Michael Weiss: The Vice President Is Looking Pretty Stupid

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Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. We've got a double header for you today in segment to maybe the dreamiest congressional candidate will be joining us. So stick around for that, particularly if you're on the video podcast. But first, slightly less dreamy. I've been charming in his own way. He's on Substack at the Foreign Office. He's the author of ISIS,

Inside the Army of Terror. He's an editor at the insider, a Russia-focused independent media outlet. It's Michael Bari Weiss. How you doing, handsome? Slightly less dreamy, Michael Bari Weiss. That's got to go on a business card. Slightly less dreamy.

I mean, have you seen Stan Forstag? My stars. No. He's running in Montana. Oh, my goodness. It's more for your wife, anyway. How many, how many, Shalamaze does he get in the Tim Miller scale of dreaminess?

Yeah, well, he's not even on the Shalamay scale. He's not exactly my. It's not, yeah, it's not, it's not my. Not your cup of tea. Yeah, not my model, exactly. But just like, objectively speaking, you know, this is a man. Like, Salamay is, you know, kind of a wee lad. My wife was walking behind him in Central Park.

Oh, God, jealous. His legs, she said, are basically the size of toothpicks. All right, Michael, don't get me excited this early in the morning. What did they say? The camera adds like 100 points of testosterone. So, yeah, I mean. Okay. I'm getting for Clem.

Speaking of testosterone. Hot and bothered, yes. Lack of testosterone. Trump has got what you said at the substack. It looks like the deal that is emerging, the MOU, is quite similar, even worse than something that Trump called the worst and dumbest deals ever made, being the JCPOA. Why don't you just talk about what you know at this point?

We haven't actually seen the text of the deal, which I think is telling in its own right. The White House put out a talking points paper. I really enjoyed the first sentence of the talking point, which is this is great for the American people who are concerned about being nuked by the Iranians. This is great for the American family, actually. Family, yeah.

If you're a family in St. Charles, Missouri, And you were worried that the Iranians might put a nuclear warhead onto a ballistic missile and fire it at your farmstead. Then you can just sleep easy tonight. So that's point one. It says they're going to feel relief at the pump and at the grocery store. I'm not sure why the grocery store factors into Iran and the settlement of the war. But yeah, I mean, so we don't know a heck of a whole lot because, as you say, the U.S. has refused to release the MOU. JD Vance has described it as about a page and a half. So let's just back up a second and underscore. This thing is not a peace agreement. This isn't any kind of treaty or some kind of lasting term sheet. This is basically an agreement to extend the ceasefire for another 60 days and to spend those 60 days trying to get to something more substantive and permanent, including on the nuclear issue and including on presumably, you know, war in Lebanon.

a whole sort of basket of interrelated things. What do we know about this thing based on what JD Vance and Jared Kushner told reporters on a background call yesterday. I wasn't on the call, so I'm not bound by any background covenant here. I just had a transcript of it leaked, and I could just tell you what J.D. and what Jared said. Now, it's interesting that Jared was on the call. Yeah. Because he has, does he have a job? What is his job exactly? Well, I mean, he's like plenty potentiary of, the president for multiple portfolios. I mean, he's doing Ukraine stuff. He's doing leveraged buyouts with the Saudis. I mean, he's up to his eyeballs in geopolitical diplomacy,

and it sounds like big business. And that's probably one of the reasons why he's selling this thing. Seems you like that's a news story that somebody that doesn't work for the government who doesn't have a security clearance is briefing the press on background without their name attached. Not only that, but feels like that's actually a bigger news story than this bullshit's bin that he's offering on background. That's just one guy's opinion. Yeah, and the attribution that they're demanding of the press is they describe Jared Kushner as a senior administration official. What administration? Trump, Inc. Which makes him sound like he's on the National Security Council or something like that. But, you know, I would say there are three main points. I mean,

without going into sort of the weeds of what was discussed, there are three points that come out of this very clearly. Number one, the U.S. is ratifying or confirming Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz, because what they're saying in this MOU or how they're describing the contents of the MOU, the straight will be opened by Iran for the next 60 days free of charge. So the Iranians say, we're not charging tolls, we're charging environmental fees or some kind of administrative tax or surcharge or whatever. The U.S. says, no, no, you mustn't do that. But what they're basically saying is, yes, we acknowledge that you Iran, which did not control the Strait of Hormuz as of February.

February, whatever, the day before the war started, you now control it. And one of the things we have to litigate is who's going to control it in perpetuity. Maybe it's some kind of joint- You get the deals on sequa, you know, make sure that we's right. Well, there's where Jared comes in, right? Yeah. Yeah. So that's point one. Point two, the ceasefire also applies to Lebanon. Why is this important? Well, for two reasons. Number one, you will recall way back in the long, long ago, one of the operational objectives of Epic Fury, as the war was known, was to eliminate Iran's report. It's funny just to think about that. It's called Epic. It was called Epic Fury. It's a great name. I mean, it's like, you know, if you like type into Claude, hey, Claude, give my 12-year-old gamer kid the name for a cool military campaign. Claude would be too embarrassed to say Operation Epic Fury. But here we are. So one of the operational objectives was Iran must end its patronage financing, arming of,

terrorist proxies, including Lebanese Hezbollah. This agreement, or this MOU, basically upends that operational objective by certifying that Iran continues to control Lebanese Hezbollah by interlinking the war in Lebanon with the war in Iran, right? And you had Donald Trump today at the G7 get up and say, he's quite tired of seeing how the Israelis go to war with Hezbollah. They level entire apartment blocks. I think he made a comment like, we'd rather see the Syrians. Akhman Ahmed al-Sharaa would be better fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon than the Israelis. So this is a complete reversal of one of the core objectives of this war, right? Number three, JD Vance and Jared Kushner are kind of going around saying,

oh, there's no money up front, there's no money up front. Bullshit. On the call, Jared Kushner said that there will be, quote, small gestures made toward the Iranians for performance-based behavior. So, in other words, if the Iranians make good on opening up the strait, they get money. They get money anyway. Why? Because the naval blockade we imposed is costing them hundreds of millions of dollars per day by restricting their ability to export oil. So the minute we start rescinding our naval blockade and consequently they start exporting more oil, they're going to make money. And in a matter of a month, it's going to be in the billions of dollars, right? Then you had this kind of back and forth. Last Friday, the mayor news agency, which is ultra-conservative faction of the Iranian regime-controlled state media outlet put out their version of 14 points of this MOU. JD Vance took to Twitter and said, you know, I'm a little disappointed seeing people who

were otherwise very skeptical of Iranian propaganda, fall for Iranian propaganda. One of the big items in this memo, and I remember talking about it on Morning Joe with Scarborough was a $300 billion reconstruction package for Iran, $300 billion. Everyone win nuts. JD Vance, sprinkling cold water on it saying, don't believe the hype, don't believe the propaganda. He's asked by CBS. yesterday, what about this $300 billion? He's like, well, that's something that could be part of the deal, assuming they behave correctly.

Well, hang on. I thought it was fake news. Now it's real. Now the FTE publishes a more elaborate explanation saying, well, it's not going to be a government-run reconstruction fund. It'll be private enterprise. So here's where you get Jared and the Whitcock family into some real part-time. It's nicely of a senior administration official.

