In this episode, I sit down with Joe Biden to talk about his time in Congress, the upcoming 2020 election, and what he s looking forward to in 2020. We also talk about the future of the ACLU and how they plan to fight for civil liberties under a Trump administration.
00:02:33.200Tell me about how you at the ACLU are thinking about your plans to try to defend American civil liberties in this term versus the first term.
00:02:44.920Well, we've been planning for almost a year.
00:02:47.280We were anticipating the possibility that he would win this election.
00:02:50.320So we've spent thousands of staff hours studying Project 2025, tracking the campaign promises, going back and playing back what happened in Trump 1.0 to see what might happen with Trump 2.0.
00:03:03.460And so we've been trying to get ready for this whole period of time.
00:03:07.140Clearly, we can't run the same playbook.
00:03:49.560Where do you really push the envelope?
00:03:51.800And that's what really we're working through right now.
00:03:53.760If you're not going to play ball, then you're going to be an enemy.
00:03:58.300And so you either settle a defamation lawsuit the way that ABC did or you kind of kowtow in advance.
00:04:05.900And you kind of say, you know what, I've done the cost benefit analysis and it makes better sense for me and my financial bottom line to be able to keep a safe distance from you if you're Donald Trump.
00:04:17.200Yeah, the ABC settling that defamation suit really was not helpful to anyone in the press, frankly, because that only has emboldened people in Trump world.
00:04:30.120You know, if you talk to the lawyers this weekend over what happened, they're very, very happy.
00:04:52.300We really didn't like that 60 Minutes thing.
00:04:54.000And then on Sunday night at the New York Young Republican Club gala, which I attended, you know, the keynote speaker was Steve Bannon.
00:05:00.420And Steve Bannon was talking about it's time to prosecute the news media and people on this network as well.
00:05:07.540And so what has previously been confined to the ethers of the MAGA universe is now coming out to the fore and they're feeling emboldened to do it.
00:05:17.520And I think we should take this extremely seriously because they're saying it out loud now.
00:05:21.460Yeah. When you talk to regular Americans who aren't lawyers, who aren't people who are engaged in this fight in a practical paid to do it as part of their job kind of way.
00:05:32.000And you hear people feeling intimidated, feeling overwhelmed by the pace at which we're getting sort of alarming news about the extremism of their plans.
00:05:42.040What do you tell them about the prospects for holding line?
00:05:45.520The local governments, you know, the state attorneys general, the governors, the mayors.
00:05:50.500We have this whole plan around a firewall for freedom, we call it.
00:05:54.240The idea that these local officials can really play an important role in stopping the worst of the government abuses.
00:06:00.960Well, for instance, when they're going to try to detain and deport all these hundreds of thousands, up to a million people.
00:06:06.700That's an operation that they have the legal power to do, to do the raids, but the logistics.
00:06:12.660And they're going to need mayors and governors or city councils to either give them access to police officers or not, jails.
00:06:23.120We're even going to house all these folks, right?
00:06:25.440And so part of what we're doing is we're preparing executive orders and we're organizing our folks to put pressures on elected officials so they don't roll over.
00:06:33.900They should sever these relationships they have with the federal government on immigration enforcement.
00:06:38.900They should make sure that our prisons and our jails are off limits.
00:06:42.840They should begin to think about what actions they could take to pardon immigrants who have a criminal record because they drove on a suspended license.
00:06:51.960Well, let's take them out of harm's way.
00:06:57.720And so part of what we've got to do is we've got to swarm our allies in some of these places.
00:07:01.780And even in red states, you have some blue mayors.
00:07:05.560And so there's a whole game plan for this.
00:07:07.820And I think part of what we're trying to do is breaking it down, what can be done by the courts and lawyers, what can be done by citizens, what can governors do, what can mayors do, and really have a game plan for that.
00:07:18.040When people look at the fact that there haven't been large-scale protests thus far the way there were pretty soon after the election in 2016,
00:07:24.860I tend to look at that and think the American people are smart, people are marshalling their resources and choosing for the right moment.
00:07:31.500Do you see it the same way or do you see it's OK?
00:07:33.380When he starts deporting all these folks, ripping apart communities, the idea that you're never going to move that many people through the immigration system without ripping apart citizens and immigrants.
