Who gets to be a patriot?

Republicans speak constantly in the language of freedom, law and order, religious liberty, free speech, parental rights, and patriotism. This episode asks why those principles seem to change meaning depending on who is claiming them.

This episode trace how American patriotism often becomes conditional: quiet Black protest is treated as a lack of respect for the country, while right-wing anger and even political violence are softened into grievance, frustration, or reverence.

We move through the founding contradiction, slavery, Reconstruction, the New Deal, the GI Bill, abortion, trans rights, guns, welfare, immigration, policing, public education, and criminal justice to show a deeper pattern beneath the hypocrisy. 

Who gets context? Who gets innocence? Who gets protection? Who gets called a patriot? And who has to keep proving they belong?

Transcript

SPEAKER_73 0:00

So our next recipients made a powerful statement when they stepped down in order to stand up for their beliefs.

SPEAKER_48 0:08

After being forced to compete with biological males at their state track meet and field championships, Alexa Anderson and Reese Eckard refused to remain on the winner's podium.

SPEAKER_73 0:21

Their silent protests spoke volumes, and their fight for fairness turned into a rallying cry that was heard across the country.

SPEAKER_54 0:35

That day at the track was my senior year Traffic Field State Championship meet. I knew that a biological male had entered and qualified in the female division. At the award ceremony, Reese and I decided to step off the podium in peaceful protest and turn our back to the ceremony.

SPEAKER_53 1:08

I ended up placing fourth in state. Alexa placed third, and the biological male tied for fifth.

SPEAKER_54 1:14

In that moment, I had an opportunity to stand up for what I believed in. I knew I couldn't just act like this was the normal me.

SPEAKER_53 1:21

Stepping off the podium for me was a pretty simple decision. I wanted to make a stand for all the female athletes.

SPEAKER_71 1:36

This is a stunning act of bravery, and yes, defiance.

SPEAKER_54 1:48

Any girls out there watching this who may have faced something similar, just know that you're not alone and there's people out there who have your back and will stand with you. Fight for what you believe in. It is not about hate or transphobia at all.

SPEAKER_53 2:00

It's about protecting women's rights. Nothing will happen if we do nothing. We need to fight to protect the future of women's sports.

SPEAKER_54 2:07

This is bigger than sports. This movement, this fight, this is for women's rights.

SPEAKER_48 2:21

Please welcome this year's most valuable patriots, Alexa Anderson and Reese Eckley.

SPEAKER_49 2:38

In October of 1968, two American athletes stood on a metal podium in Mexico City while the national anthem played. Tommy Smith had just won gold medal in the 200 meters, and John Carlos had won bronze. When the anthem began, they bowed their heads and raised their fists. The gesture was quiet. It lasted less than a minute. Smith wore a black scarf, Carlos wore beads around his neck, their socks were black, and their feet were bare. The image became one of the most recognizable protests in American sports history because it forced the country to see two things at once: black achievement under the American flag, and black protest against the country standing behind the flag. The reaction was immediate. Smith and Carlos were condemned, punished, threatened, and pushed out of the Olympic village. Many Americans didn't treat their protest as an act of conscience, but as an act of betrayal. The medals didn't protect them. And the anthem didn't include them enough to let them criticize the country while standing beneath it. That reaction reveals one of the oldest contradictions in America. The country praises freedom, courage, sacrifice, and speech, then becomes much less comfortable when those principles are used by people whose criticism disturbs the national image. Smith and Carlos understood the language of America. They understood liberty, dignity, citizenship, and equality. Their protests asked whether those words applied as fully to black Americans as they did to the people most eager to recite them. Nearly fifty years later, Colin Kaepernick knelt during the National Anthem before an NFL game. His protest was also quiet. He was protesting police violence and racial injustice. At first, he sat during the National Anthem. Then Nate Boyer, a retired Green Beret, reached out to him and they talked. And Boyer suggested kneeling, a gesture he associated with soldiers kneeling at the grave of a fallen brother. Kaepernick listened. And from that point forward, Kaepernick knelt. The response followed the same pattern. Fans burned his jersey. Commentators called him ungrateful. Politicians called him disrespectful. In 2017, the President of the United States stood at a rally in Alabama and said that owners should remove a player who knelt during the anthem from the field and fire him. The NFL ultimately blacklisted him. A silent protest against state violence was treated as an offense against the nation. Four years later, a mob, some of them flying an American flag, others flying a Confederate one. An irony to this episode attacked the Capitol while Congress was certifying the result of a presidential election. People forced their way through barricades, smashed windows, entered offices, threatened lawmakers, and injured police officers. A Confederate flag moved through the halls of the Capitol, carried by a man participating in an assault on the peaceful transfer of power. And the Republican response didn't sound like the response to Kaepernick. The language softened. Rioters became patriots, tourists, political prisoners, hostages, people who had been treated unfairly. Violence against the machinery of democracy received more sympathy from the right than a black quarterback kneeling during that song. In fact, the very president that condemned Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem would go on to pardon these very January 6th insurrectionists. Black athlete kneels quietly and becomes anti-American, while a group of mostly white men attack the capital of the United States and gets folded back into the language of patriotism. One act is interpreted as contempt for the country while the other is interpreted as passion that went too far. Republicans often speak as though patriotism is a universal principle. They talk about the flag, the anthem, the military, the constitution, the founders, law and order, freedom, faith, family, and country. The words sound broad, and they sound like they belong to everyone, but in practice, they apply them to a small circle. Who is already imagined as American? Who receives patience? Who receives context? Who gets anger translated into patriotism? Who gets violence translated into frustration? Who gets protest translated into hatred? Who gets criticism treated as proof that they never belonged? These questions run through more than anthem protests, they run through religion, speech, schools, policing, immigration, guns, courts, elections, and money. They explain why Christian public expression is called tradition, while other religions are treated as accommodation or threat. They explain why conservative speech is defended as liberty while teachers, librarians, historians, and students are accused of indoctrination. They explain why Republicans talk about small government while using the state to control women's bodies, classrooms, gender, borders, and protest. And they explain why law and order becomes flexible when the law reaches their own side. Freedom sounds different when the person asking for it is a conservative business owner, a pregnant woman, a black protester, a Muslim student, a transgender teenager, an immigrant worker, a police officer, a billionaire. In other words, who gets to be a patriot. A man who kneels because the country has failed to protect black citizens. A man who carries a Confederate flag into the Capitol while trying to overturn an election. A teacher who explains racism. A parent of a trans child. A Christian coach praying at midfield. A Muslim student asking for the same dignity. A billionaire demanding tax cuts. Or a poor family asking for food assistance. The answer tells us what Republicans often mean when they say America. Sometimes they mean the whole country, but often they mean the people they recognize as the rightful owners of it. This episode is about that boundary. It's about how the right uses universal language while applying principles selectively, about why hypocrisy is only the surface of the problem. Beneath it is a deeper structure of belonging, where some people are treated as full Americans, and others are asked to prove they deserve the rights America claims to guarantee. Welcome to, in other words, today's episode, Who Gets to Be a Patriot? I'm Tyler Smith.

SPEAKER_32 8:34

The Miami Dolphins, it's a football team, Dana. Just signed Jay Cutler as their backup QB. Good for you. Stay out of this. As the controversial Colin Kaepernick remains untouched like a quart of expired milk. Some are calling this racist. But that's nuts. If I owned a bar and the hostess announces that she's going to be protesting at work, I would fire her because that's not the job of a hostess. Cutler fits in with Miami. He had his best year under that coach when he was in Chicago. Meanwhile, Colin chose to fit in with activists instead. He used his work for political theater, perhaps to take attention off his mediocre playing and bring attention to his newly minted political brand.

SPEAKER_37 9:18

President Trump doubling down on his criticism of NFL national anthem protesters by defending the military and the flag and the anthem and those who keep us safe. All while the Democrats, the liberal mainstream to destroy Trump media, they do what they always do. What are they doing? Making this about race when it's not. And that is tonight's very important breaking news opening monologue.

SPEAKER_35 9:42

So finally, here is the factor tip of the day. Respect is important. San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, as you know, refusing to stand for the national anthem because he believes America is biased against black people, and the police in general are ill trained.

SPEAKER_13 10:03

You have people that practice law and are lawyers and go to school for eight years, but you can become a cop in six months and don't have to have the same amount of training as a cosmetologist. That's that's insane.

SPEAKER_35 10:17

Well, Mr. Kaepernick is incorrect. Law school lasts for three years. Maybe he's adding the four years of college before that, but it still doesn't add up. A minor point, just a nitpick. But here's the more serious situation. I believe the quarterback is ill-informed across the board. Studies and statistics show American police are not, are not targeting African Americans. And while there are exceptions to that, of course, American law enforcement in general deserves respect. They protect us.

SPEAKER_63 11:30

He said 123 blacks uh were killed by uh in 2012 by police, 326 whites were killed. You see the numbers right there. Is that a fair statistic?

SPEAKER_79 11:42

The first one that we looked at, this were 15 to 19-year-olds, and that was over a two-year period from 2010 to 2012. So 21 times greater than whites. And then the stat that you just showed from Bill O'Reilly, this is in 2012. 123 blacks in 2012, uh, and 326 were killed by cops, I should say, and then uh 123 whites were killed by cops. No, 123 blacks and 10 years. 123 blacks and 326 whites were killed by cops. But he's not doing per doing it percentage-wise. If you look at it again, 12 percent of the population, he's not doing it by percentages, he's doing it by total population, even yet with those numbers. And you think it's only 12 percent of the population, that's still a large number that's a lot of people.

SPEAKER_68 12:23

And can I weigh in? I mean, I mean, I I I think when you really look at the statistics, the statistics rather are um really faulty because when you talk about officer-involved shootings, Wolf, there isn't a mandatory reporting, right? It's a self-reporting. It's almost on the honor system. And so although the FBI does have some statistics, uh most people know that those statistics can't even be counted upon because they are self-reported. And so my suggestion um has been all along that we need mandatory reporting from our law enforcement agencies around the country. And I think that the number of officer shootings involving young black males is actually much higher than is even self-reported. And so that's something that really needs to be part of the conversation.

SPEAKER_04 13:08

And so part of that, we started to see a series of other cases that set a precedent. And I think instead of necessarily naming these cases, we can think about the outcomes of these cases. So stop and frisk, uh terry stops, uh jump outs, which is where you kind of have an undercover group of officers who are in plain clothes who are jumping out on individuals standing on the street. And of course, the precedence here is that it's about uh whether or not someone is suspected of engaging in a felony. And I think part of recognizing what that means is that it gives officers a lot of discretion to make a justification for who they perceive to be engaging in a felony and what type of felony they perceive them to be engaging in. And so, in many respects, they're actually able to at times make decisions as they're going along. And even though we're focusing on these set of cases as it relates to this particular stat, and I don't want people to forget this stat, that African-American men compared to white men are about four times more likely to be killed by the police when they're not attacking, nor when they have a weapon. In many respects, that's the group we're talking about. These are individuals who the police have said no, they weren't engaging in a crime and no they didn't have a weapon. And yet still, we still see this outcome. But besides that group, we have to look at what led up to that particular encounter. That's when the fact that minorities are more likely to be pulled over than whites, they're more likely to be searched than whites, they're more likely to be uh to have violent force used upon them. And all of these different cases over the past 30 years or so have established a precedence that that's okay based on what a reasonable officer would do. And I think it's difficult for people to really understand that, but what that precedence essentially means is that you you you ask other officers would they have engaged in the same type of behavior, given the circumstances and given what they know about the situation. Now, of course, you have specific police departments, police unions who have decided to kind of double down on that and aim to rectify that and make it what they perceive to be more objective. But at the end of the day, in many respects, it's still police officers policing other police officers about these about these alleged behaviors. And at the end of the day, what we see is an outcome and a huge disparity that I think in the United States of America none of us should be comfortable with.