It also has a real state empire and investment company. Jared said on the call that one of the goals would be to assuming Iran behaves properly. And, you know, J.D. thinks it's, quote, cool that he now thinks the IRGC has seen the error of its ways. After 47 years, we're to get to that. We're to come back to JD. We'll come back to that. But, okay, so Jared said one of the end goals of this whole thing would be to quote, corral international investment in Iran. What does this sound like to you? I'll tell you what it sounds like to me. In 2016, after the JCPOA, the Barack Obama designed arms control agreement with Iran, who limit but not eliminate the nuclear program. After that was signed, ratified,

John Kerry went on what was known as a roadshow. He traveled to London. He met with European bankers. And it was quite awkward even for members of the Obama administration because Kerry was going around saying, hey, everything's cool. Iran, that war, that conflict, that's over, man. Come on in. The water's fine. You can invest in Iran. And by the way, we won't even enforce the remaining sanctions we have on the regime. So Jared Kushner is the new Kerry. Now, if you're a If you're, you know, an Israeli hawk, if you're an American pro-Israel hawk and you're seeing everything I've just described to you, danger, Will Robinson, danger. You know, Donald Trump was meant to be the guy. He called the JCPOA, one of the worst agreements he ever saw. And basically,

whether or not he realizes it, because I think he has just basically farmed this out to his, you know, squad of factotums, including his vice president and his son-in-law, whether he realizes it or not, Right now he is sleepwalking into something that would be, I think, materially worse than the JCPOA, because it's not just about a nuclear arms control agreement. This is about normalization with Iran, bringing Iran back into the international community, and potentially creating windfalls of cash for the Iranian regime, not just from the Gulf Arab countries, but European nations, Asia, you name it. And yes, members of his own family probably looking to capitalize on this,

because everything is about them and self-enrichment. My only quibble with that assessment is I don't think they're sleepwalking into it. I think their eyes very wide open, walking headlong into this deal. Except that I would say that Trump is also very sensitive and receptive to the pushback he's getting, right? Because you can tell based on his tenor right now. I mean, the Wall Street Journal has come down on him like a ton of bricks. They have an editorial today. He's calling this a capitulation.

They were very pro-war. Now they see the warning signs. Their editor at large is tweeting that this is a colossal mistake. I'm just throwing out there. I know that the Wall Street Journal editorial board thinks that we have TDS at the bulwark and thinks that the Atlantic has TDS, but maybe, maybe should have read a Rob, Bob Elena Kagan article at some point in the last five months if they, if they didn't see this coming. I told you. Everyone, everyone predicted this. You asked me at the start of this thing. I said, I think this is stupid. I think it's stupid for a number of reasons, not least of which, you don't

go to war with an erratic megalomaniac who does not like military campaigns. You don't say. And Donald Trump likes acts of war. He likes spectacular. you know, big operations where, you know, everything goes boom. He declares victory and you change the channel, right? He did not have the stomach to send, you know, marine expeditionary units to seize Cargile. And he was never going to put boots on the ground. He wasn't going to go the distance, right? And the Israelis, I think, were completely hoodwinked, thinking, oh, he's very pro-Israel. He helped us in last June bombing the Iranian nuclear program. He's in it to win it. Colossal mistake. B.B. has such egg on his face right now, and it's going to cost it.

He probably will lose the election as a result of this. Let's talk about the Israel side of this first second, because I got to a little tiff this morning with Dan C. Norr, who's in the podcast business also. This podcast called me back, which is, you know, he's American. It was a Republican foreign policy guy, a big Iraq war guy. And the podcast focused a lot on Israel and Israeli issues. You wrote a book about Israel.

And the strategic blunder of the pro-Israel hawks, I think you cannot overstate. And I know that they're very sensitive about bringing this up at this point. but, and I think they're hoping against hope that things get better. Call me back to not do the podcast, not done a podcast since the agreement, because he's like, I'm just waiting for the exact text.

I need to see the exact text. I don't want to be somebody out there blabbering about this without knowing the exact text. It's like, we don't need to see the exact text to know what's happening. Michael Bari Weiss is very capable of podcasting about this based on the background briefing calls from JD and the son-in-law. And like, the pro-Israel hawks,

Israel itself agitated Trump to get into this war, not saying that they were the puppet-mass behind it, but they pushed for the war. They pushed for the war in the situation room. They thought that they had a partner in this effort to overthrow the Iranian regime. That was the goal of the war at the beginning. It was regime change. 100% of the war at the beginning.

They decapitated the head of the regime. And when they got into this, that was the plan. This was their one opportunity to settle all their scores in the Middle East. And Donald Trump was going to have their back on it. It was an idiotic bet from the start. anybody who knows anything about Donald Trump and did not come out of a coma for the last 30 years knew that it was an idiotic bet. They did it anyway. And like, here they are.

Trump this morning is like talking about how they shouldn't even be involved in Lebanon and maybe Syria should be taking a greater role in what's happening in Lebanon. And he's telling BB to fuck off. And he's telling BB that he's telling BB that he told BB to fuck off. And it was a short term that I thought was going to be a medium term disaster. turned out to end up being a short-term disaster. Right. And BB's popularity, his poll numbers are cratering. You know, look, the Israelis are looking at this saying, what do we get out of it?

All we seem to have gotten out of it was we have been alienated from our greatest ally and our most important ally. The United States is now talking about restricting our freedom of movement. You know, it was a very telling thing that happened last week when Israel bombed Hezbollah. Iran was going to retaliate. In fact, it did retaliate by sending a... missile at Israel. Donald Trump's response to that was Israel don't respond. Right. I mean, unheard of. Israel cannot not respond to a missile attack by a terrorist regime like Iran.

It simply cannot. Its strategic doctrine goes kaput. So suddenly, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu gets on the phone with Trump, spends an hour cajoling him, persuading him, we have to do something in retaliation. Donald Trump's like, well, get it over with quick because you're going to fuck up my whole deal, my whole grand design. What is this? I call this a pair of golden handcuffs that have been placed on the Israelis. They went to war with the United States. They thought, this is amazing. The first time we have combined military action in the region against essentially the mothership of all of our discontent, right? Iran is the head of the snake. That's what the Israelis would call it. We need to cut off the head of the snake. And the Americans are with us to do this. Instead, this war is ending

where there were four operational goals. I mentioned one, right? Eliminate the financing and patronage of terrorist proxies. Now that's been reversed. Number two, destroy the missile program. Well, U.S. intelligence estimates they have about around 70% of their mobile launchers, around 70% of their pre-war stocks. And oh, by the way, access to, I think it's like 31 out of 33 missile silos along the Strait of Hormuz. Whoops. So much for destroying or even degrading substantially their missile perk. The Israelis say we got more of that. They didn't get enough of it, though, that Iran is precluded from firing missiles at Israel when it wants to retaliate it. Right? So we know that operational objective has not been achieved. Number two, eliminate once and for all the nuclear program. Well, okay, the centrifuges aren't spinning because they've been destroyed or heavily damaged, highly enriched uranium buried under the ground. But in this MOU, or in the contours of this MOU based on what's being discussed, there is no understanding of how we are going to exfiltrate highly enriched uranium or any uranium from Iran. That's all to be left undecided for a later day. The can is going to be kicked down the street.

and the Iranians have it in their interest to kick the can down the street, which is why CIA, John Ratcliffe and Marco Rubio, and even Pete Hegseth, God bless him, I never thought I'd say that, are saying, we don't trust the Iranians to make concessions on, I didn't mean to say that. I didn't mean to say that. I'm sorry. I retract that comment. Yeah, maybe instead of Pete Hegseth got bust and maybe like even somebody as mentally challenged as Pete Hegseth, even like one of the dumbest people that you've ever met can look at this situation and accurately assess. I meant to say, God love him in the Joe Biden, Irish Catholic sense of the phrase. God love him. But anyway, it came out, God bless him. Excuse me. Anyway, this is why CIA is leaking. The Iranians are not to be trusted on the nuclear fire. So there's three operational,

the one operational objective that you could argue has been completely achieved is the Iranian Navy is in the drink now. It's been destroyed. Okay, well done. Was that worth the expense in blood and treasure for this campaign? I ask you. I ask any Israeli. The answer, no, it wasn't. right? And now the money that Iran is going to make on the back of this thing, what are they going to use it? I think probably for their people. Hospitals, schools. Yeah, their people. Right. You know, maybe we'll, you know, they'll just quietly murder another 30,000. Economic opportunity throughout Iran, probably. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you're quite right. Regime change was always the goal. And don't let the revisionists tell you otherwise, because one of the exit interview slash profiles of David Barnaya, the now former Mossad director, it was, published in the Jerusalem Post, they explained quite clearly, we were going to run arms to the Kurds. We did. The expectation was the Kurds were going to create this insurgency to fight the IRGC.