00:07:43.420It's going to rip the basic fiber of our lives.
00:07:46.600And that's when people are going to say, oh, that's not what we bargained for.
00:08:45.060It's Tuesday, 17th, December in the year of our Lord, 2024.
00:08:49.020Back when I was a kid, my dad, and this was a big laugh for him, you know, he was a phone company guy and they would talk about internally what they were trying to do, what they were trying to accomplish.
00:09:01.620And he would talk, they would quote the Pogo, remember Pogo?
00:09:04.420Old cartoon, I think, from the 50s and 60s.
00:09:11.480That should be the mantra for the MAGA movement and the, I shouldn't say he is us.
00:09:18.640But it's the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, which is total votes is, I don't know, 75 to 85 percent.
00:09:28.900I think if you look at President Trump's, a good count of that would be towards the end of the primary season when it was Nicky, Nicky, Nicky, Nicky, Nicky, when Birdbrain held out, and I think she was getting 15 to 20 percent of the vote.
00:09:43.620Then eventually all those people came home, remember all these Republicans weren't going to do it, and they still have the never Trumpers.
00:09:49.480That's the kind of, you know, Rich Lowry, you know, National Review, bow ties and chamber music, cocktails on the Upper East Side, the equivalent of the New York Conservative Party.
00:10:02.700You know, a lot of William F. Buckley types, and I was a big fan of Buckley, but that was back then, not now.
00:10:11.800If you see what's happening, and you're going to have two examples of this.
00:10:20.920Well, President Trump has actually thought through, you can see he's thought through over a long period of time.
00:10:25.940His victory, which was quite different than 16, because 16, we were just scrambling every day to get to a win.
00:10:34.200You could tell in the four years that he was kind of the lion in winter.
00:10:41.100Having had the election stolen from him, having made a conscious decision to come back and do this,
00:10:47.920understanding what the stakes were for him personally and for the country, he really started to think through what exactly we're trying to accomplish here.
00:11:00.200How is this going to be different than the first term, and how are we really going to make America great again?
00:11:07.360You know, I hated, and I was quite vocal about this, the slogan or whatever, the catchphrase in 20 members, make America great again, again.
00:13:00.960Because during the Biden regime, the empire started to get even the true neo-Marxist, neo-Marxist element of it on the society side, the cultural side, started to come forward.
00:13:15.920Not just the transgender radicalness, but all of it, and what they're trying to do in the propaganda department and the education of your schools.
00:13:27.820Thank God the young men in this country, being red-blooded American boys, stood up and rejected that.
00:13:38.160And on their shoulders, President Trump rode to the presidency, his third victory for his second term.
00:13:48.420A second term that may lead to a third term.
00:19:18.060And corporate America, and this is why Robbie Starbuck, what Robbie Starbuck has done is so unbelievably important.
00:19:23.320Is he, Robbie Starbuck's working on getting local prosecutors to bring criminal charges against these companies, which not just civilly, should be massive class action lawsuits, massive class action lawsuits by MAGA against these corporations trying to destroy people.
00:19:39.000Remember, Target, Target would just rather run you out of the store.
00:19:59.86090% of it went against us in 2020 because he had to put 10% aside because they sit there and tell the justifier, well, we kind of spur around.
00:20:06.020No, dude, you targeted Trump and you targeted Trump voters.
00:20:10.140And now you go down with a million-dollar check for the inauguration.
00:20:13.460This is why in 2016 I didn't go to any of the inauguration events.
00:21:38.880The one alternative is those, some big, you know, omnibus or CR that takes it for the whole year and takes it out of President Trump's hands.
00:21:46.180Particularly, specifically, takes it out of Russ Vogt's hands, the guys at OMB, and takes it out of Vivek and Elon Musk.
00:21:57.780Because of all this complexity of what's going to go on, on the deconstruction of the administrative state, we are going to be your Sherpa that actually cuts through the fog of war and shows you the signal, not the noise.
00:22:09.140Not the happy talk, not a bunch of congressmen going up for open mic night over there last week when they're sitting there going,
00:22:15.100Yeah, at Iowa State, they have a research program on, you know, two-headed cows that ought to be cut.
00:26:01.380They realize you've had a belly full of it.