SPEAKER_38 15:21

These are the pictures you've seen of January 6th. They're familiar because they've been playing on a loop on every media outlet in America for the last two years. There's a reason for that. But it turns out there's quite a bit of video you haven't seen. And that video tells a very different story about what happened on January 6th. More than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage from in and around the Capitol have been withheld from the public. And once you see the video, you'll understand why. Taken as a whole, the video record does not support the claim that January 6th was an insurrection. In fact, it demolishes that claim. And that's exactly why the Democratic Party and its allies in the media prevented you from seeing it. By controlling the images you were allowed to view from January 6th, they controlled how the public understood that day. They could lie about what happened, and you would never know the difference. Those lies had a purpose. They created a pretext for a federal crackdown on opponents of the UNIParty in Washington.

SPEAKER_40 16:26

Our office wanted to ensure that there was shock and awe that we could charge as many people as possible.

SPEAKER_38 16:31

The first thing you notice from viewing the full video record of January 6th is just how many people entered the Capitol building that day. Hundreds and hundreds of people, possibly thousands, over the course of about two hours. The crowd was enormous. A small percentage of them were hooligans. They committed vandalism. You've seen their pictures again and again. But the overwhelming majority weren't. They were peaceful, they were orderly and meek. These were not insurrectionists, they were sightseers. Footage from inside the Capitol overturns the story you've heard about January 6th. Protesters queue up in neat little lines. They give each other tours outside the speaker's office. They take cheerful selfies and they smile. They're not destroying the Capitol, they obviously revere the Capitol.

SPEAKER_49 18:48

The Declaration of Independence spoke of equality, consent, rights, and the legitimacy of people altering or abolishing a government that violated those rights. That language helped give the country its moral vocabulary. It allowed Americans to imagine themselves as participants in a political experiment rather than subjects of inherited rule. The country described itself as a place where authority had to answer to the people. The difficulty was built into the word people. The United States announced principles that sounded universal while constructing institutions that treated membership as restricted. The same political culture that spoke of liberty, protected slavery. The same country that described consent as the basis of government held millions of people who could not consent to their labor, movement, family life, punishment, or sale. The founding language could reach toward humanity in theory, while the founding structure limited political personhood in practice. And that contradiction has shaped the country ever since. The founders wrote liberty into the country's political language while building institutions that denied full membership to millions of people living under American power. They built a system in which some people could experience the country as a republic of rights while others experienced it as a system of extraction, removal, captivity, and control. For white men recognized by law as members of the political community, the new nation could feel like an expansion of freedom. For enslaved black people, indigenous nations, women, servants, laborers without property, and many others, the same nation organized power through dependence and exclusion. The result was a country with two simultaneous realities. One reality was the principle liberty, representation, equality, self-government. The other reality was the boundary around the people who could claim those words with force. American history is filled with conflict because those two realities keep meeting each other. People excluded from the promise read the language carefully and demand that it apply. People protected by the boundary often treat that demand as disorder. The Constitution made that boundary visible. The three-fifths compromise counted enslaved people for representation while denying them political existence. Enslaved people couldn't vote, hold office, testify freely, control their families, or own their labor in any meaningful way. Yet their bodies increased the political power of the states that enslaved them. The structure didn't ignore enslaved people, it used them. They were present as population, wealth, and labor, while absent as citizens. That helps explain how freedom and domination could coexist without feeling contradictory to the people who benefited from both. A poor white man in the early republic might have had little wealth and little control over the economy around him, yet he still occupied a legally recognized position above enslaved black people and many free black people. His status didn't require prosperity, it required membership. He could imagine himself as part of the country because the law and the culture placed others beneath the category of full belonging. The system relied on this. Indigenous nations faced a related structure from a different position. They were recognized when treaties were needed and erased when land was Desired. The United States dealt with native peoples as political communities when that recognition served expansion, then treated them as obstacles when their sovereignty interfered with settlement, agriculture, mining, railroads, or national ambition. That language of liberty moved west, while removal, coercion, and broken agreements followed behind it. These early patterns show how the country learned to speak two languages at once. It could describe itself through rights while distributing those rights unevenly. It could praise self-government while denying political authorship to large groups of people governed by its power. It could call itself a nation of liberty, while making liberty depend on race, sex, property, religion, and proximity to the dominant image of the citizen. And that boundary was never maintained by law alone. It was taught through stories, sermons, schools, newspapers, court decisions, violence, and custom. People learned who appeared peaceful and who appeared dangerous, who appeared civilized and who appeared savage, who appeared capable of self-government, and who appeared in need of supervision. Once those meanings became familiar, they no longer felt like ideology, they felt like common sense. That's one reason patriotism has been so contested. Patriotism is rarely just affection for a place. It's an argument about the political community. It asks who can speak for the country, who can criticize it without being expelled from the moral imagination, who can demand repair and still be treated as belonging. A person recognized as part of the rightful nation can criticize from within, but a person treated as conditional is often heard as attacking from the outside. After the Civil War, the legal foundation of slavery collapsed, and for a brief period the boundary widened. Reconstruction created one of the most important democratic periods in American history. Black men voted, held office, built churches, established schools, formed civic organizations, published newspapers, and participated directly in rebuilding the South. Formerly enslaved people didn't wait to be granted dignity by the culture that had enslaved them. They acted as citizens and helped build the institutions citizenship required. The backlash came because that citizenship and their success changed the social order. Black voting didn't just add ballots to elections, it challenged the inherited assumption that political authority belonged naturally to white men. Black office holding carried the same challenge in a more visible form. A black legislator, sheriff, school official, and constitutional delegate forced the country to confront the difference between freedom as a slogan and freedom as shared power. And many white Americans experienced that change as humiliation and disorder. Equality can feel like loss to people who have mistaken dominance for normal life. If a public office had long been imagined as a white domain, a black officeholder looked to many defenders of the old order like corruption. If voting had been treated as a white civic privilege, black voting could be framed as manipulation. The language of restoration then became a way to rebuild the boundary without saying openly that democracy itself had become too broad. And so the old order returned through new instruments. Black codes restricted movement, labor, and legal autonomy. Vagrancy laws criminalized ordinary life and created pathways back into forced labor. Convict leasing allowed southern states and private industries to profit from prisoners. Many of them black men swept into the system through racially selective enforcement. Poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, grandfather clauses, and violence narrowed the electorate again. The 15th Amendment said race couldn't be used to deny the vote. State and local systems developed ways to make that right difficult, dangerous, or practically unavailable. The form of exclusion changed as direct exclusion became harder to defend. The boundary moved into procedure, administration, policing, debt, local discretion, and public terror. These things repeated in later periods. When the country expanded opportunity, the expansion often carried the older boundary inside of it. The New Deal is remembered as a major enlargement of economic security, and in many ways it was. Social security, labor protections, public works, and federal investment helped create a new relationship between citizens and the national government. These programs made the state more responsible for economic life and helped build the foundation of the 20th century middle class. But the benefits weren't distributed evenly. Large categories of workers were excluded from the early Social Security coverage, including agricultural and domestic workers, categories that included many black workers. Housing policy helped subsidize white home ownership while redlining and discriminatory lending restricted black access to wealth building. Labor protections often reached some workers more effectively than others. The language of economic citizenship expanded, while the architecture of racial inequality remained embedded in the institutions delivering the benefit. The GI Bill followed the same pattern after World War II. It's often remembered as one of the great engines of American mobility, and for many white veterans it was. It helped pay for education, supported home loans, and opened pathways into the middle class. The law itself didn't simply announce that black veterans were excluded, but the restriction operated through segregated universities, discriminatory banks, local administration, housing markets, and the broader racial order of the country. A black veteran could wear the uniform, serve the country, return home, and still encounter a system that treated his claim to reward as conditional. Military service proved sacrifice, but it didn't guarantee equal access to the benefits that sacrifice was supposed to earn. The country could honor veterans in principle while distributing gratitude through the same old boundary. Japanese Americans experienced another version of conditional belonging during World War II. The United States forcibly removed and incarcerated people of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens, because ancestry itself was treated as suspicion. Families lost homes, farms, businesses, schools, and community life. The government didn't impose the same mass policy on German Americans or Italian Americans at the same scale, even though the United States was also at war with Germany and Italy. And at the same time, Japanese American soldiers served in segregated units, including the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which became famous for its record in combat. Some of these men fought for the United States while their families were confined by the United States. Their service exposed the instability of belonging under a racialized national imagination. A uniform could prove loyalty on the battlefield while ancestry marked a family as suspect at home. This history shows that loyalty has never been judged only by conduct. Conduct is filtered through recognition. Some people are presumed loyal until proven otherwise. Others are asked to prove loyalty repeatedly, and even proof may fail to travel far enough. Black soldiers fought in American wars while returning to segregation, housing discrimination, unequal schools, restricted voting, and police violence, while Japanese American soldiers fought while relatives remained incarcerated. Black athletes won medals for the United States and were punished for asking the United States to face its own failures. These variations on the same national habit, the country accepts service, labor, sacrifice, and achievement from people it has not always recognized as full authors of the nation. The right didn't create that habit from nothing. Conservatives inherited a country already organized around competing definitions of belonging. What makes the right central to this episode is the way it continues to defend an older image of the country while using the language of universal principle. The words are freedom, speech, faith, law, family, and patriotism. The application often depends on whether the person claiming those words fits the image of the country conservatives are trying to preserve. That image has changed over time, but it has recognizable features. White, Christian, native-born, culturally traditional, protective of hierarchy, and emotionally attached to the idea that the country is being taken from its rightful people. Under that image, patriotism is easiest for those who affirm the inherited order. Criticism from them can be heard as concern. Anger from them can be heard as frustration. Even lawbreaking can be softened into defense of the country. But people outside that image encounter a different standard. Their criticism is heard as resentment, their anger is heard as threat, their demand for equality is heard as special treatment. Their presence in public institutions is treated as politics, even when the existing arrangement was political all along. The historical record makes the modern pattern easier to understand. The argument over who gets to be a patriot is an argument over who gets to be presumed part of America before they speak. Once that presumption is uneven, every principle becomes unstable. Freedom becomes easier to defend for some people than others. Law becomes harsher for some people than others. Speech becomes more protected for some people than others. Patriotism becomes less a measure of commitment to democratic principles and more a measure of fit with an inherited national image. That's the foundation for everything that follows. The fights over prayer, schools, books, guns, immigration, policing, elections, and protests are not disconnected culture war disputes. They are later versions of the older boundary. Each fight asks who belongs naturally in public life and who enters it under suspicion. Each fight asks who gets the benefit of context and who carries the burden of proof. Each fight asks who can claim America as home and who must keep proving they have earned the right to stand inside of it.