Instead, the Kurds in Iran hoarded the weapons and the Starlink terminals. They were going to install Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a satrap in Tehran and possibly other actors that they recruited. The idea, the goal from the start was get rid of this regime. That has failed. And now the IRGC is firmly in control of the country. And they control at least half of Iran's economy. So they are going be the beneficiaries of any deal. I don't know about y'all. My calendar's full of outdoor activities this summer. In fact, we're doing Bayou weekend, going down to Coach O territory this weekend.

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While people listen to this, I do want them to listen for one key word, the word cool. And just keep that in the back of your mind and just like put a pin on the word cool because we're going to come back to that. But let's listen to JD Vance talking to Jake Tapper yesterday. The coolest thing about the progress we've made over the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system, senior leadership, even IRGC officials say, you know what? We may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we've done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake. Let's try something else. The coolest thing. The coolest thing.

They're going to try something new. The IRGC is like, you know what? You know, this rate of terror that we've thrown down in our people, death to America, death to Israel, that's not right. We want to join the community of nations. Yeah, I mean, I know JD Vance is like tight with Trita Parsi and the Quincy guys, but even they would blush to say the IRGC says it's seen the error of its ways. I mean, if you look at the Pentagon's in-house assessment, its own history of the Iraq war, IRGC-backed militias have more American blood on their hands than any other entity in Iraq, save for Al-Qaeda in Iraq, right? This is not a cuddly, kittenish military enterprise or organization here.

No. They exist. to spend some time face to face with Steve Witkoff. They got to hang with Wiccaught. They didn't even hang with him. They like, they like the cut of his jib. And they're just like, this guy. Right.

We could have what this guy has. He's got like a little corrupt deal with his family. They installed what the New York Post calls a probably gay supreme leader. I mean, it's a new woke, D-E-I-R-G-C, man. Come on, get with the program. Exactly. You know, you can have a wife and a side piece that bolts you off their shoulders. Totally.

It could be a different thing. J.D. ! went further than that on a background call. And I guess, Michael, you ruined it by telling us that you, you've already broken the White House agreement on this since you were not part of the agreement and said that it was JD. But Sam Stein and I were able to identify one of the speakers on the background call as well, based on that word, cool. Here's JD, you know, briefing reporters on the progress. And it's a similar thing to what he's saying to Jake. Everybody goes a little further.

one of the really cool things and interesting things about this entire process is that we actually have a direct relationship with a number of people at the highest levels of the Iranian government. Maybe the real treasure is the friends we've made along the way, says JD Vance, you know? The ones we chose not to kill. What we needed to do to make the friends was just bomb a girl's school. If we bombed a girls' school, then we could communicate with them. Because before the war, we couldn't have had a direct relationship with a number of people. It's like JD's discovering diplomacy from first principles. I think it's very interesting.

And I have to say, as somebody who really fundamentally dislikes JD Vance, I'm gratified to see him going out front as the principal salesman of this thing. Because this thing is a disaster for the United States. I mean, do you know the people who are briefing me and leaking? to me the most furiously right now are Republican hawks. People who, you know, found the JCPOA enathema. They are in absolute panic mode. Idiots, the FDD, all these fucking morons.

The FD guys are, no, no, no, no, no. In fact, the guys I'm talking about are telling me the FD guys are out to fucking lunch. They're in a cult of their own where they're saying, well, we need to see the deal. And like, you know, I mean, Mark Dubowitz, nice guy, but Jesus Christ. man. I mean, like, you know, they have absolute faith in Donald Trump to, to save the day on this. And, okay, you know, I mean, this is when you, you know, you go to some, like, ranch in Montana and drink, you know, Kool-Aid or whatever. Because I don't see that from Normie Republicans who have spent 30 years working on the Iran issue. Also, they fundamentally understand just how completely dysfunctional and batshit their own party is. They are the ones that are, are the most aggrieved and the most anxious right now. And JD Vance going out front, selling this thing, does several things at once. Number one, pisses them off, makes his ability to become the heir apparent for 2028 a little

harder because he looks stupid and naive and untrustworthy. Number two, Marco Rubio, everyone's like, where's Marco Rubio? I'm like, he's gone into occultation like the 12th Imam. He's hiding. Actually, now he's in the G7 meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky. He wants nothing to do with this, because he knows that this is a fucking. fucking turd, right? And he knows that this would scuttle his chance of being the nominee in 2028. But what does this also do? This gives Democrats hilariously, ironically, this gives them such ammunition because they can basically use the same narratives that they were peddling under

Obama to sell the JCPOA. JD Vance is now peddling, but peddling woefully in artfully, and in such a deranged fashion, that it's giving them ammunition to basically campaign as the party that is tough on Iran. So Democrats can run in 2028 as we're the hawks on Russia and frankly, relatively speaking, we're also the hawks on Iran because look at what this guy did. He just gave away the store. At least we're not the idiots. We're not the idiots. Right. Yeah. Right. You know, see the for idiots on Iran. Well, that's great. My man who did the, the Bullwark Pond theme song is now working on some Toy Story 5 stuff inside Toy Story in my mind. And I just was kind of thinking about it. I kind of want to spin off. You guys really have made it,

huh? Oh, yeah. And I was just kind of thinking of like JD and, and, and, the Iranian foreign minister with little Randy Newman in the background in Switzerland you got a friend in me anyway we'll see how it goes for Jaddy I'm happy he's making some friends we'll see he's got his book also I do want to shout this out

he's got his book out about his conversion a true a true miracle that he found a new god and a new political god at the same time he found two gods at the same time and he converted to both of their faiths simultaneously

Yeah. And it's something that can only happen, you know, with divine intervention. And so we're excited to read the book. And so JVL and I will be doing a live reading of the book together at some point on Wednesday. So keep an eye out for that on your substick and YouTube feed. I think that will be enjoyable. Get a rosé ready for that. Hiring people can be hard for me.

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It's true for us. It's true for me. I'm working harder when I know that the podcast is going to be fun. I'm working hard every day. You guys know that. But yeah, you know, there's that little extra juge

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That's Ziprecruiter.com slash bulwark. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. The Marco J.D. Fischer, I think, is notable here. Mark is the G7, I guess, we can talk about. Maybe he's doing some diplomacy there, I assume. He's not doing any media. Marco loves doing media. So that's unusual.

