:00,480 --> 00:52:07,273 objections of two thousand voices who exercised the exact process that was supposed to empower them. 676 00:52:07,524 --> 00:52:16,596 When the executive branch fortifies itself against the people, democracy is already losing the argument because the argument was supposed to be settled. 677 00:52:17,057 --> 00:52:20,697 The argument was supposed to be you can reach us. 678 00:52:21,018 --> 00:52:24,378 You can stand in the square and yell at the house. 679 00:52:24,378 --> 00:52:29,980 You can stand close enough that the people inside can't just pretend that you're not there. 680 00:52:29,980 --> 00:52:31,260 We are yours. 681 00:52:31,260 --> 00:52:32,100 you. 682 00:52:34,732 --> 00:52:45,066 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. 683 00:52:45,317 --> 00:52:47,909 And the moat is the response to that argument. 684 00:52:47,909 --> 00:52:52,914 The concrete foundation being poured this week is the answer to that argument. 685 00:52:52,914 --> 00:52:54,835 The moat says no. 686 00:52:54,836 --> 00:52:56,317 You can't reach us. 687 00:52:56,318 --> 00:53:00,140 We don't have to see you, and we don't have to hear you. 688 00:53:00,141 --> 00:53:05,365 Because we've built something between you and us that you cannot cross. 689 00:53:05,616 --> 00:53:07,457 That's what concrete means. 690 00:53:07,458 --> 00:53:09,880 That's what's being poured this week. 691 00:53:09,880 --> 00:53:14,584 Not just a foundation for a ballroom, a foundation for that answer. 692 00:53:14,584 --> 00:53:20,569 That answer made permanent, made physical, made ours to live with. 693 00:53:20,570 --> 00:53:21,241 So what do you do? 694 00:53:21,241 --> 00:53:25,995 Because I don't I I hate to leave you just angry, you know, just pissed off. 695 00:53:25,995 --> 00:53:29,478 Anger without a door is just despair with extra steps. 696 00:53:29,478 --> 00:53:31,199 And we've got plenty enough to spare. 697 00:53:31,199 --> 00:53:32,720 Let me give you three doors. 698 00:53:32,788 --> 00:53:33,848 Three things. 699 00:53:33,929 --> 00:53:34,779 Each one's different. 700 00:53:34,779 --> 00:53:36,020 Each one is doable. 701 00:53:36,020 --> 00:53:41,495 Each one is connected to a specific lever in this specific fight. 702 00:53:41,495 --> 00:53:46,228 First thing, personal, and and you can do it in five minutes today. 703 00:53:46,228 --> 00:53:51,372 Look up the National Trust for Historic Preservation versus Trump case. 704 00:53:51,813 --> 00:53:53,174 Read the filing. 705 00:53:53,174 --> 00:53:58,217 Savingplaces.org has it, uh, and it's more readable than you'd expect from a legal document. 706 00:53:58,238 --> 00:53:59,699 And I'm not asking you to become a lawyer. 707 00:53:59,699 --> 00:54:01,670 Will shout out to you, brother. 708 00:54:02,008 --> 00:54:04,980 I'm asking you to just know the thing. 709 00:54:04,980 --> 00:54:08,892 I mean, put it into Chat GPT and get a summary or whatever you're gonna do with it. 710 00:54:09,143 --> 00:54:17,720 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 711 00:54:17,720 --> 00:54:21,773 question that is still pending while the concrete is drying. 712 00:54:21,774 --> 00:54:32,923 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. 713 00:54:33,264 --> 00:54:35,946 Know the case, know the name, read the filing. 714 00:54:36,187 --> 00:54:37,227 Second thing. 715 00:54:37,228 --> 00:54:50,492 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 716 00:54:50,492 --> 00:54:55,273 preservation groups, civil liberties organizations, public interest law firms. 717 00:54:55,374 --> 00:55:03,926 These are the same kinds of of organizations that fought the Lafayette Square Clearing and won a settlement that produced real policy changes. 718 00:55:03,927 --> 00:55:10,812 They were doing the work that formal oversight processes have failed us on because the processes have been captured. 719 00:55:10,813 --> 00:55:13,565 Will Sharf chaired the commission. 720 00:55:13,565 --> 00:55:17,677 Now remember, and the courts are the remaining lever. 721 00:55:17,678 --> 00:55:27,005 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. 722 00:55:27,006 --> 00:55:28,757 Because these cases are 723 00:55:29,185 --> 00:55:29,735 Expensive. 724 00:55:29,735 --> 00:55:30,596 They cost real money. 725 00:55:30,596 --> 00:55:36,219 And the other side has a a one billion dollar security request moving through a Republican Senate, right? 726 00:55:36,219 --> 00:55:41,522 You tilt the scale by making sure the people doing the legal work can keep doing it. 727 00:55:41,802 --> 00:55:43,013 Voting's not enough anymore. 