SPEAKER_73 31:24

So also breaking out of Florida today, ICE and Florida law enforcement announcing Operation Dirtbag, which may be even too nice a term for some of these individuals that they have taken into custody. They've arrested more than 200 criminal illegal aliens during the 10-day crackdown as part of this operation. Some of the worst of the worst convicted of sexually abusing young children and attempted murder, many of them still in America, years after immigration judges ordered their removals. That never happened.

SPEAKER_64 32:00

Over the last 10 days, we have removed 54 sexual predators, 164 offenders of sexual crimes, two convicted murderers.

SPEAKER_77 32:10

This operational criminal return is another fine example of what exactly the President Trump said.

SPEAKER_43 32:19

They're sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some I assume are good people. I love Mexico. I love the Mexican people. Two waiters came up to me tonight. Mr. Trump, we love you. I said, Where are you from? Mexico. I said, that's great. I love you too. These countries aren't sending their best the finest. They're sending people that are like got a lot of problems. Doesn't that make sense? I basically said this. We need to strengthen our borders. And they said, I'm a racist. To get the cars and trucks and everything over here, let the illegals drive them in. They're coming in anyway. Oh, I do great with Latino voters. I employ so many Latinos. I have so many people working for me. It's common sense. They don't want these people, so they send them to the United States because the United States is run by stupid people.

SPEAKER_44 33:16

Some are good and some are rapists and some are killers, and we don't even know what we're getting.

SPEAKER_43 33:20

I'm not just saying Mexicans. I'm talking about people that are from all over that are killers and rapists.

SPEAKER_18 33:27

As President Trump's immigration crackdown continues, welcome to the United States of America. The administration rolled out the red carpet for 59 white South Africans they call refugees, saying they faced racial discrimination back home.

SPEAKER_19 33:43

We're sending a clear message that the United States uh really rejected the egregious uh persecution of people on the basis of race in South Africa.

SPEAKER_18 33:55

President Trump claims the U.S. had to take in the group because white farmers are being killed in South Africa in what the president calls a genocide. But there's no evidence that it's taking place.

SPEAKER_21 34:19

And as they edge closer, President Trump is threatening to use the military to shut down the U.S. border.

SPEAKER_05 34:25

As President Trump rallies for tougher security on the border. Democrats want to drill the borders and ruthless gang. Some tearing down the fence. She and others waiting behind the fence overnight.

SPEAKER_43 35:00

Mexico is on there. Southern border, there's southern border.

SPEAKER_05 35:05

And then fighting, and then finding some bad people. Closer to home, a record number of people apprehended at the U.S. Mexican border. 37,000 in August alone. Now the president says he's ready to send the military.

SPEAKER_43 35:20

We're calling up the military, not the guard. We're calling up the military. And we're gonna have the military station. They're not coming into this country. They might as well turn back. They're not coming into this country. Here in Arizona, I've taken a lot of heat, and it's unnecessary, very unfair heat, because first of all, I love the Mexican people. How can I not love people that give me tens of millions of dollars for apartments? You have to love them. But I love them for a lot of reasons. I love them for their spirit. And then I talk about Mexico, and I love Mexico, but every time I talk about it, they accuse me of being a racist. So you have illegals that are just pouring across the borders. I was really criticized for the border, but the truth is it's true. They think it's like mother teraces coming across the border. Well, I said drug dealers, I said killers, and I said rapists. And they made the word rapist, they really picked that up. I tell you, I love the folks from South America, they're friends of mine. Uh many work for me, many are your friends, many buy apartments from me. I have great love for the Mexican people, and I always have, and they like me. No apology because everything I said is 100% correct. All you have to do is read the newspapers. You have 20 million, 30 million, nobody knows what it is. It used to be 11 million, now today I hear it's 11, but I don't think it's 11. I actually heard you probably have 30 million. You have to give them a path and you have to make it possible for them to succeed. You have to do that. But the bad ones, and there are bad ones, you have to get out and you have to get them out fast. I've been told by so many Hispanics, Mr. Trump, thank you, sir, thank you. You have done the right thing. I think I'll do very well with the Hispanic vote. Go to Fusion and pick up the stories on rape, and it's unbelievable when you look at what's going on. So all I'm doing is telling the truth.

SPEAKER_79 37:01

I read the I read the Washington Post, I read the Fusion, I read the Huffington Post, and that that's about women being raped. It's not about criminals coming across the border or entering the country.

SPEAKER_43 37:14

Somebody's doing the raping, Don. I mean, you know, it's it's I mean, somebody's doing the just saying it's women being raped. Well, who's doing the raping? Who's doing the raping? I mean, how can you say such a thing?

SPEAKER_72 37:27

Newly released documents that were missing from the Epstein files contain serious unverified allegations against President Trump. The Justice Department posted three FBI memos describing interviews with a woman who accuses both Jeffrey Epstein and President Trump of sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager. The White House calls the accusations completely baseless.