Why would he touch this thing with a barge pole? Well, he's going to have to come around on it. He's going to have to come around on it because Daddy Trump wants it. And Marco finds his, play around on everything eventually. But it's pretty telling that he is nowhere. I would prefer him at the G7 while Trump meets with Volodymyr Zelensky than doing this.

Dance being there. You noted, though, that the fissures in the fissures here are mapping exactly along the Russia. And isn't that interesting, right? So you've got Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, JD Vance, the people who want to trust Vladimir Putin, they want to end the war on terms favorable to Russia.

They're not particularly fond of. Ukraine. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have never been to Kyiv. Steve Witkoff's been to Moscow, I think, eight times. He's going again soon, allegedly. And, you know, Marco Rubio, who often says the party line and toes the administration line on Ukraine, discreetly does things to help the Ukrainians. And the Ukrainians will be the first to tell you this, and the Europeans the second. He scuttled that whole Fugazi, Dmitriev-Steve Witkoff info up, laundered by our friend Barack Ravid at Axios, turned that from being codified U.S. policy, which was the the goal of the Russians to put it out in the press so that we would have to accept it as the

actual plan of action. And basically, you've never heard of it again, right? It was watered down to the point of nullity. And now the Ukrainians are doing well. I'm sorry, they were firsted right on everything. I was told that in an Axis newsletter yesterday, they've been firsted and right. I have bad mouth to many people on this show. This is where you lead me astray. No, but I mean, it's true. He's like, and this is an argument I have with a lot of people who like myself, are deeply critical, if not hostile to this administration. There are certain actors in the administration, I would rather have be in the administration than not. Marco Rubio is one of them. And the other, I have to say, is John Ratcliffe, the CIA director. So, you know, you talk to

the Ukrainians, you talk to the Europeans, you talk to people close to CIA, and they'll tell you, one of the reasons that the U.S. intelligence relationship with Ukraine not only persists, but has deepened and expanded, is because of John Ratcliffe. And he has some weird, mystical ability to convince Donald Trump of doing things that are against Donald Trump's instincts, usually when they're on the golf links together at the weekend. And so I think it's very interesting that it's John Ratcliffe, the one leaking to Axios. This deal is a, you know, is a disaster waiting to happen. We can't trust the Iranians. Basically, you know, the factions within the White House are fighting it out in the press, right? And what Marco Rubio does next, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure he will say something that kind of sort of ticks the boxes, but we all know. know where he stands on this. Going back to the Israel thing, that was funny, I don't believe this is true,

but there was a leaked report out of like a right-wing Israel source in one of their outlets. I forget which one, that Trump threatened to fire Marco Rubio and Hanks out that they didn't get on board, which seems totally fake. What that does is acknowledge

that everybody knows what the factions are. And if you're trying to get a change result, like trying to do something to exacerbate that internal rift. Well, you also saw the New York Times reported citing the Pentagon that the Pentagon was doing collection suggesting the Israelis were spying on not just any old Americans, but JD Vance and his team. Well, now I think you know why they were probably doing that because they saw what was coming, yeah?

It's pretty noteworthy. Mark, I think, is interesting because simultaneously to the well-read, educated, people who know history, people who know geopolitics crowd. He seems more adultish, more adultish. I don't want to give him the credit to be an adult. He still is kind of like a little guy in a big chair. But like that's not the

path to winning a Republican primary. And so say what you want about JD and I will say a lot of negative things about him every single day on this podcast for the foreseeable future. But I don't know that his bet is wrong when it comes to like domestic politics within the Republican

party base. So. I think that's interesting. Yeah, but again, it all sort of sinks or swims on who Donald Trump sees as a worthwhile successor or worthy successor. And I think the problem JD Vance has is, you know, I think of JD Vance is the way I thought of Ed Miliband. He's just fucking weird. He's unlikable. He's anti-charismatic. You know, he gets up on TV and he says ridiculous things like the IRGC.

It's cool, man. They kind of get it now. After 50 years of fighting us, they want to be friends. No. Like, and even the base, it's like, they make. They may want an end to forever wars. They may have been against this war. But they don't want somebody who sounds like a dupe.

Like he's like, you know, fallen in love with a strategic adversary. Like a milk stop. I need, we need some Brits on it. One of the things that's been interesting about MAGA, if you look at the polling, they've not necessarily turned pro-Russia. And, you know, one of the other things I've been paying attention to is this kind of civil war or this split within MAGA. The podcast to stay in war.

But like, you know, Laura Loomer now, go into town on the Russians, talking about atrocities committed against Ukraine. And, you know, obviously there's personality. There's ego. You've got Tucker Carlson, Megan, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, all basically declaring their support for the Kremlin, not just with respect to the war in Ukraine,

but geopolitically, they should be strategically aligned with the United States. And now on the other side, and a lot of this has also fallen along the same line. battle lines that we've just described, right? You know, the pro-Israel anti-Iran element is also now increasingly anti-Russia because they think the Russians are meddling about and conducting influence operations to try and create this kind of schism or social unrest in the United States, particularly among conservatives, right? Turn conservatives into anti-Semites, turn them into anti-Israel activists. And, you know, there's some truth to that, of course, but it's very interesting to see the way things are shaking out. And I don't have any faith that Donald Trump

is going to abandon his lifelong quest to be besties with Vladimir Putin. It takes one phone call. It takes one meeting. Everyone gets excited when he says something that's seemingly pro-Ukraine. This is all a game of management, right? I mean, I think the Ukrainians are very clear-eyed about what needs to be done. He's never going to be pro. The best you can do is stop him from becoming so anti that it actually affects their fortunes on the battlefield.

And right now, their fortunes on the battlefield are quite good, right? They're winning. Well, they are. So we had Ann Appleman in the pod last week, she was talking about the progress that you Ukraine is making on the battlefield. I talked yesterday to Kaelin Robertson over on YouTube. He is on the ground in Ukraine and he was there at the church bombing, the Lavra bombing. And so, you know, they're simultaneous. Like there's progress on the battlefield and yet, you know, it's a burden on Ukrainians. Of course it is.

They're living through this situation where you have to continue to live through this where you have non-military targets getting hit with Russian missiles and groans, you know, that, that continues a pace, right? And, you know, that can only go for so long. So anyway, so Trump has Volodymyr Zelensky today at the G7. What's your take on the state of affairs there? I mean, some of the optics going into this are okay. The big meeting that happened in the White House in the last couple of days was Trump met Ussick, you know, the world heavyweight boxing champion, who is exactly the kind of guy the Ukrainian should have sent to meet Trump because, you know, he's big. He's good-looking. You know, he's a fighter and he's a winner.

And do you remember, well, of course you do, the infamous meeting in the White House in February of 2025 where both Trump and JD Vance dressed down, Volodymyr Zelensky, humiliated him. At that meeting, the Ukrainian delegation as a way to flatter or befriend Donald Trump, one of the little prizes they gave to Trump was a replica of Ussk's championship belt. And when the meeting all went to shit, everyone was like, crap, we got to get Usik's belt back. And Trump just kept it, right? So now he had the belt. And a year and a half later, he meets the champion himself. And apparently, I mean, this all went

down very well. So Keith Kellogg, the former special envoy to Ukraine and his daughter, Megan Mobs, they arranged for this meeting with Usik. And you can see from the photos, I don't know if all of them have been released publicly, Trump is actually, he's smiling. He looks happy next to Usik, right? He's less happy next to Volodymyr Zelensky because he doesn't like Volodymyr Zelensky. In fact, he hates And that's never going to change. Why? Because in his mind, he sees Volodymyr Zelensky as inextricably bound up with his first impeachment in term. Right. Right. And unfortunately, the Ukrainians have no workaround solution for that. As I say, and this is, I want to be clear about this. It's never going to be Trump will be on their side. And imagine if he were. Imagine if a guy like Trump, who's obviously willing to go to war with countries that everyone says you shouldn't go to war with. Imagine if he had gone all in with Ukraine. They probably would have driven the Russians out of Crimea by now. And, and. Right? But the Ukrainians are doing okay, actually better than okay, for the first time in several years, for a number of reasons. Number one, they have realized that they need to domestically source the munitions required to fight this kind of war, which is ever evolving, ever modernizing, right?