728 00:55:43,013 --> 00:55:44,224 I want you to show up and vote. 729 00:55:44,224 --> 00:55:45,084 I really do. 730 00:55:45,084 --> 00:55:47,285 Believe me, I want you to vote. 731 00:55:47,286 --> 00:55:52,309 But voting by itself now has not really turned out the way that we all hoped. 732 00:55:52,309 --> 00:55:56,911 Third thing, the political one, and this is not this is the specific. 733 00:55:57,097 --> 00:56:01,461 Contact, call your senator, both of them, and ask them one specific question. 734 00:56:01,461 --> 00:56:03,803 Don't rant, don't give them a speech, just a question. 735 00:56:03,803 --> 00:56:08,797 Will you vote against any appropriation that funds White House ballroom security? 736 00:56:08,797 --> 00:56:15,663 Given that the project bypassed the National Capital Planning Commission and was undertaken without congressional authorization. 737 00:56:15,663 --> 00:56:17,664 Make them answer that specific thing. 738 00:56:17,664 --> 00:56:21,628 Don't let them pivot to whether the threat is actually real. 739 00:56:21,628 --> 00:56:22,969 You already know the threat is real. 740 00:56:22,969 --> 00:56:23,970 I've told it to you. 741 00:56:23,970 --> 00:56:26,161 You can even tell them I told it to you. 742 00:56:26,204 --> 00:56:27,015 That's not the question. 743 00:56:27,015 --> 00:56:37,762 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 744 00:56:37,762 --> 00:56:45,127 percent of the public, while a federal lawsuit about it being legal is still pending. 745 00:56:45,127 --> 00:56:48,179 The one billion dollar security ask runs through the Senate. 746 00:56:48,179 --> 00:56:52,051 The Senate, you can call them and bug them to the end of the earth. 747 00:56:52,051 --> 00:56:55,513 The Capitol Switch Board is, and write this down. 748 00:56:55,759 --> 00:57:03,534 two zero two two two four three one two one five minutes, one question. 749 00:57:03,534 --> 00:57:04,594 That's it. 750 00:57:04,855 --> 00:57:08,767 Read the thing, fund the fight, make the call. 751 00:57:09,018 --> 00:57:14,291 So the thing ab this week that uh pissed me off was Lafayette Square. 752 00:57:14,291 --> 00:57:16,211 Not the gas or the Bible. 753 00:57:16,311 --> 00:57:20,214 Not not the image of a man walking across the cleared ground. 754 00:57:20,214 --> 00:57:23,495 I think about the name the people's house. 755 00:57:23,746 --> 00:57:25,326 That used to mean something, right? 756 00:57:25,326 --> 00:57:28,808 You could you could stand on the lawn and see the windows and yell. 757 00:57:28,809 --> 00:57:32,731 The distance between you and power was supposed to be small enough 758 00:57:32,982 --> 00:57:34,112 To walk. 759 00:57:34,433 --> 00:57:37,534 That was the design, that was the point of the design. 760 00:57:37,535 --> 00:57:47,020 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 761 00:57:47,020 --> 00:57:49,482 distance but can't actually reach. 762 00:57:49,483 --> 00:57:59,789 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. 763 00:58:00,040 --> 00:58:02,101 Don't let the wall become the furniture. 764 00:58:02,101 --> 00:58:03,401 That's how it always wins. 765 00:58:03,401 --> 00:58:16,304 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 766 00:58:16,304 --> 00:58:20,645 quite remember being built, that feels too permanent to question. 767 00:58:20,645 --> 00:58:25,646 The fence that was without precedent in 2020 feels normal now. 768 00:58:25,647 --> 00:58:26,828 That's the mechanism. 769 00:58:26,828 --> 00:58:29,116 That's how permanence works, right? 770 00:58:29,116 --> 00:58:30,657 It wasn't always there. 771 00:58:30,657 --> 00:58:35,258 Roosevelt built one room for the Republic to survive the bombs. 772 00:58:35,258 --> 00:58:39,199 They built a fortress for a man to survive the people. 773 00:58:39,199 --> 00:58:40,319 And we are allowed. 774 00:58:40,319 --> 00:58:45,461 No, we're required to remember the difference between those two projects. 775 00:58:45,461 --> 00:58:49,682 One was for the institution outliving the man. 776 00:58:49,683 --> 00:58:52,284 The other is for the man outliving the institution. 777 00:58:52,284 --> 00:58:54,084 And right now, this week 778 00:58:54,084 --> 00:58:59,229 With the foundation going in, we are watching the second project get poured in concrete. 779 00:58:59,230 --> 00:59:00,371 I am Joshua. 780 00:59:00,371 --> 00:59:02,133 This has been the overlap. 781 00:59:02,133 --> 00:59:05,415 You can find everything we do at FOF.foundation. 782 00:59:05,697 --> 00:59:07,999 Well, thank you, and thank you to all of you. 783 00:59:07,999 --> 00:59:09,561 Stay close to the house. 784 00:59:09,561 --> 00:59:10,661 It's yours. 785 00:59:11,042 --> 00:59:12,333 We'll see next week. 786 00:59:12,584 --> 00:59:13,859 Bye.