SPEAKER_49 37:56

It decides who receives protection, who gets privacy, who gets believed, who gets punishment, watched, regulated, and who gets left alone. And any political movement can talk about freedom in broad language while using government in very specific directions. Republicans have spent decades describing government as the central threat to liberty, and that's successful because it appeals to real fear. Many people don't want distant institutions and bureaucrats making decisions, punishing ordinary behavior, or inserting themselves in the families, churches, businesses, schools, medical care, speech, property, or work. Especially if it's framed that way. The language of limited government works because it sounds like a defense of human dignity against coercion. The right's use of that language becomes clearer when government power reaches different people. A business owner hears regulation and the right often hears tyranny. A fossil fuel company hears climate rules and the right hears overreach. A landlord hears tenant protections and the right hears interference. An employer hears union rights and the right hears coercion. A wealthy household hears taxation and the right hears punishment. In those cases, government appears as a threat because it limits people or institutions already holding leverage. The language changes when the state moves against people outside the preferred image of the country. A pregnant woman becomes subject to criminal law, medical delay, travel anxiety, surveillance, and legislative control. A trans child becomes a problem for state lawmakers rather than a patient, a student, a child, or a member of a family. An immigrant worker becomes a target for detention and removal. A public school teacher becomes an object of investigation. A librarian becomes a political suspect. A protester becomes a security threat. A poor parent applying for assistance becomes someone whose need must be tested, monitored, and morally examined. The size of government is rarely the most honest description of the argument. Direction tells more of the story. Abortion makes the pattern especially visible because it places the state directly inside the body. For years, Republicans used the language of bodily autonomy when public health policies affected them. Mask requirements became authoritarian. Vaccine mandates were tyranny. Public health guidance became proof that government had become too powerful. The argument treated the body as a zone of personal sovereignty, even when individual decisions carried consequences for other people in shared spaces. At the same time, they turned big pharma into a villain, as though pharmaceutical power had suddenly become corrupt because vaccines were tied to public health policy. The criticism rarely extended into a serious challenge to the profit structure that gives drug companies so much power in the first place. The same politics that attacked vaccine manufacturers also defended the market logic, stock prices, patents, deregulation, and private enterprise system that allows those companies to become so powerful. Pharmaceutical corporations were treated as dangerous when they were associated with mandates, then folded back into free enterprise when the conversation shifted to profits, investment, innovation, and the stock market. After Roe fell, Republican-led states moved quickly to restrict abortion. Legislatures wrote rules that changed the way pregnancy, miscarriage, emergency medicine, prescriptions, travel, and physician judgment functioned. Doctors began practicing under legal uncertainty. Patients with severe complications could be forced to wait until danger became legally unmistakable. Medical decisions that once belonged primarily to patients and clinicians became exposed to prosecutors, hospital lawyers, state statutes, and political pressure. The principle of bodily autonomy was intense when Republicans resisted public health measures, but it weakened when pregnant women claimed autonomy over their own bodies. The state that was too intrusive for a mask became acceptable for pregnancy, childbirth, and emergency care. They treated one kind of bodily claim as freedom and another as moral disorder. And ironically, they used their God to justify it. The same pattern appears in trans health care. Republicans often describe these laws as protection for children, and that language gives the state a caring tone. Protection sounds gentle and suggests caution, innocence, and responsibility. In practice, the laws often move government power between families and clinicians. Parents who support their children, doctors who provide care, therapists who help families think through difficult questions, and young people trying to survive adolescence become subordinate to legislatures turning medical life into a campaign issue. The party that wants small government suddenly wants the state to enter the clinic, the school, the family, the body, to decide which names can be used, which bathrooms can be entered, which teams can be joined, which forms of care are permissible, and which families will be treated as dangerous for accepting a child's identity. The right presents this as a defense of children because the children being controlled have already been placed outside the conservative imagination of innocence. A child who confirms traditional gender expectations receives protection. A child who disrupts them becomes a policy object. The comparison to conservative families clarifies the direction of power. If a liberal state tried to override conservative parents, restrict religious counseling, ban certain forms of Christian education, or investigate families for raising children inside conservative theology, Republicans would immediately understand the danger of government entering the household. They know what state overreach sounds like when they imagine themselves as the target. Their alarm fades when the target is a trans child, a supportive parent, or a doctor providing care the right has decided to make politically illegitimate. Guns show the same thing from another angle. The right often treats gun ownership as a symbol of free citizens. The armed individual is imagined as responsible, independent, and morally prepared to defend family, property, community, and country. Gun regulation is described. As a threat because it limits the person Republicans picture as the rightful bearer of arms. But that image has never been neutral in American life. When the Black Panthers openly carried firearms in California in the 1960s while monitoring police behavior, conservative authorities didn't respond by celebrating constitutional liberty. They passed the Mulford Act, restricting the public carrying of loaded firearms, and Governor Ronald Reagan signed it. The armed citizen looked different when the citizen was black, organized, and confronting police power. A white gown owner could be imagined as defending freedom. A black radical with a firearm became a sign of danger and disorder. The political imagination around the person holding it changed the interpretation. Labor and welfare policy reveal the class version of the same structure. Republicans often describe employers, corporations, and wealthy households as the productive center of the economy. Their freedom is treated as economic freedom itself. Lower taxes become growth. Deregulation becomes efficiency. Weak labor standards become flexibility. Anti-union policy becomes protection from coercion. The people already controlling wages, schedules, benefits, prices, housing, and investment are described as if they are the ones in need of defense. But workers encounter a narrower idea of freedom. A person whose employer controls their schedule, healthcare wages, safety conditions, and ability to organize may have formal liberty while living under constant economic pressure. A worker who cannot leave a job because medical insurance is tied to employment is constrained in a way the right rarely names as coercion. A parent working full-time without enough money for rent, food, childcare, medical care is not living inside meaningful freedom simply because the government didn't write the hardship directly into law. More often, consumers themselves are burdened with supporting wages, whether it's taxpayer money supporting a large percentage of employees' wages of large corporations through social safety nets, or tipping. Republican politics has been far more comfortable defending the freedom of capital than the freedom of workers. The employer's burden becomes a public concern. The worker's burden becomes personal responsibility or failure. Regulations on business are treated as violations of liberty. Poverty, medical debt, wage stagnation, and unstable schedules are treated as unfortunate features of life, market outcomes, or evidence that someone failed to make better choices. Public assistance follows the same moral sorting. Food support, housing assistance, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, student debt relief, and child tax credits are frequently discussed through suspicion. The recipient must be examined for dependency, fraud, laziness, irresponsibility, or undeserving behavior. The state becomes stingy, disciplinary, and moralizing when help moves toward poor people. Money moving upward receives softer language. Corporate subsidies become investment. Tax cuts become growth. Defense contracts become national security. Fossil fuel support becomes energy dependence. Bank rescues become stabilization. Public money doesn't lose its moral danger because the amount is smaller. It loses the stigma because the recipient changes. And immigration gives the state an even broader field for selective force. Republicans speak of legality, border, sovereignty, and order, and those are real functions of a state. Every country has immigration rules, and democracies have to decide how entry, asylum, labor, and citizenship will be administered. The political meaning of immigration on the right goes far beyond procedure. Immigrants are routinely described as invasion, crime, disease, replacement, fraud, and cultural loss. Legal status becomes a moral identity. Illegal becomes a type of person rather than a condition created by law. Once that happens, state power can become harsh while still sounding neutral. Detention centers become enforcement. Family separation becomes deterrence. Workplace raids become order. The labor immigrants provide can remain economically useful while the people providing it remain politically disposable. The rights language around law and order works the same way. Safety is a legitimate public concern. Communities need laws, functioning courts, protection from violence, and some shared expectation that people can live without constant threat. Republicans have used that broad need to build a politics in which order often means force directed at people conservatives already distrust. When black Americans protest police violence, the right often moves quickly from the reason for the protest to be the possibility of disorder. The blocked street becomes the story, the broken window becomes a symbol, the killing, the fear, the pattern of police power, and the demand for accountability recede behind the concern for public calm. Protesters become dangerous before their claim is seriously examined. But right-wing lawbreaking receives a far more forgiving vocabulary. Armed standoffs become resistance. Threats toward official become frustration. Harassment becomes speech. Refusal to follow public health orders becomes courage. January 6th becomes the clearest example because it placed Republican language about law, police, patriotism, and elections under maximum pressure. People attacked the Capitol while Congress was certifying a presidential election. Police officers were injured. Lawmakers hid. The transfer of power was disrupted by force. And the defendants became victims. Criminal sentences became persecution. The event became something to minimize, reinterpret, or fold back into the story of patriotic grievance. When Trump returned to office, he granted sweeping clemency to people connected to January 6th. That clarified how flexible law and order becomes when the law reaches the movement itself. The state can be severe toward migrants, protesters, poor defendants, drug offenders, and people in cities. It can be suspicious toward teachers, librarians, doctors, and families. It can enter pregnancy and gender care with confidence. When the state punishes people who acted on behalf of the Republican Party, mercy suddenly becomes a higher principle. And courts are treated through the same filter. When courts restrict abortion, expand gun rights, protect conservative religious claims, limit regulatory power, or weaken voting rights protections, Republicans speak of constitutionalism and judicial restraint. When courts investigate, charge, convict, or constrain Trump and his allies, the system becomes weaponized. A conviction can prove corruption when it touches an opponent and prove persecution when it touches someone inside the movement. And so the legal process becomes legitimate or illegitimate depending on its direction. This pattern is why the language of small government can sit beside the language of authoritarian control without feeling inconsistent to many conservatives. The two impulses are aimed at different people. Limited government protects the people, and institutions the right identifies with employers, churches, gun owners, corporations, police, landlords, fossil fuel companies, wealthy people, and conservative parents. Strong government disciplines the people in institutions it suspects. Immigrants, protesters, pregnant women, trans families, teachers, librarians, public schools, the black community, poor families and cities. The state becomes a shield in one direction and a weapon in another. But that arrangement serves more than cultural hierarchy, it serves economic power. If government is treated as tyranny whenever it limits capital, wealth becomes harder to challenge democratically. If government is treated as necessary whenever it disciplines vulnerable people, anger moves away from the people who own, hire, pollute, insure, lend, and profit. The worker is taught to resent the migrant instead of the employer. The parent is taught to fear the library, instead of the underfunded school. The patient is taught to fear the public health care instead of the insurer. The voter is taught to fear welfare fraud instead of tax policy written for wealth. Republicans can then claim the language of freedom while protecting the conditions that make people less free in daily life. A person without health care is less free. A worker without bargaining power is less free. A woman forced to continue a pregnancy by state is less free. A family afraid to support a trans child is less free. Attendant priced out by speculation is less free. A child in an underfunded school is less free. A community exposed to the pollution is less free. The rights version of freedom often begins with the person already holding power and treats everyone else's dependence as natural. Employers need freedom from regulation. Corporations need freedom from environmental rules. Wealth needs freedom from taxation. Churches need freedom from pluralistic public standards. Gun owners need freedom from restriction. Police need freedom from oversight. Then the people living under those conditions are told that their own demands for safety, wages, healthcare, bodily autonomy, housing, clean air, and public investment are burdens on someone else's liberty. This is how the older boundary moves through the state. Doesn't always announce itself in racial language or religious language or gendered language, it often arrives as freedom, order, responsibility, parental concern, fiscal discipline, local control, public safety, or constitutional principle. The words sound universal and common sense, but the state's behavior shows the direction of concern. State power turns the recognition who counts as American into public policy. It decides whose liberty is defended as sacred and whose liberty is treated as negotiable. It decides whose fear becomes law and whose fear is dismissed, whose body receives privacy and whose body becomes a public matter, and whose violence receives punishment or whose violence receives explanation. The fight over government is therefore a fight over belonging. Republicans can call themselves the party of small government, but their politics repeatedly asks government to do enormous things when the target sits outside the circle of recognition. It can force childbirth, restrict medical care, police classrooms, intimidate librarians, raid workplaces, expand border enforcement, protect police power, punish protest, and pardon its own. The state isn't small in that arrangement. It's selective. And once a state becomes selective, the next question is no longer only what the law says, it's who the law imagines when it says freedom. And that's where the First Amendment becomes the cleanest test. The literal purpose of the First Amendment is to protect the right to speak against power. It exists so people can criticize the government, protest the government, refuse forced displays of loyalty, kneel during the anthem, raise a fist at an Olympic podium, burn a flag, walk out, turn away, or say that the country is failing its own promises. The Constitution doesn't need a speech amendment to protect easy agreement. It needs one because a free country has to protect dissent for patriots. And that principle has to apply universally or it's not a principle. Girls protesting trans athletes have a First Amendment right to speak, even if someone disagrees with their argument. Black Olympians have the same right. NFL players kneeling against police violence have the same right. Students protesting war, workers protesting exploitation, women protesting abortion bans, parents protesting school policy, conservatives protesting vaccine mandates. They all stand inside the same constitutional protection when they speak against power. A patriot doesn't only defend the speech they like. That's just preference. They don't only defend speech that protects the United States as a symbol of freedom. That's nationalism, a slippery slope to fascism historically. A true patriot defends the structure that allows disagreement to exist in the first place. So when Republicans celebrate protest from people they identify with and condemn protest from people they distrust, they're not defending the First Amendment. They're sorting who gets to use it. When they demand punishment for kneeling athletes, rage at flag burning, call racial justice protest un-American, threaten teachers, intimidate librarians, or ask the state to discipline dissent, they're not defending the Constitution. They are fighting the part of the Constitution that makes democracy possible. The alternative is much darker and much simpler. A country where the government, police, courts, schools, and dominant culture can act without meaningful challenge. Police can kill black people without accountability. Legislatures can force childbirth without protest. The state can restrict medical care without dissent. Schools can erase history without resistance. The Constitution was designed to allow Americans to disagree with power. Anyone who wants to punish people for doing that is not defending patriotism. They are demanding obedience and calling it love for country.

SPEAKER_81 57:13

Not parents, not businesses, not private schools, not religious institutions, not even the individual human conscience. Conservatives, on the other hand, believe the government's role in society should be limited to absolute necessities, such as national defense and to being the resource of last resort to help citizens who cannot be helped by family, by community, or by religious and secular charities. Conservatives understand that as governments grow in size and power, the following will inevitably happen. There will be ever-increasing amounts of corruption. Individual liberty will decline. Countries with ever-expanding governments will either reduce the size of their government or eventually collapse economically. In order to pay for an ever-expanding government, taxes are constantly increased. But at a given level of taxation, the society's wealth producers will either stop working, work less, hire fewer people, or move their business out of the state or out of the country. Big government produces big deficits and ever-increasing and ultimately unsustainable debt. The bigger the government, the greater the opportunities for doing great evil. Big government eats away at the moral character of a nation.

SPEAKER_12 58:57

And I'm carrying sharp, you just heard from Representative Jody Barrett, who is deeply opposed to abortion. He feels like since Tennessee passed a ban on terminating pregnancies, too many people have gotten away with it using other methods.

SPEAKER_62 59:10

So he's filed a new bill to deter it, an amendment, and as Chris Davis discovered, it could even include the death penalty.

SPEAKER_06 59:18

That's the word from state lawmakers on their proposed abortion legislation.

SPEAKER_38 59:22

Senate Republicans unveiling their proposal earlier this afternoon.

SPEAKER_15 59:25

Florida's legislative session off to a controversial start. Moments before the governor's big state of the state address, Republican lawmakers dropped a new abortion ban.

SPEAKER_82 59:33

We have breaking news now in Arizona to tell you about. Moments ago, the state Supreme Court ruled that a 15-week abortion ban is not legal and cannot go into effect. It is a win for anti-abortion advocates because Arizona will now revert back to a mere total ban that has roots in the Civil War era.

SPEAKER_73 59:55

Breaking tonight at this hour, the state of Ohio is now just a signature away from a historical pro-life legislation. Governor John Kasich is now tasked with considering the adoption of one of the strictest abortion laws in the country. It is a measure that would ban abortions upon the first heartbeats of the fetus. Heartbeats that are often measured in just six weeks into a woman's pregnancy.

SPEAKER_25 1:01:14

GOP eliminators have voted to fund just last week.