I mean, this is a drone war. It's not necessarily being fought with heavy armor and tanks. I mean, you need infantry to hold the line, of course. You need human beings, and they're always going to have a manpower shortage. But they have really got the advantage in terms of military technological innovation. And that's done two things at once. Number one, it's now really interdicting Russian supply lines, particularly in the South. They're cutting off, you know, the lines of communication to Crimea, and their drone operators are talking openly about this as a strategy now. Number two, it's allowing Ukraine to claw back some territory. They continue to lose territory in one place, but they claw back territory elsewhere. But number three, and perhaps most importantly,

it's made a utilitarian argument for Ukraine. It's not just about moral support, solidarity, the humanitarian suffering. Now Ukraine has something to offer the West, including the United States. And I mean, even Trump's, you know, idiotic sons are investing in Florida-based drone companies that are looking to acquire Ukrainian drone technology. So, I mean, that's the register that I think the Ukrainians need to use with this administration. And they have. The other Russia story for this week from the BBC that's like pretty crazy is it feels like

it's out of the show The Americans, but I guess this show would be called The Brits or something, but there was some Russian spy outfit that instigated an arson attack on Keir Starmer. I mean, this is what the Russians have been doing for a few years now. Since the war and since international travel has been restricted, rather than send their own operatives into Europe, they are recruiting just either organized criminal elements or kids, riff-raft, people who are basically what I would call gig terrorists, looking to make easy money, in some cases, a thousand pounds or even less. They connect with a Russian handler on telegram, and the handler tells

them, go in graffiti a wall with swastikas or Stars of David, go and foment race hatred over here, or in this case, go and firebomb the home of the prime minister of the UK. Now, the suspects, actually hopefully you got more than a thousand pounds for that. I think it was just not very much more than that, actually. Again, these are just kids, in most cases, they're looking to make easy money. So what the Russians are doing is they're recruiting Ukrainians, right, because they want it to look like Ukraine is behind the spade of terrorist attacks. But really, it's Russians. And in this instance, the handler was, I think, a 23-year-old kid who's the son of a Russian diplomat.

What was interesting to me, though, and this kind of all my greatest hits come back around. So this kid studies at Moscow State University's Diplomatic Academy, which is run by their foreign ministry. The Diplomatic Academy at Moscow State University has a media program run by Riber. Riber is a sanctioned state media organization that does, among other things, according to the U.S. government,

tries to foment, you know, ethnic tensions, race, hate crimes in the West, all kinds of provocations, sabotage operations. And two of the instructors in this program on information warfare run by Riber, you mentioned the Americans, literally,

one of the instructors was an SVR illegal, known in the United States for however many decades living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as Donald Heathfield. You remember when the FBI rounded up all those guys, including Anna Chapman? That was the premise for the show, the Americans. This guy is an SVR illegal now teaching kids how to recruit people in the West to blow things up in the West, including the Prime Minister's House. And another guy involved in this program was a quote-unquote diplomat stationed in the Russian embassy in London. back in 2010 when I live there, and I wrote about him, what did this guy do? His name is Sergen al-Lobin. His father is FSB, was a general in the KGB, and then an FSB officer was actually the boss of Alexander Litvinenko, you know, the FSB defector who Vladimir Putin poisoned with polonium in the UK.

Lin-Lobin is most certainly a Russian intelligence officer. He was stationed in the Russian embassy, and he helped found an organization called Conservative Friends of Russia, which was a basic Tories for Vladimir Putin. This is going back, what, 15, 16 years now. Sir Malcolm Rifkin, who in Thatcher's government, he was the president of this organization until he realized it was a front created by Russian intelligence. Nalobin kicked around the world. He left the UK. He went to Estonia. Now he's sitting in a fucking ivory tower in Moscow teaching kids how to recruit other kids to blow things up in the West. So you see, I mean, these efforts were put in place many, many years ago. Nothing is new here.

The Russians have just now got, you know, they're on a war footing. They're recycling all their old cadres who claim to be interested in rapprochement or normal, stable relations with the West. No, they're looking to set things off in the West. Is there any kids listening to this in the back of your parents' car and you're trying to make some extra cash like only fans or something? Okay, like there are a lot of ways to do make gig money these days besides firebomb in the prime minister's house. That's a bad, that's a mistake. Yeah, they'll probably be into that too. Last thing. You know, Bill made this point yesterday, given the humiliation in Iran, no matter how Trump tries to spin it, I think it seems obvious that what is next is a retrenchment back to his Don Roe doctrine nonsense, you know, with Cuba seeming to be at the top of the list there. Do you have a sense for what's happening, you know, with regards to Cuba?

Yeah. So the policy as told to me by somebody who would know is, coercive diplomacy and coercive economic measures designed to force Cuban intelligence and the hardliners in that regime to open it up, privatize the country, allow foreign direct investment, probably from the very outspoken and hyperactive diaspora in Florida. And short of that, you know, if there needs to be some kinetic operation, there probably will be. But their goal is not to do any kind of military campaign. You know, I saw a lot of chatter. they're going to snatch Raoul Castro just turned 96. He can't get out of bed without the help of his grandson, Raulito.

Raulito is one of the guys that the Americans are parlaying with because they see him as amenable to some kind of brokered agreement. So it's not regime change per se, but it's regime transition all of Venezuela. They just haven't found Adelsi Rodriguez yet that they can rely on. But one of the interesting things that they've been doing, you know, people assume that because we've had this blockade in place since, you know, 59, 60, sanctions had been crippling on Cuba. No, the blockade was related to

American transactions with Cuba. Now they're imposing sectoral sanctions on Cuba, going after Gaesa, which is, I mean, like the IRGC runs the Iranian economy, the Cuban intelligence runs the Cuban economy. So what they're doing is basically putting a gun to the head of these strongmen in Havana saying, you can keep some of your ill-gotten gains. Like, we're not here to take your money away, but you have to work with us. You have to do business a la Donald Trump. And if you don't, then we're going to take everything away and you're going to lose it all. So it's kind of a mafia tactics, I think. More 89, 91 in terms of, you know, the transition they're looking to achieve rather than A of Pigs 2, Electric Bugaloo. Now, who knows? It's Donald Trump,

right? You know, mercurial, erratic, megalomaniacal, Cubans could piss him off. In the meantime, that has been, I was doing some long reads on this. I'm like the economic ramifications there. It's terrible. It's really horrified. No, I mean, there's, I think, 23 hours of blackouts a day, hardly any food in the grocery store. You know, they were very well known for their medical industry. Cuba would always send doctors to places like Venezuela.

I mean, also intelligence assets, but, you know, this was their big thing. Michael Moore did a whole documentary on Cuban health care. All of that's, you know, kaput now. No, it's an immiscerated third world island nation. And I think that's part of the game here. You know, we can give you relief. We can give you humanitarian assistance, but it's not going to be run through the regime. It's going to be run through the Catholic Church or charities that we select.