00:26:03.860And they realize that you went out and knocked on doors and did canvassing and worked phone banks and, you know, trained up to be integrity.
00:26:20.580So you're not, and by the way, when state legislatures all over the country just did great things, except in places I still can't figure out, like North Carolina, where Trump wins bigger than ever, and we lose across the border.
00:32:31.860You were the vanguard and the cadre and the vanguard for the greatest comeback in world political history, not just American political history.
00:33:00.460And I think we're all in agreement that we probably have to get a lot of what he wants to accomplish then with the midterms coming up in the second year.
00:36:16.640All you guys do is cry and whine and bitch and moan about the post-war international rules-based order.
00:36:21.760Is that no, that order that might have worked at the time when you, in the 1990s, the Bush regime allows the Chinese Communist Party to come in with slave labor, with slave labor.
00:36:35.240And then Wall Street, because it's to their advantage, ships all the high-paying value, high-value-added manufacturing jobs to China for the slave labor of the Lao-Bai-Jing.
00:36:57.340They game the system to leverage off the slave labor of the Chinese people.
00:37:03.380And to ship all the high-value-added manufacturing jobs up there and gut the United States of America and leave you as a serf, a Russian serf.
00:37:10.360This is why kids under 35 years old don't own anything, are not going to own anything.
00:40:40.900And he gets up in their grill and says, the Emancipation Proclamation, which changed the direction of the war, because up until Antietam, up until Sharpsburg, the fall of 1862, the war was about keeping the union.
00:40:55.860After that, because Lincoln wasn't winning.
00:42:38.700I want to warn you of a huge change that could be coming to our money and our bank accounts.
00:42:43.940First, think back to 9-11, shortly after the government pushed through the Patriot Act.
00:42:48.500This gave the government power to spy on innocent Americans by monitoring our phone and email and tracking our movement across the Internet.
00:42:55.980Now, Jim Rickards, editor of the independent financial newsletter Strategic Intelligence and New York Times bestselling author, is warning about a coming event that could elevate this governmental surveillance to a terrifying new level.
00:43:09.680In fact, some of the guests I've had on the war room believe that the government will soon expand their powers to track our every move.
00:43:17.580If we say the wrong things on social media, donate to the wrong causes, buy firearms, or even vote MAGA, the government may be able to shut us out of our bank accounts.
00:43:27.800I can't say for sure if this will happen, but it's an interesting and dire warning.
00:43:34.000Fortunately, Jim Rickards, an American patriot and friend of mine, has made it his mission to educate us on what he believes is coming and how to protect yourself from the possibility of programmable money.
00:43:46.500Watch Jim's warning video now before it's censored like I've been in the past.
00:44:37.420If we're this on the CR and he's hit it from his members to drop it on them and put the gun under the head because the funding runs out on Friday,
00:44:52.000essentially he screwed the caucus, this is the easy one.
00:44:58.140This is as close to a layup as you can get.
00:45:00.460You just had to have something skinny, kick it into, which as you know, we're not fans of short-term CRs.
00:45:07.420However, if the purpose is to get it to after January 20th so that Russ Vogt and Scott Besant and Hassert and Navarro and the economic team around a guy named Donald John Trump can get their hands on it
00:45:22.460and do what they want to do, even with a first pass with Vivek and Elon and their team, not a whole doge, but at least, you know, a lick and a promise.
00:45:48.540Think of the conversations we're had, and I know we're getting technical, but we need to get technical because I need you to be inside, to have inside baseball.
00:45:55.520So all this crap you're going to see on Fox, you're not going to believe.
00:45:59.300They're going to try to jam everything in one reconciliation bill.
00:46:03.300Reconciliation is the kind of gimmick they have to get it through so you can get past the Senate filibuster.
00:46:08.940We need to, because Trump needs to hit it on January 20th with the border.
00:46:13.680And actually with money that's written into kind of a law, which the reconciliation bill would be.
00:46:38.120They want to hide all of the goodies for the lobbyists and for the wealthy and for the billionaires so they can put a gun to the war room's head, folks, and say, oh, Bannon, all you and your people.
00:47:31.780Please forgive me for trying to destroy you for four years – excuse me, for eight years, but really destroy you when I had – you know, we had a free shot on goal starting in January 2021 when then we supported you.