SPEAKER_49 1:01:42

A person is described as frightened or dangerous, confused or calculating, troubled or criminal, provoked or predatory. The law may arrive later with charges, standards, testimony, and procedure, but political interpretation usually arrives first. That early interpretation shapes what people are prepared to believe. It influences which facts seem important, which facts seem irrelevant, and which facts are treated as evidence of character. It determines whether a person is allowed to remain complicated while the story develops. Some people enter public judgment with a full human background. Others enter as symbols of threat before the details have had time to settle. Republicans often speak as though they are committed to neutral standards self-defense, law and order, due process, personal responsibility, public safety. In practice, the moral imagination around those standards changes quickly depending on who is standing in the center of the story. Fear becomes credible for some people and suspicious for others. Violence becomes explainable for some people and defining for others. Past mistakes become context for some people and proof for others. Kyle Rittenhaus is an example of that moral imagination. He was 17 when he brought a rifle into Kenosha during protest after the police shooting of a black man named Jacob Blake. He shot three people, killing two. His lawyers argued self-defense, and a jury acquitted him on all charges. Once the verdict came down, many conservatives treated the acquittal as proof that he had been maligned by the media, overcharged by prosecutors, and misunderstood by the public. He became a conservative figure, a young man who had supposedly been punished for defending himself. The political meaning of Rittenhouse, though, had formed well before the verdict. Conservatives were able to imagine his fear. They could describe the setting around him, the disorder in the street, the pressure of the moment, the danger he perceived, and the possibility that a teenager with a weapon might still be frightened. They could separate the act from a total judgment of the person. And he was allowed that context. And the most recent national story of self-defense is a little different. A black 17-year-old named Carmelo Anthony fatally stabbed Austin Metcalf during a confrontation at a high school track meet in Frisco, Texas. His context was similar to that of Rittenhouse. His defense argued self-defense. But a jury later convicted him of murder, and he received a long prison sentence. The legal record moved in a different direction from Rittenhouse's. The context around these situations are similar, but the political frame that formed around fear, youth, and violence were different. Interestingly, Rittenhouse had 11 white jurors out of 12, and Carmelo Anthony had an all-white jury. And so the right-wing discussion around Anthony moved much more readily toward criminality. A black teenager claiming self-defense didn't receive the same broad public patience from conservatives that Rittenhouse received. The language of fear, confusion, media distortion, and prosecutial excess was less available. The weapon became proof of danger faster. The confrontation became easier to read through character. His youth didn't soften the interpretation in the same way, and his claim of fear didn't become a major conservative cause. That difference reveals how self-defense operates as more than a legal doctrine in political culture. It's also a story people tell about who is allowed to be afraid. When conservatives recognized Rittenhouse as a frightened teenager in a chaotic environment, they showed that they understood context. They understood pressure, confusion, threat perception, and the possibility that a person can make violent decisions while still being treated as more than violence itself. Their response to Anthony showed the limits of that imagination. The question was never only whether a self-defense claim could be made in court, the question was whether a black teenager could occupy the same moral category of fear in the conservative mind. George Floyd and Ashley Babbitt are other examples. George Floyd was murdered by a police officer, and the video evidence of Floyd's death showed that he was restrained, pressed to the ground, and deprived of breath while bystanders pleaded with officers. He pleaded for his own mother. The case became a national reference point because it showed state power using force against a man who was already controlled. A large part of the conservative Response focused on Floyd's biography. His criminal history, drug use, behavior, and personal life were pulled into the public meaning of his death. The question of whether the state had killed him became entangled with whether he was admirable enough to grieve without qualification. Sympathy was made conditional on character. A man killed by police had to pass a moral audit after death. Ashley Babbitt received a different kind of attention from the right. She was shot by a Capitol police officer while trying to climb through a broken window near the Speaker's lobby during January 6th as members of Congress were being evacuated as the Capitol became overrun by rioters. The Justice Department reviewed the shooting and declined to pursue criminal charges against the officer. But for conservatives, Babbitt became a symbol of innocence, martyrdom, and government abuse. Her presence inside the mob didn't close the door on sympathy. Her participation in an attack on the Capitol didn't prevent Republicans from treating her death as politically meaningful. And so the contrast is clear. Floyd's death at the hands of police led many conservatives to search his life for disqualifying details. Babbitt's death, while participating in a violent breach, led many of the same political voices to search for innocence, tragedy, government overreach. The moral labor moved in opposite directions. One victim was complicated downward, the other was elevated upward. That's one reason law and order has never been just about law. It has also been about which people are imagined as proper objects of state force. When police violence reaches black Americans, conservatives often asked what the victim did wrong before asking what the state did. When state violence reaches someone aligned with the right, conservatives become more interested in proportionality, restraint, fear, and the inner life of the person who died. They know how to ask humanizing questions. They ask them selectively. The same selectivity appears around protest. Colin Kaepernick knelt silently during the anthem to protest police violence and racial injustice. His action was symbolic, nonviolent, and carefully explained. He changed from sitting to kneeling after speaking with a veteran who thought kneeling would communicate respect more clearly. Conservatives still treated the gesture as an insult to the nation. The act was quiet, but the interpretation was severe. January 6th involved physical force against the Capitol during the certification of a presidential election. People attacked police, broke windows, entered restricted areas, threatened lawmakers, and tried to disrupt the transfer of power. The right had to interpret behavior that directly violated its own language about law, police, order, and patriotism. But it was softened. The people involved became frustrated citizens, political prisoners, hostages, patriots, people who had been treated unfairly. The meaning assigned to each act depended less on the act itself than on the people performing it. A black athlete engaged in silent protest could be read as hostile to America. Trump supporters engaged in political violence could be read as wounded Americans who loved the country too intensely. The first interpretation had little patience for explanation, while the second created room for motive, grievance, anger, confusion, and mercy. That flexibility around motive is one of the right's most important habits. A conservative who breaks a rule often receives a story about pressure. A liberal, black protester, immigrant, poor person, transperson, teacher, librarian, or public health official who violates conservative expectations becomes evidence of a larger moral failure. The act is not only judged, it is used to classify the person. Donald Trump's criminal conviction history and Hunter Biden's conviction shows how this operates inside formal law. Trump was convicted in New York of 34 felony accounts of falsifying business records. Republicans responded by describing the prosecution as politically motivated, corrupt, shameful, or weaponized. The legal process itself became suspected because it reached Trump. His conviction didn't function as evidence against him in the conservative story. It became evidence against the system. Hunter Biden's conviction on federal gun charges moved through a different political channel. Republicans spent years presenting him as proof of a corrupt Biden family. When he was convicted, many didn't treat the conviction as evidence that the justice system could act against a president's son. The conviction was absorbed into the larger story they had already wanted to tell. It became too small, a distraction, a fragment of broader corruption narrative. A legal outcome against Hunter Biden confirmed suspicion. A legal outcome against Trump confirmed persecution. The evidence changed meaning depending on the target. That habit reaches beyond those two cases. Republican politics has grown increasingly comfortable treating accountability for its own leaders as abuse while treating investigation of opponents as moral necessity. A subpoena, indictment, conviction, civil judgment, or investigation becomes legitimate or illegitimate through partisan location before the public ever reaches the details. The process is trusted when it wounds an enemy. It's corrupt when it wounds the leader. And this moral sorting shapes how people understand innocence. Innocence is not only a legal status in American politics, it's a cultural position. Some people are presumed to have reasons, others are presumed to have motives. Some people are imagined as scared, while others are imagined as dangerous. Some people are victims of circumstance, others are examples of decay. And the rights treatment of children follows the same pattern. Conservative politics often speaks with enormous emotion about children, but the children being protected is usually filtered through a specific image, innocent, traditional, shielded from racial history, sexuality, gender complexity, and public conflict. That child becomes central in fights over books, pronouns, drag performers, school bathroom, sex education, and classroom history. Other children receive less political tenderness. Black children afraid of police violence are told to comply. Trans children trying to survive adolescence become symbols in campaigns. Immigrant children are treated as legal problems. Poor children are discussed through their parents' supposed failures. Children in underfunded schools are told to make do. Children facing gun violence are given thoughts and prayers, and little structural protection. The language of protection intensifies when the threat is a book or a pronoun, then weakens when the threat is poverty, bullets, hunger, pollution, untreated illness, or unstable housing. That tells us how innocence is being assigned. It's not distributed evenly across actual children and actual harm. It attaches most strongly to the children whose innocence helps preserve the conservative image of the country. A child harm by economic policy, gun policy, immigration policy, environmental policy, or healthcare policy is harder to use in that story because protecting that child would require confronting money, guns, employers, landlords, insurers, polluters, and the public systems Republicans often want to weaken. It dips into the Republican checkbook. And women are interpreted through a similar moral filter. When Republicans speak about protecting women, the protection often depends on women fitting a preferred role, mothers, wives, daughters, victims of outsiders, symbols of moral character, people to be defended by paternal authority, women demanding bodily autonomy, sexual freedom, equal power, workplace authority, or freedom from religious control receive a colder form of interpretation. Their autonomy becomes selfishness. Their anger becomes instability, their fear exaggeration. Their medical decisions become a public property. Pregnancy makes this especially clear. A pregnant woman can be described with reference when she confirms the story Republicans want to tell about motherhood. When she seeks an abortion, needs emergency care, fears a dangerous pregnancy or partner, or refuses to let the state turn her body into an instrument of policy, the language changes. Her inner life becomes less important, and her judgment becomes suspect. The state's moral claim overtakes her lived reality. And this also explains the right's treatment of fear. Conservative fear is often treated as evidence of danger. Fear of crime justifies policing. Fear of immigrants justifies enforcement. Fear of voter fraud justifies restrictions. Fear of socialism justifies austerity. Fear of gender ideology justifies control over schools and families. Fear of losing the country justifies suspicion toward elections, courts, cities, universities, journalists, and public institutions. Fear outside the conservative imagination receives less authority. Black parents, afraid of police violence, are accused of being anti-police. Women afraid of forced pregnancy are accused of rejecting responsibility. Trans people afraid of harassment and state control are accused of demanding special treatment. Immigrants, afraid of detention, are told they should have followed the rules. Students afraid of shootings are told not to politicize tragedy. Poor families afraid of losing food or medical care are told to work harder. Fear can become policy when conservatives recognize the person feeling it. Fear becomes weakness, manipulation, or disorder when they don't. That selective recognition allows the right to present itself as both hard and wounded. It can demand punishment for outsiders while demanding mercy for itself. It can mock grievance politics while building an entire movement around conservative grievance. It can tell marginalized people to stop complaining while treating criticism of conservatives as persecution. It can accuse others of playing the victim while turning Trump, January 6th defendants, Christian conservatives, police officers, billionaires, gun owners, and conservative parents into victims of a hostile nation. And this victimhood serves a political function. It gives power the language of injury. A group seeking control over schools can describe itself as silenced. A party restricting abortion can describe itself as defending the vulnerable. A movement attacking trans families can describe itself as protecting children. A leader convicted by a jury can describe himself as persecuted. People who attack the Capitol can be described as victims of injustice. And that moral frame turns aggression into defense before the audience has to examine the behavior. That frame works because many people inside the conservative coalition experience cultural change as personal loss. A more pluralistic country can feel like displacement to people who were taught, directly or indirectly, that their culture represented the country itself. A woman in power, a black family in a white neighborhood, a Spanish sign in a store, a gay couple in a children's book, a Muslim official taking an oath, a trans student asked to be recognized, a city deciding an election, a teacher explaining racism, a journalist exposing corruption, each can be interpreted as evidence that the country has been taken from its rightful owners. And once politics is organized around that feeling, context becomes a reward. The people defending the old image of the country receive explanation. Their anger has causes, their fear has history, their violence has background, their leaders have enemies, their crimes have complications. People challenging that image receive a narrower analysis. Their anger is resentment, and their fear is strategy. Their protest is chaos, and their need is dependency. Their history is an exception. A healthy democracy depends on people being able to apply context without surrendering judgment. Context should help explain behavior without automatically excusing it. The right has shown that it understands this distinction when the person belongs to its side. It can talk about fear without denying facts, pressure without denying harm, youth without denying responsibility, grievance without denying law. The problem is distribution. The full human explanation is treated as privilege. That privilege has consequences. It affects who receives sympathy after death, who receives patience before trial or mercy after conviction, who receives public forgiveness after violence, and who's allowed to remain a person rather than become a category. It affects whether a protest is heard as a claim or dismissed as disorder. It affects whether a weapon is seen as protection or proof of danger. And it affects whether legal accountability looks like justice or persecution. This episode began with patriotism because patriotism is one of the cleanest places to see this sorting. A person's love of a country is judged through the same moral filter. Kaepernick's protest could have been interpreted as a demand that America protect all of its citizens. Smith and Carlos could have been interpreted as athletes asking the country to take its own principles seriously. George Floyd's death could have been interpreted as evidence that the state power needed to be restrained. Instead, conservatives often searched for disloyalty, disorder, character flaws, or excuses to narrow the claim. And the cases we've talked about, Rittenhouse received the language of context. Anthony was more quickly pressed in a criminal meaning. Floyd's death was filtered through biography. Babbitt's death became a conservative wound. Kaepernick's kneel became contempt, and January 6th became grievance. Trump's conviction became persecution, and Hunter Biden's conviction became confirmation. Republicans don't lack the capacity for nuance, they reserve it. And once nuance becomes selective, innocence becomes political property. It belongs most readily to the people the right already categorizes as part of the country it wants to defend. Everyone else has to earn it under harsher conditions, and many never receive it at all.