And this is Marco Rubio's, this is his kit and caboodle right here, right? He's the Western Hem guy. That's why he's staying out of the Iran thing. If he can deliver Cuba, if he can put an end to Castroism, at least as it's been known, for the last half century. I think in his mind, he is the heir parent. I think in Donald Trump's mind, he's more likely to be the heir parent. And in the GOP's mind, I mean, good luck to Democrats take in Florida,

because that'll be that state wrapped up for them for the foreseeable, right? So there are political calculations, clearly, domestic political calculations here. But I know people that are very close to a three-letter agency who say they don't want to do war. They don't want to do an invasion of any kind or a rendition of anybody. They think they can get it through other means. Who knows? Well, that's my kind of handsome right there. He's a noodle boy like Chalamey.

You know, he's smart, crafty. It's Michael Bari Weiss. Good hair, dude. You're talking about me. Yeah, good haircut. Yeah, you're not a dream boat. I'm just trying to, yeah, I'm just trying to make amends for the intro. I don't know, man.

You're still not a dream boat. Comments on the bulwark subsack, you got some 60-year-old resistance wine moms who think I am, Timothy Shalamay. So you better watch out. You're going to piss off some of your audience there. All right, noodle man. That's Michael Bari Weiss. Appreciate him as always. Thank you for your wisdom. Up next, Sam Forstack.

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It's Sam Forstack. Sam, I got to start with a, I got a bone to pick with you. So that's okay. Oh, perfect. We're starting on the right foot. I was doing some research to prepare for this interview. And I came across the interview you did with something called the pulp. I don't know the pulp.

But in that interview, the reporter says that you invited him to your home or to some place where you were in a sauna. And you did the interview while doing a schvitz. And so I'm like, why wasn't I invited to do a shirtless interview with you, I guess is the question. I feel like I'm a second class journalist. I didn't get that. So I got to have some way to make sure we get a second interview in. You know, I can't give it all the way at once. Got it.

Okay. Well, any son, I'm available for sauna interviews. I guess is all I'm going to offer here as well. I'd recommend people read that. It's pretty good. In it, I kind of learned about your background, but I still am not sure I really know what a smoke jumper is. And so I thought maybe you could just start by telling us about your background and what exactly smoke jumping entails. Smoke jumpers are just another kind of wildland firefighter.

We are airily delivered. So we parachute into remote wildfires to put them out before they grow. And the way the smoke jumping program has always been pitched since 1939 when it started, it's speed, range, and payload. So we jump out of fixed wing aircraft, out airplanes, parachute at 3,000 feet nowadays on the system that we use. And, you know, it's just another way to get to a fire with less hiking, but a whole lot more on the back end. typically. That sounds scary. That sounds a little scary for my taste. It can be. Yeah, depending on how big the jump spot is. It's either terrifying or beautiful. But a way I read an interview with a Russian smoke jumper and the way he described smoke jumping is for three minutes, fly like eagle and for three weeks, dig like mole. That seemed pretty accurate to me. Are there increasing needs for that? Like with, you know, climate change, everything? Like how it's hard for me to kind of get a grasp on, you know, that. It kind of feels like we've been having more, you know, fires in the mountain west lately. Oh, absolutely. I mean, it used to be fire season and parts of the West, it's just a year-round occasion now. You know, you got fires in Colorado or California that are burning all the way through December or January. And that means a whole lot more resource needs that we're all paying for. And it's both the fact that summers are hotter and drier and longer. And it's also the fact that we have 100 years of large-scale fire suppression on the landscape and disinvestment from active forest management, from the sort of things that you would.

do between fire seasons to make sure that homes and the wild and urban interface don't have trees grown right up to your back porch. And to make sure that those fires aren't quite so hard to fight once they start, that's a lot of what I'm running to change. It's the fact that when we disinvest up front, whether it's wildfire or healthcare, we end up in a state of constant crisis response governance where we all end up paying so much more for so much less. And it's the same if it's a fire burning into a subdivision. And so you've got to call in a large air tanker to drop retardant to stop that thing before a house burns, or if it's a 62-year-old woman sitting in the emergency room at St. Patrick's, the hospital here at Missoula, we all end up paying so much more

for the least effective way to solve that problem. Yeah, so let's talk about that a little bit. So that's kind of related to your origin story of why you decide to run for Congress and, you know, the cuts that you were seeing following Doge. Talk about that and what you saw on the ground. Because then I think obviously, and Doge was so widespread as kind of hard for people to get their hands around everything. And for good reason, USAID got, I think, a lion's share of the attention as well as the people who are losing jobs in D.C. because they know the D.C. reporters, right? But this stuff was happening all over the country. Talk about what you saw up close. Yeah. I mean, when all these doge cuts started, I was going into my fourth season of smoke jumping. I was also a vice president

at my union's local. It's Niffey Local 60, we're the first unionized national forest in the country on the Lolo here just outside of Missoula. And they ended up firing about a quarter of the Forest Service in Montana in one year, just last year. And most of the people that they fired in the name of efficiency were folks making less than 20 bucks an hour, swinging tools in the woods and making sure that you can make it up a road to a trailhead or up a trail to access your public lands or conducting the science to keep our air and water clean. None of that is about efficiency. It was all about power and consolidation.

And when I reached out to Ryan Zinke, the schlub we got sitting in office here as our representative, I got crickets time and time again. So I decided if he's going to come take my coworkers and my members jobs. I'm going to come take his. And then he backed out. So you can have won in step one already. And now you're running against a different kind of magistooge. Yes.

Yeah. We got another political puppet in Aaron Flint. He's a little talk radio host who's been spewing hate and hot air on the radio for the last 10 or 15 years. Well, a lot of us have been actually doing the damn work and trying to help our neighbors. I think that it is a perfect little encapsulation of what we're looking at as a country. people, you know, one side that is just trying to inflame hate and the vision. And, well, one side that I think we need to change to make a version, a vision of what this country can be, which is bringing people together and actually starting to solve big problems again.

Let's not turn spewing hot air into a pejorative, okay? Some of us are grinding away on that. What are you hearing from people in Montana, right? Because this is something that I'm, you know, trying to wrap my arms around, which is, it seems to me that Trump is disproportionate, hurting people in rural America, whether that be farmers with the tariffs. You know, we could kind of, you know, if you just look at the economic stats, it's a lot of the more rural parts of the country that have been hit harder. This is something that affects everybody in Montana, right? The types of cuts you're talking about.

On the other hand, a lot of the voters, you know, who live in those areas, like the information they're getting are from people like your opponent, you know, they're getting a lot of They're getting a lot of misinformation and wrong information on Facebook, talk radio, podcasts, et cetera. Is it breaking through the damage that his policies are causing? Like, what are you hearing from people on the ground? Yeah, I would say it's, you cannot miss it, right? If you're now paying nearly five bucks a gallon at the pump and you're in a place like

Montana where, well, you measure the distance in hours instead of miles between one town or city and the next, everybody is feeling it. And we are in a state here in Montana where we, by some metrics, have the least affordable housing market in the country. You know, wages relative to the cost of housing, the cost of buying a house is doubled or tripled or worse in Missoula or Bozeman or Flathead Valley. And, you know, I worked between fire seasons for a group of homeless shelters, the Montana Coalition to Solve Homelessness for three years. We got cities where homelessness has doubled or tripled across Western Montana, and that's because housing is unaffordable. So people are feeling it. I'll tell you, one of the

tough conversations I've had in the last five months of this campaign is a lot of people asking me a different version of that question. It's like, well, a quarter of your co-workers voted for Trump or Brian Zinke, did they see that they were wrong, right? Do they see that they messed up? And that is kind of missing the point because a lot of these folks were hurting before Donald Trump got elected a second time. And that is how we got into this mess. I mean, I was making $19 an hour jumping out of airplanes for the U.S. Forest Service at the end of 2024 in a community where you cannot find a home for less than a half million dollars if you're lucky. And I'm seven years in and there's guys who are 20 plus years in making that same wage in the same community, the same housing market.