SPEAKER_50 1:19:29

There were a thousand people peacefully protesting. At a gas station a few blocks away from the courthouse, an argument broke up amongst a group of heavily armed young men and protesters. Early in the evening, I had a chance to talk to the armed men, and they described themselves as a self-made militia. And then come together over Instagram to protect protesters improperly. Among the self-described militia was a 17-year-old with a green shirt and a long rifle. We would later learn his name is Kyle Rinhouse. A short time after this argument, I heard several gunshots we're at about a block away from the gas station. Cell phone video shows someone who appears to be Rinhouse coming away with a gun while a man is left alone on the ground with what looks like a gunshot wound to the head. I saw the same person run past me with two or three men chasing him. He stumbled and fell to the ground before moving into a seated position and aiming his rifle at the men pursuing him. As he began firing, I ran for cover, and when I could see the street again, two men were laying on the ground. One of them was not moving.

SPEAKER_09 1:20:56

But last night, a 17-year-old individual from Antioch, Illinois, was involved in the use of firearms to reserve, to excuse me, to uh to resolve whatever conflict was in place. The result of it was two people are dead.

SPEAKER_38 1:21:14

A 17-year-old called Kyle Rittenhouse has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder for shootings that took place in Kenosha, Wisconsin recently. There's a lot of confusion about what exactly happened. But in at least two of the shootings, video shows Rittenhouse running away, being attacked, and then firing. What does this add up to? Well, some on the left don't want to know, and Tifa, according to accounts online, is trying to figure out what cell Rittenhouse is being held in, presumably so they can kill him.

SPEAKER_51 1:21:47

Kyle Rittenhouse faces multiple charges for shooting and killing two people and wounding a third during last year's riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He maintains it was self-defense. The jury is expected to begin deliberating his fate after Monday's closing arguments. But long before the facts of the case were even known, those on the left were quick to deliver their verdict.

SPEAKER_74 1:22:10

Kaylee.

SPEAKER_51 1:22:27

Tommy, I love Julie's point so much where the media is supposed to be the standard that the rest of us can look to for objectivity, right?

SPEAKER_10 1:22:35

Facts don't matter to the mainstream media, only the narrative and only the agenda. And it's sad that we've come to that place, but we certainly have. They have framed this young man from the get-go and already made their decision about him. But let's also reframe this. Let's imagine that Kyle Rittenhouse instead was a BLM or Antifa supporter, a member of one of those two groups, and he was being attacked by Trump supporters or being ambushed by Trump supporters. I think the media's tune would be quite different. And you use they use those terms about Trump and being a Blue Lives Matter supporter, and they use those because their Trump derangement syndrome is so deep and so thick that they can't get beyond that. And all they see is someone who is going out and questioning the narrative of these mostly peaceful BLM and Amtifa riots that we saw for an entire summer long. There was no outrage about those. There was no outrage about the violence, the vandalism, the destruction and the burning of cities that was occurring in cities for an entire summer, if not more. And I know Emily, you well know that in Portland and Seattle, those things continued on for months after the George Floyd riots. But there was no outrage from the media about that and the damage it caused. But they are going after him just like they've gone after Trump, just like they went after Nick Sandman, and just like they'll go after every single conservative if it helps benefit their agenda and their narrative.

SPEAKER_30 1:24:10

Kyle Rittenhouse came to Kenosha as a counter protester. He says to protect property following the police shooting of Jacob Blake last year.

SPEAKER_40 1:24:18

Self-defense is somebody enters your house and they're doing you wrong. He was out on the street, he was a provocative, and he had these people come to him.

SPEAKER_45 1:24:26

You just emboldened all of these people that are filled with so much hate. They are now emboldened.

SPEAKER_30 1:24:31

Rittenhouse was interviewed by Fox News after leaving the courtroom. The jury reached the correct verdict. Self-defense is not illegal.

SPEAKER_38 1:24:41

Throughout the trial, Rittenhouse was praised on right-wing media. When legitimate authority refuses to do its duty, its sworn duty, others will fill the vacuum. And lionized by many politicians on the right.

SPEAKER_31 1:24:53

If we don't defend this young boy who defended his community when no one else was doing it, it may very well be your baby boy that they come for.

SPEAKER_46 1:25:02

Kyle Rittenhouse would probably make a pretty good congressional intern. Kyle Rittenhouse is not guilty, my friends. You have a right to defend yourselves. Be armed, be dangerous, and be moral.

SPEAKER_44 1:25:11

A lot of people would have been very angry in this country if that young man was uh was in any way convicted.

SPEAKER_30 1:25:18

Already, far-right groups are calling Rittenhouse the hero we've been waiting for. Republican Missouri Senate candidate Mark McCloskey, who launched a career in politics after pleading guilty to waving his gun at protesters last summer, showed up at the Kenosha courthouse, photographed with two men flashing white supremacist hand signals.

SPEAKER_24 1:25:36

Kyle Rittenhouse brought to tears as the jury held his fate in their hands and the verdict was read. Not guilty on all charges. Justice was served. Our system works. This was a clear-cut case of self-defense. The media lies, triggered the riot, which ended up costing millions in damage and two lives. Remember, this is the same media who wants you to believe there were mostly peaceful protests going on as the fire was blazing behind them. This case has nothing to do with race. It was four white men. The media will have to answer for what they did. Even the disgraced athlete Colin Kaepernick jumped on the bandwagon tweeting we just witnessed a system built on white supremacy validate the terroristic attacks of a white supremacist. This only further validates the need to abolish our current system. White supremacy cannot be reformed. So when you watch Rittenhouse on Tucker, you don't see the way the media has characterized him. You see a guy who looks pretty measured, open-minded, thoughtful person. And when you look at him testify too, what do you see? You see someone who is scared for his life, crying real tears, and honestly, someone who was there in Kenosha that night to help not to harm. But the media makes him look like some vigilante who's out on some racist killing spree, just using his white tears in order to literally beat a murder rap. So why do we have this? So it's because they do character assassination and psychological warfare.

SPEAKER_36 1:27:18

19-year-old Carmelo Anthony pleading not guilty to murder after fatally stabbing 17-year-old Austin Metcalf in the past at a high school track meet last year. Prosecutors calling Anthony's actions unjustified provoked murder, alleging he goaded Metcalf into pushing him, then killed him. Metcalf's mother wiping her eyes as jurors watched.

SPEAKER_39 1:28:00

The case was going. The prosecution was very methodical. They used some of the same phrases over and over again to emphasize what their theme of the case was. From the defense standpoint, I thought they tried to humanize Carmelo a little bit, trying to make him more of a relatable person. And one thing I found extremely interesting is nobody addressed why he had a knife at a track meeting. So the idea that that was not brought up by the defense during their open leaves a little question in everybody's mind. How are they going to get around that?

SPEAKER_48 1:28:28

Let's get into a few of the details that were laid out, at least when it comes to the prosecution, in their opening statement. The two guys were under the same tent. A tent that was there for the team of Austin Metcalf. Carmelo Anthony was on another high school team. It was raining. He presumably knew someone, that's the reports, inside that Memorial High School tent. But tell me about what happened when it comes to Metcalf, what he heard from his coaches, and how that three or four minutes of interaction went down in Frisco.

SPEAKER_39 1:29:01

Speaking of his coaches, I've been told that the track coach is actually on the witness stand right now providing testimony. But what we heard in opening was the track coach actually reached out to Austin Metcalf as one of the leaders of the team, one of the leaders of his grade, and said, Hey, I need you today. I need you to be a leader and do things the right way when we're at the track meet. So Austin felt like he needed to protect his other athletes. They were in their own tent that was just their team, kind of like a locker room. It seems like every school had a tent. Unfortunately, Carmelo's did not. And so you see Carmelo walk in and out a few different times, and then they're both in that tent area for about four or five minutes, and then you finally see some pushing and shoving going on. One guy goes this direction, the other guy goes this direction, and then all chaos breaks news.

SPEAKER_48 1:29:44

Okay, before you left the courtroom to come join us, the only witness that had made the stand at that point was a forensic video and an uh analyst. And so that was much of what the jury saw today. They saw the video. Tell us what you could see in that video.

SPEAKER_39 1:29:59

It's very grainy. It's uh surveillance video from different vantage points in the stadium. They brought in an expert to enhance the video as best as possible. You can never make out anyone's face. You can't see, you can see the clothing that they're wearing, and they match that up with some of the more clear pictures they had from the very entrance. But the actual act in the stands, it's it's very difficult to see who's involved. A lot of shadowy figures. It does not show that Carmelo was jumped by four or five different people. There was one person scuffling with him. Supposedly, he said, push me and see what happens. Austin pushes him and he has a knife in his hand and just plunges it right in his chest.

SPEAKER_46 1:30:41

19-year-old Carmelo Anthony sentenced to 35 years in prison for fatally stabbing 17-year-old Austin Metcalfe at a track meet.

SPEAKER_69 1:30:50

This was awful place. This this place awful place as a former prosecutor. This was a legal entity that happened in this motherhouse. This is a motherhouse. This is not a courthouse. Those twins are domestic racist terrorists.

SPEAKER_46 1:31:09

To be clear, it's a little bit tough to hear. The last line those twins are domestic racist terrorists. If that incendiary accusation was true, wouldn't the defense have brought that out to attack the victim's character, albeit a risky strategy, I understand, but you even said we're throwing stuff against the wall here to steer see what sticks. Or do you think the defense was too scared to open up a character attack line of questioning for what it would have meant for their client?

SPEAKER_07 1:31:42

Well, number one, it was irrelevant. Race was irrelevant in this case, except in the minds of these protesters. Uh, and I think the defense knew that they've tried to go down that road, the judge would have shut them down because race was not a factor in this case. I'd like to know where these protesters are uh every day in Chicago when you have thousands over the years of black men killing other black men. Where is where are they calling for justice in those cases? They're not. And so they're trying to monetize uh the tragedy of one boy killing another boy. If this was two white dudes getting in a fight and one died, or two black dudes, this wouldn't even have been on their your channel or any other news channel.

SPEAKER_16 1:32:21

Now young people themselves are demanding changes. CBS2 Stephen Graves is live at Chicago Police headquarters after speaking to some of them. Stephen.

SPEAKER_14 1:32:32

Hey, Jim, yeah, good evening. We've heard about groups asking for more police officers on the street. Chicago police actually started a new initiative this week. But these young people say let's start talking about alternative ways to uh change the gun violence cycle in their communities. Twenty-two-year-old Nita Tennyson bears the heavy weight of names on her back Saturday, ones of young friends lost to gun violence in Chicago.

SPEAKER_65 1:32:57

Not enough graduations, weddings, baby showers, it's funerals and urns. That's all I've been to in the past four years.

SPEAKER_14 1:33:03

And the tragic cycle continued this past 4th of July weekend.

SPEAKER_65 1:33:06

And I ended up losing one of my friends this past weekend, and I wanted to do the march because it's enough. Peace up, peace up.

SPEAKER_14 1:33:13

She and the group Good Kids Mad City organized this love march in Greater Grand Crossing. It came a Saturday, already saw more than a dozen shooting victims, two men shot here on West Congress in the early morning hours, and last Friday afternoon, a 15-year-old boy shot dead in Jeffery Manor. It all sparking even more passionate words from these young people. 18-year-old Miracle Boyd, now here to lead a charge.

SPEAKER_66 1:33:38

GKMC is currently working on a campaign and ordinance titled The Peace Book.

SPEAKER_14 1:33:42

It's aimed at tackling gun violence by providing resources to struggling black and brown Chicago communities.

SPEAKER_66 1:33:48

We will incentivize street factions and gangs to go through a restorative justice process so they can be accountable and heal from their trauma. They will also come to terms and agree to peace treaties and end the cycle of violence that has claimed the lives of women and children.

SPEAKER_14 1:34:01

Seven-year-old Natalia Wallace, one of those victims July 4th, caught in the middle of gang gunfire as she played in her grandmother's yard, one of nearly 80 people shot that weekend in Chicago. Police now have plans to engage more with neighborhoods, putting officers in hotspot areas for community service to gain trust.

SPEAKER_11 1:34:21

The parents are liars. They hired a lying spokesperson to represent them, a race hustler, too, which appears to apply to the parents as well. Not to mention their core supporters and their grandmother, Carmelo's grandmother, who kept chanting, racist, biased, racist, biased, after the guilty verdict. Why don't you try accepting responsibility? Okay. Maybe if you hadn't had such an entitled attitude that's blind to facts, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. Your grandson would be free, and Austin Metcalf would still be alive.

SPEAKER_48 1:34:56

Austin Metcalf's dad, Jeff Metcalf.

SPEAKER_42 1:34:58

If your children saw how you acted, would you be proud? Or is that what you teach them? Do you teach them that racism is okay? Do you teach them? Do you ever do you program your kids? I said this was never about race. Don't make it about race, and don't politically. What did you do to that boy to make him just happen somebody? My God, what kind of mother are you? You're the only one in your family without it. I guess that's something to brag about in your culture. You people hang your hat on the dumbest I've ever seen. Let me let me make one up. Y'all can make let me make let me make something racist up so y'all can go viral. I got a new name for Mellon, okay? Because he was such a little boy y'all were trying to portray. How about watermelon felon? How does that one strike you? I hope he enjoyed his first night in a cell last night. Because he's gonna have many nights to think about what the thing he did. If you want to talk about stolen land, yeah, that starts here. We were here before y'all were. They took all our land and put us on the reservation. They just brought you guys over on the boat. Hey man, that's your game. Cool. You bring it in my lane. I'm gonna run your fucking over. So you get more than four hundred years ago. Someone actually took you over here.

SPEAKER_49 1:38:07

Well but sometimes it appears as an instinct. Anthony was convicted of murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison for the fatal stabbing of Austin Metcalf at a Texas high school track meet. He argued self-defense. The all-white jury rejected that argument. Kyle Rittenhouse, by contrast, was acquitted by an all-white jury, with the exception of one juror, after arguing self-defense in the Kenosha shootings, where he shot three people, killing two, during unrest after the police shooting of Jacob Blake. The legal outcomes are different, and while the cases aren't factually identical, they're connected. And what connects them is the history they entered. American criminal justice has literally never operated outside race. For generations, researchers have found what they call the race of the victim effect. Crimes against white victims are punished more severely than crimes against black victims, particularly in homicide and death penalty cases. They have also found that all white or majority white jury pools convict black defendants at significantly higher rates than white defendants, a disparity that shrinks dramatically once jury pools become more diverse. And across jurisdictions, black defendants receive significantly harsher sentences than white defendants convicted of the same crime. None of those findings prove that any individual verdict is racist. They tell us something more important. They tell us that every modern courtroom today exists inside a history that didn't disappear simply because the law changed. Jurors don't enter the courtroom without history. Neither do prosecutors, police officers, journalists, politicians, or the rest of us. We inherit assumptions about danger, innocence, credibility, and fear long before we hear the evidence. That's why these cases become more than criminal trials. They become mirrors. They show us not only what happened between two people or three people, but how America continues to decide whose fear sounds reasonable, whose violence receives context, and whose humanity survives accusation. America has always sorted fear by race. White fear has often been treated as reasonable, protective, civic, even patriotic. Black fear has often been treated as aggression, excuse making, disorder, or criminality. That pattern predates both of these cases. It runs through slavery, slave patrols, which would lead to police departments, lynching, segregation, jury exclusion, sentencing, and the long history of white people being believed more readily when black life was on the other side of the story. For centuries, white Americans were allowed to police public space and call it order. They could patrol roads, neighborhoods, voting lines, schools, workplaces, and borders of racial belonging. Black Americans were expected to explain why they were there, why they were moving, why they were angry, why they were afraid, why they hadn't obeyed fast enough, why they hadn't made the white person feel safe. So when a black teenager is accused of killing a white teenager, the case doesn't enter a neutral country. It enters a country where the white victim is easily individualized as son, athlete, brother, child, future innocence. But a black defendant enters any encounter with police or the courtroom or in the eyes of society at large with a history already attached to him. He can become more than just a person within the context of the situation. He can become proof, proof of danger, proof of entitlement, proof of crime, proof of everything outside the circle of the American tradition. That's why the commentary around the case isn't separate from the case's political meaning. It doesn't have to be racist outright, although his dad was. It's the implicit bias we all have. It's the language we use, it's the context of the crime, the coverage, the outlash afterwards. When people reach for watermelon jokes, criminal stereotypes, and claims about black entitlement, they're telling us what story they think they are inside. They're not only responding to a death, they're participating in a racial tradition. And Rittenhouse shows the other side of the tradition. Conservatives knew how to give him context. They could describe the chaos, the fear, the crowd, the split-second decisions, the legal standard, the burden of proof, the danger of rushing the judgment. They could explain why someone who killed two people might still deserve the full protection of law and the full complexity of human interpretation. They could understand the frustrations of January 6th insurrectionists that stormed the Capitol and tried to overthrow an election, but struggle to understand the protest of black immunity after another black child is killed by a white police officer. When the person at the center of the case fits the right's image of the citizen, white, armed, anti-left, standing against protest, standing against loss of power, context becomes abundant. When the person is black and the victim is white, context becomes suspicious. Self-defense becomes an excuse. Youth becomes irrelevant. Fear becomes harder to imagine. The courtroom may speak in individual facts, but the culture hears those facts through inherited categories. Innocence, fear, danger, reasonableness, and patriotism have never been distributed evenly. They have always been filtered through the question beneath this whole episode. Who is already imagined as belonging? Because belonging changes interpretation. A person who belongs can make a mistake and remain human. A person outside the circle can make a mistake and become a warning. A person who belongs receives tragedy. A person outside the circle receives identity. That's why this is not only a story about two teenagers, two trials, or two verdicts, or just a story about protest. It's a story about America and who gets to be a patriot.

SPEAKER_71 1:43:39

At 9 05 a.m. Central Time, the Department of Homeland Security law enforcement officials and officers were conducting targeted operations in Minneapolis against an illegal alien whose criminal history included domestic assault with intentionally inflicting bodily harm, disorderly conduct, and driving without a valid license. An individual approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun. The officers attempted to disarm this individual, but the armed suspect reacted violently. Fearing for his life and for the lives of his fellow officers around him, an agent fired defensive shots. Medics were on the scene immediately and attempted to deliver medical aid to the subject, but he was pronounced dead at the scene. The suspect also had two magazines with ammunition in them that held dozens of rounds. He also had no ID. This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement. This individual showed up to impede a law enforcement operation and assaulted our officers. They responded according to their training and took action to defend the officer's life and those of the public around him. And uh I don't know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign. This is a violent riot when you have someone showing up with weapons and are using them to assault law enforcement officers. We're continuing to follow the exact same protocols that we always have. And so this investigation is ongoing. We're continuing to gather the facts as they unfold throughout that. And we'll do it just like we did under the entire Trump administration and previous administrations. Nothing has changed, and we'll continue to release details as we have them. But I want you to not distract away from the facts of the situation. Our law enforcement officers were there doing a targeted operation against an individual who was in this country illegally and had a criminal conviction for domestic assault with intent to do bodily harm and other convictions as well. This individual went and impeded their law enforcement operations, attacked those officers, had a weapon on him, and multiple dozens of rounds of ammunition, wishing to inflict harm on these officers coming brandishing like that and impeding their work that they were doing. That is no claim. It is the facts. The facts of the situation this individual showed up to an law enforcement operation with a weapon and dozens of rounds of ammunition. He wasn't there to peacefully protest. He was there to perpetuate violence. And he was asked to show up and to continue to resist by a governor who is irresponsible and has a long history of corruption and lying. This individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism. That's the facts. This is the same protocol will always follow. Who would trust Governor Walls at this point? The man has stood up and encouraged resistance. He has refused to partner with us. He has sacrificed his citizens' safety and their well-being by choosing the side of people who break the law and who steal money and who perpetuate violence. He has chosen all of that and backed an administration previously that allowed an invasion of our country. We need to partner with people who truly understand that the law is the law, and in the United States, we will keep people safe.

SPEAKER_29 1:47:29

This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.com founder and certified firearms instructor, Steven Kotowski.

SPEAKER_52 1:47:42

Stephen, thank you for being with us. In a recent appearance on Fox News, FBI Director Patel said this about bringing guns to protest. Take a listen. So was Alex Predi in any way breaking the law when he brought that gun to a protest?

SPEAKER_61 1:48:08

No, he wasn't. Uh Minneapolis police have already stated that Predi had a valid concealed carry license, and in Minneapolis, as well as in in uh Minnesota writ large, there is no ban on carrying firearms at a protest. And I think there's also some question as to whether or not this would even qualify as a protest under states that do have that sort of ban. But regardless, here there was no such ban.

SPEAKER_52 1:48:32

And and Pretty is being called by other officials that he's a domestic terrorist. By bringing a gun to a protest where there's other law enforcement, does that categorize somebody as a domestic terrorist?

SPEAKER_61 1:48:44

Certainly not under any law. And of course, it is pretty common in the United States for people to bring guns to protest, especially gun rights protests. We had a major one in Richmond, Virginia just last Monday without incident.

SPEAKER_52 1:49:05

I'm curious because this shooting has brought up the debate over carrying firearms and public and the use of firearms by by law enforcement. And we've seen repeatedly this administration siding with firearms rights advocates in other cases involving gun violence. Yet in this case, top officials are doing it about face. How are gun rights advocates seeing this?