So their life did not improve materially over the preceding four years. And you know what? If your life gets worse on a material basis while one party's in power and you vote for the party out of power, that's how democracy works. And it's a shame that those are the kind of options that we left people with. So let's give people a better option. Yeah. I mean, I understand the tendency to want people to be like, you know, you really nailed it on this Trump thing. You were exactly right. I mean, you know, being told that you're right. Everybody likes being told that they're right.

But it's not really how politics works. It's not politicking. I guess my version of that question to you, when you think about your, you know, a lot of the guys you work with were Trump voters, you said it. It's said in the article that I read. And so, you know, politics comes up. You're chatting with them. Now you're running. of course there are some issues where, you know,

they're just going to be fundamental disagreements, right? Of course, there are to be some areas where maybe there's some alignment. Nobody wants high cost for gas and housing. I'm wondering, is there anything where you are talking to them and you're like, you know, I think that these guys had a point in their criticism of the Democratic Party. Oh, yeah, how much time you got, Tim? Absolutely.

As much as you want. I mean, a big part of why I got into this is because, you know, we've had some, you know, nationally momentous. leaders in the history of Montana, right? I mean, John Tester I got to sit down with last week. He was somebody who was able to get things done even in the terribly broken confines of the United States Congress and Senate that we've lived with over the last, you know, five, 10 years. Mike Mansfield, you know, John Rankin. But what I see when I look at Congress is a Congress where the average member is worth three to four million dollars, depending on the day and how good

the stock market's doing. Meanwhile, the average Montana is making 60,000 bucks a year. What I see when I look at Congress is a place where the average members worth 15 times the average American, and you look empirically and working people have fallen behind. As a matter of material well-being and real wages adjusted for cost of living over the last 10, 30 years, and it does not seem like there's a sense of urgency addressing that grievance, right, economic grievances to nearly the extent that there ought to be. And what happens when you don't address people's basic material needs when the market is not meeting those things is they fester and they.

turn into misdirected grievances, and you got people like the schmucks in power who tell you, you know why you're poor, you know why your life's getting worse? It's because the brown people or the women. And it's not any of those folks. It's the very small slice of people getting incredibly rich off of all of these broken systems. And those same people have sunk their claws into Congress and into the halls of power in a way that even when we can pass major good policies like the bipartisan infrastructure law, a disproportionate amount of that money goes to large corporations and not into working people's pockets. And we should be pissed off about that. I hear you on all that.

That sounds like something Joe Biden could have said, though. I mean, maybe you would have had any credibility saying it. But I do wonder, you know, I mean, some of this stuff for voters in Montana, it's cultural. Like they think that the Democratic Party was too lax in immigration or too lax on crime or whatever it is. You know, when you think about those issues, are there areas of commonality or common ground at all with MAGA voters? I think broadly, and I'm sure you've experienced this too, I think that somewhere where we have messed up is we got the power of language. all backwards as a movement on the left, as Democrats, whatever you want to call it. And I got a front row seat to this because for the last eight years, I've been fighting

wildland fire for six to nine months a year. And then in between fire seasons, I'd go work for groups like the ACLU of Montana doing really important work defending our basic constitutional freedoms when the far right made it their mission to attack those things. And they attack them largely because they don't want you talking about the fact that they're picking our pockets by cutting the top income tax rate. then once you're talking about where someone's going pee. And that's not the role of government at all I would offer.

And so what I would see is sometimes I got one or two days between a fire season where I just worked a thousand hours of overtime. And then I'm on a Zoom meeting. And we spend the first 20 minutes of that Zoom meeting doing ice breakers, right? Or offering our pronouns, which I am perfectly comfortable with in which I think was a healthy part of the movement, but which a lot of the folks that I worked with would not be comfortable with because they aren't steeped in that language.

they, you know, perhaps they haven't been through that, you know, they haven't gone to university, they haven't been in spaces where that's part of it. And what we have ended up doing is creating a language of power where a lot of poor and working people actually would not feel comfortable in that space. And if we as progressives care about poor and working people and improving their lives, we should be creating spaces where they would feel welcome to and where we are not going to eject them immediately if they stumble and if they fail to, you know, to keep up with a, you know, a changing language that is changing before their eyes. I think that's somewhere we've messed up as the left.

And that's somewhere where we've ended up leaving a lot of people behind who should be part of our coalition. That's right. A lot of the language stuff came from college-educated folks, not working people. You know, we're working people just weren't talking like that. And also there's a silliness to it. I mean, again, I respect everybody's, you know, right to exist. And we should certainly not try to infringe on anyone's basic rights to live however they want.

But like, Sam Forstag is a he, him. Like, we didn't, you didn't need to announce it really. you know, like nobody's confused about it. And so, like, that's why I thought there's like an element of silliness to this. Like it feels a little silly at times. Yeah. And as just as importantly, we don't need to eject somebody from that space if they aren't ready to be using that language just yet because these things take time, right?

And because, you know, again, if you're out in the field for six months and then you show up in a space like that, well, some of these folks, they quite literally do not know the words. And you should not have to know the specific words to be involved in a space where you're changing policy or involved. and what the future of our state looks like. I just want to talk to you about a couple policies really quick. So you said you were doing ACLU work. I'd like to hear a little bit more about that broadly, but particularly there's a big question around freedom of speech. And I think that the right kind of weaponize this topic successfully,

going after the Democrats in the Biden administration, going after ways in which this was about this was about, in my opinion, kind of marginal things about the Biden administration, trying to tell tech companies what to do, you know, regarding content related to the pandemic. etc. But this worked and we do have a First Amendment in this country and I think there were a lot of voters that voted for Trump because they thought he was going to be a free speech candidate, something that the ACLU works on as well. And so I'm just kind of wondering what your work was

focused on where you fall on those conversations around free speech. Yeah, I mean, the ACLU, as it was conceived, actually, it's an organization that's supposed to defend your civil liberties regardless of what side you fall on. The ACLU was defending the KKK's right to protest, not because they're not schmucks, not because that is not a despicable organization, but because our First Amendment and the right to free speech and demonstration is something that benefits all of us when it's out in the open instead of suppressed. So we can address hateful ideas. What I was working on was largely criminal justice reform. It was free speech. It was pushing back against a lot of what I would offer distractions that the Republicans empower in this state were spending two-thirds of their time

singing and dancing about while they picked all of our pockets and continued to cut top tax rates for the people who need it the least in this state. And what I found is that there actually are a lot of opportunities to find common ground and work across the aisle. I mean, we ended up getting some major criminal justice reform policies passed in this state. Even in 2023, when at that point I was organizing with Montana Innocence Project, we passed a reform to ban fines and fees for juvenile defendants in the criminal justice system, kids facing time behind bars, in Miles City and Eastern Montana, who were getting out of Juvia with $10,000 plus of debt just from the court fees that they'd racked up. And you wonder why recidivism rates

are so high, right? You wonder what the heck you're supposed to do when you get out of Juvia at 18 and you got $10,000 of debt and no resources, no prospects. Well, that's a system that is designed for people to fail. And we were able to pass that in a Republican supermajority because even folks, you know, on the right, people who voted for the other side, they might know what it's like to have a family who's tied up in the carcoral system. Those are broadly the issues I was working on. One other issue I wanted to ask you about is foreign policy. Obviously, we got the memorandum of understanding, I guess, with Iran that we're working on,

maybe a deal on Friday. We're talking about that in the first segment. I wonder what your thoughts were on the war broadly, how Democrats handled it, and kind of what your mindset would be on foreign policy issues if you got in there. I would say if there was anything redemptive about the America First platform, it was this notion that we were going to end these needless, endless, endless, wars. And it turned out that that was just another lie. And now we are raining chaos and cruelty overseas in Iran at immense cost and blood and treasure to us as Americans, the service

members. And that doesn't benefit any of us. And what I read a headline that we are planning to potentially spend $300 billion to pay for reconstruction of the damage that we rot as a country. Imagine the good that we could do with that kind of investment. I mean, when I go around Montana, I'm sitting down in a mobile home lot last week with a gal who has watched your lot rent. increased by two to three times in the last five years. There are people being priced out of house and home. There are people who are losing healthcare coverage by the millions because, well, we let those ACA subsidies expire

and we don't have the gall or gumption to actually fix a health care system. $300 billion could do a lot of good. It could pay for a lot of free child care. And instead, what it's paying for is us rebuilding something that we just blew up. That's a damn shame. And we should be so pissed about it. And I think people on both sides are pissed as I'm talking to them. I want to talk about managing the Democratic Coalition.

You've done something so far that's pretty impressive. I don't understand how exactly. But if you're just on Twitter, if you're on the Internet, there is like a never-ending war, speaking forever wars between kind of like the Bernie people and the moderates and the Democratic coalition. Imagine what we can do with that energy. Exactly.

I wish it was being channeled a different place. So you've been able to do that. I've heard from my lefty friends that you're a candidate that they're watching. supporting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came out there to campaign from you. A lot of my more moderate friends, I Liz Smith on the podcast the other day with majority Dems. They supported your campaign. John Tester, you mentioned. It supported your campaign. Can you tell other people what the special sauce is on that? Because unfortunately, I see a lot of Democrats who sometimes find themselves in the sour spot where like both sides don't really feel like they represent

them. And for whatever reason, you know, you've managed to unite the tribes a little bit. Talk about how you think that that went down. I would say it's twofold. But this campaign has been based on it's two premises. It's first that the basic function of government is to help people meet their basic material needs when the market is not meeting them. And right now the market is not meeting a whole lot of basic needs. Like right now people are failing to afford a roof over their head. Right now people are working two or three jobs at a time in a place like Montana and struggling to afford health care when a marketplace plan is 800 bucks a month for bad health insurance or when child care costs $19,000 a year if you can make it into a child

care program, let alone retirement, where people's social security checks are not keeping up with cost of living. And those material needs are actually unifying issues. People who voted for Joe Biden or Harris or Donald Trump, none of them want to see their neighbor's homes bought out from underneath them. And my basic notion here is that if we can focus on those things first, we can build a coalition and we can get to the other notions of empathy and compassion and the level that we need to extend to our neighbors next, because it's a whole lot of easy. to extend the kind of empathy and compassion that you ought to to your neighbor if you're not having to work three jobs at a time just to fill the damn fridge. And that that's a reasonable

expectation. And the second premise here is that people are tired of being so damn angry. I am. Like it does not get us anywhere to have these campaigns where the entire premise of why you should vote for me is that you should hate the other guy more than you hate us. And that is what it felt like living through the last campaign. It felt like we had a whole lot of candidates who were saying, look how terrible and atrocious and despicable the other side is. That's why you should vote for us as Democrats, and that is not cause enough to engage with politics or to give people any sort of hope for what our government can do for us. We should be really pissed at both sides if that's the sort of campaign they're running,

because to me that reads as distraction from the actual issues that people are facing on a day-to-day basis. And I think the way that we get past that is to say, well, here are the concrete ways that we can fix the material problems that you're facing. and you know what if a government, if a Congress that is largely populated by the rich and powerful is not addressing working people's problems with the level of urgency it deserves, maybe we should start sending working people to Congress again. Because you bet your tail I'm going to deal with a housing crisis with a little bit more urgency. If I know what it's like to be working three jobs at a time while I'm going to classes and still coming up short on rent. And most people in this country, or at least the people I know here in Montana, know what that's like. Most of the people in Congress, it does not seem like they do.

You're covering a lot of heavy material and serious material that's very important to voters there, and I appreciate that. I appreciate that. And so this is a tough transition for me because I'm a podcast host, but we're going to end with something a little more frivolous. Okay. Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, would not tell me what their workout routine is. Okay. Both of those guys are fit. You know, they're going to the Senate and they're looking good. You know, the Republicans have somehow, co-opted this with Maha, even though they have a lot of fat body politicians in Congress. There was a guy Abe Hamaday, who is a congressman from Arizona that was posting a weird AI meme about how it's important to be fit yesterday. I feel like the Democrats can recapture some of this. So my question for you is, will you finally be the person that tells me what the workout routine is? So, you know, some of us are looking to improve our arms. You know, we're trying to figure out what to do. Well, I'll tell you, a regular sauna does a lot of good. And I can tell you

you could use a sauna, Tim. So you should swing by. I could. I could. Thank you. Beyond that, my workout routine has rapidly diminished since we started this campaign. It turns out working wake to sleep for months on end doesn't do good for your health. But for jumpers, there was always calisthenics, right? If I got time, if I got 30 minutes, I'll go out there and I'll jump rope and do burpees. And that's a pretty good way to smoke yourself in 30 minutes. So that's what I've been doing. Jump rope and burpees, huh? Oh, yeah. How many burpees do I got to be doing to get into smoke jumping shape? Well, a guy like you, you look pretty close from what I can tell, sitting across a screen.

No, I'm not. Thank you, but I'm not that close. Thank you. I'm going to ladies' weights class, and I'm getting mugged by the moms half the time. So that's not true. Okay. All right. Well, look into the burpee routine.

Well, I'll ask Claude to see if they can help us with it. All right. That's Sam Forsig. What's your website? People want to support you and what you're up to. The website is samformontana.com. All spelled out. Yeah, please go check.

it out. Check out our policies. You're going to find an excessively detailed policy platform because policy is my love language. And if you can spare it, please go and donate because I need all the help we can get. And the angry, hate spewing talk radio host, nothing like Tim Miller, the one that I'm against here in the general election. He's got a whole lot of money behind them. And we got a whole lot of people. So I need help from all over to win this thing. And it's a stretch race. I wrote about this last Friday. But it's doable, though. Republicans have won the seat for a while, but Tester won it narrowly. very narrowly. Obama one,

I know there's been some redistricting, but you kind of map out what it would have looked like Obama in the district. So it's doable, but it's a stretch. And hopefully it can be a place where we can kind of turn the tide

a little bit. So appreciate you very much, Sam. I look forward to seeing you and Asana soon. Thanks also to Michael Bari Weiss for his expertise. Everybody else will be back here tomorrow

with another edition of the show. See you all then. You got a friend in me. You've got a friend in me. When the road looks rough ahead and your miles and miles from your nice warm bed You just remember what your old past is. Boy, you got a friend in me. The Borg podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper,

Associate producer Anzley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.