SPEAKER_61 1:49:26

Yeah, there was uh what seemed to be a bit of a coordinated effort to paint just carrying a firearm or extra magazines, which is also a common thing that a lot of people with concealed carry licenses do on a daily basis, as nefarious by the administration, by many top administration officials, even beyond Patel. And uh that's brought quite a bit of la backlash from the gun rights groups, including the National Rifle Association, Gunnar's America, the Second Amendment Foundation. They've all uh pushed back on this idea that just doing that alone is nefarious. And I think even as the this morning, the Trump administration has perhaps started to take a different Tacked on that question with uh the White House press secretary pulling back away from this idea that merely having a gun, uh, near law enforcement is evidence of nefarious intent.

SPEAKER_76 1:50:11

We never forget and always remember our brothers and sisters who have served so that we may enjoy the gift of freedom.

SPEAKER_22 1:50:18

Alex Pretty's name is now known around the world. One reason is this viral video. It shows Pretty standing over the body of a veteran who passed away and honoring his service. Susan Elizabeth Littlefield got the story behind that video that millions have now seen.

SPEAKER_41 1:50:35

Oh, this is a a State House Congressman from Ohio. And he said, Thank you for your courage of the post, what you did. Your father would be so proud.

SPEAKER_75 1:50:45

And how did that hit?

SPEAKER_41 1:50:47

With thousands of people saying, He would be so proud of you. It's it's truly remarkable, and it feels, you know, I feel his presence, and you know, I'll carry that with me.

SPEAKER_75 1:50:57

Terry Randolph was a proud airman.

SPEAKER_41 1:51:00

He was stationed in Libya at an Air Force base. Um, he was like an aeronautical uh telecommunications.

SPEAKER_75 1:51:08

And communicating would become his career. He opened a public relations business in the 1980s. He hosted a gigantic welcome home for hostages during the missile crisis.

SPEAKER_41 1:51:19

Telling stories and the right stories and trying to be on the right side of history.

SPEAKER_75 1:51:23

After seven decades of telling stories, they got the news. His time was short, lung cancer.

SPEAKER_41 1:51:29

He didn't want to continue to do treatment. He wanted to go on the route of hospice. And this is when Alex really kind of became someone that my family leaned on and um answered a lot of questions during a really difficult time.

SPEAKER_75 1:51:44

And it was Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old man with a smile, who answered the hardest questions his father would ever have to ask.

SPEAKER_41 1:51:52

Alex himself, who with much resolve was able to, you know, look a man in the eye who's, you know, you know, asking questions about his own death.

SPEAKER_75 1:52:02

Seems like you felt safe with it.

SPEAKER_41 1:52:04

Yeah, yeah, I would say he definitely made a sense of calm.

SPEAKER_75 1:52:08

A sense of calm he brought in the moments after Terry passed.

SPEAKER_41 1:52:12

In this solemn hour, we read him our honor and our gratitude. Someone who, you know, was so compassionate and such a just a good man to think about him being portrayed as a domestic terrorist.

SPEAKER_75 1:52:24

Split second decision. He posted this video as a testament to Alex's character.

SPEAKER_41 1:52:30

I couldn't remain silent. I had to, you know, help in any way I could. I was lucky enough to have a little piece of evidence to shine a light on him, and and I hope that people see it.

unknown 1:52:42

I think they are.

SPEAKER_75 1:52:44

And did they ever?

SPEAKER_38 1:52:46

As Alex Predy said himself, as he honored a deceased veteran who had been in his care. Today we remember that freedom is not free.

SPEAKER_75 1:52:53

Your dad and him are connected.

SPEAKER_41 1:52:55

Yeah, he would have wanted to be a part of this. He was a storyteller, and this is this is his last act, and and he's on the right side of history again.

SPEAKER_75 1:53:04

Susan Elizabeth Littlefield, WCCO News.

SPEAKER_22 1:53:08

Alex Prey was killed on January 24th, one year to the day after Terry's celebration of life.

SPEAKER_55 1:53:15

I would also like to address the chaotic scenes in Minnesota over the weekend. Nobody in the White House, including President Trump, wants to see people getting hurt or killed in America's streets. This includes Renee Good, Alex Predi, the brave men and women of federal law enforcement, and the many Americans who have been victimized at the hands of illegal alien criminals. Saturday's shooting remains under active investigation by Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI. The Customs and Border Protection is also conducting their own internal review. As President Trump said yesterday, the administration is reviewing everything with respect to the shooting, and we will let that investigation play out. But let's be clear about the circumstances which led to that moment on Saturday. This tragedy occurred as a result of a deliberate and hostile resistance by Democrat leaders in Minnesota. For weeks, Governor Waltz and the mayor Jacob Fry and other elected Democrats were spreading lies about federal law enforcement officers who are risking their lives daily to remove the worst criminal, illegal aliens from our streets. Murderers, rapists, pedophiles, human traffickers, and gang members.

SPEAKER_28 1:54:32

CBS News has exclusively learned the vast majority of immigrants arrested by immigration and customs enforcement officials under the Trump administration did not have violent criminal records.

SPEAKER_58 1:54:49

That number comes from new data shared by the University of California, Berkeley, as part of its deportation data project.

SPEAKER_59 1:54:56

It also found that nearly 75,000 people who were arrested have no criminal records. These numbers give one of the most revealing looks into the Trump administration's aggressive efforts to rein in immigration.

SPEAKER_55 1:55:08

Governor Waltz and Mayor Fry have shamefully blocked local and state police from cooperating with ICE, actively inhibiting efforts to arrest violent criminals. They have also used their platforms to encourage left-wing agitators to stalk, record, confront, and obstruct federal officers who were just trying to lawfully perform their duties, which has created dangerous situations threatening both these officers and the general public and Minnesotans alike. This is precisely what unfolded in Minneapolis on Saturday morning. Obstructing federal law enforcement and inciting violence against officers is wrong and illegal. This used to be a universally accepted position in the United States. Amid the hysteria, we must remember how we got here to this moment today and what this Democrat opposition is about. Former President Joe Biden and the Democrats opened America's borders for four years, inviting tens of millions of illegal aliens from all over the world to flood into our country. Among them, violent criminals who terrorized American communities and have inflicted devastating, permanent pain and harm on law-abiding Americans and their families. Yet we never saw outrage from Democrats or their allies in the liberal media over these horrifying crimes against U.S. citizens.

SPEAKER_17 1:56:46

It's a case that is made national news because Lopez Sanchez is an undocumented immigrant with a long felony record who's been deported five times but keeps coming back. And even after that, even after a recent drug arrest, he was released from a jail by San Francisco authorities into the general populace because San Francisco does not cooperate with federal immigration laws. It's a sanctuary city.

SPEAKER_60 1:57:14

Immigration authorities say the suspects crossed the border illegally earlier this year and were released into the U.S. by the Border Patrol. Police say the men strangled Jocelyn and dumped her body in a creek. Just days ago, another undocumented immigrant from Ecuador was arrested in New York City, accused of raping a 13-year-old girl in broad daylight. And last week, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador was arrested in Oklahoma. Police say he raped and murdered Rachel Morin, a mother of five from Maryland.

SPEAKER_55 1:57:49

The pain of American angel families was ignored and dismissed because it undermined the Democrat narrative. Innocent Americans like Jocelyn Nungra, Lakin Riley, and Rachel Morin are just a few of the many victims savagely murdered by illegal alien criminals. Earlier this month, an illegal alien from Mexico with a long criminal history who came into our country under Joe Biden's administration threw a baseball-sized stone at a school bus carrying children in New Jersey and fractured the skull of an eight-year-old innocent children.

SPEAKER_20 1:58:29

That's according to a study by the University of Michigan using data from the CDC.

SPEAKER_67 1:58:33

Allow me to address a shooting that took place this morning in Santa Fe High School, Texas. President and I have been briefed. We'll continue to monitor the situation. But we say to the students, the families, the teachers of Santa Fe High School, and all of those affected in the entire community. We're with you. You are in our prayers, and I know you are in the prayers of the American people.

SPEAKER_55 1:59:00

President Trump promised accountability to these American families by securing the border, deporting every illegal alien who has committed crimes, especially and most importantly, violent crimes. Nearly 80 million Americans voted for him to deliver on that very promise, and he is. As the duly elected president, the president is fulfilling the will of the people by arresting and removing these threats from our country in cities from Los Angeles to New York and yes, Minneapolis. Yet Democrat leaders in Minnesota with sanctuary city policies have actively defied federal immigration law and the will of the people. And as a result of that defiance, two Minnesotans have now tragically lost their lives on the streets of Tim Waltz's state. And it's President Trump's hope and wish and demand for the resistance and chaos to end today. That's why President Trump spoke with Governor Waltz directly this morning, and he has outlined a clear and simple path to restoring law and order in Minnesota. Number one, Governor Waltz Mayor Fry and all Democrat leaders should turn over all criminal illegal aliens currently incarcerated in their prisons and jails to federal authorities, along with any illegal aliens with active warrants or known criminal histories for immediate deportation. Number two, state and local law enforcement must agree to turn over all illegal aliens who are arrested by local police. And then thirdly, local police must assist federal law enforcement in apprehending and detaining illegal aliens who are wanted for crimes, especially violent crimes. If Governor Wallace and Mayor Fry implement these common sense cooperative measures that I will add have already been implemented in nearly every single other state across the country, Customs and Border Patrol will not be needed to support ICE on the ground in Minnesota. ICE and local law enforcement can peacefully work together, as they are effectively doing in so many other states and jurisdictions. Additionally, President Trump is calling on the United States Congress to immediately pass legislation ending sanctuary cities once and for all. American cities should be safe sanctuaries for law-abiding citizens only, not for dangerous illegal alien criminals who broke our nation's laws and do not belong here. We hope Governor Walls will continue will do the right thing and continue to work with President Trump to keep the American people safe following their call this morning. Americans overwhelmingly want exactly what President Trump is delivering: strong borders and strict immigration enforcement against the worst illegal aliens, of which there are still hundreds of thousands to deport from the interior of our country.

SPEAKER_49 2:03:00

A political movement built around selective innocence eventually develops a difficult relationship with facts.

SPEAKER_55 2:03:07

Some facts can be absorbed easily.

SPEAKER_49 2:03:09

Others threaten the story the movement tells about itself. The evidence has to be managed. Can be denied, reframed, minimized, burdened, and suspicion, or redirected toward an enemy. And that habit has become one of the defining features of Republican politics. The argument is no longer limited to a disagreement over tax rates, court appointments, school policy, immigration levels, gun laws, or regulation. Those fights remain and they matter, but the large change is the attack on the institutions that allow people to establish a shared account of what happened. Elections, courts, journalism, science, public education, public health, and history all become suspect when their conclusions threaten the right's preferred story of the country. Elections are the clearest example because democracy gives reality a formal procedure. Votes are cast, counted, challenged through lawful channels when necessary, certified, and translated into authority. A party can lose an election and still remain legitimate. It can organize, persuade, nominate better candidates, change strategy, and accept that the public choose something else. That process depends on losers treating loss as part of democracy rather than proof that democracy failed. Republicans have increasingly treated unfavorable election outcomes as suspicious by default. The 2020 election became the major break. Trump told his supporters before election day that the only way he could lose was if the election was rigged. The fraud story was prepared before the results existed, which meant the result didn't have to be evaluated on its own terms. It arrived inside a narrative already built to reject it. Courts dismissed claim after claim. State officials certified the results. Republican election officials, Republican governors, Trump appointed judges, local administrators, federal agencies, recounts, and audits failed to produce evidence of fraud sufficient to change the outcome. The institutional process did what a democratic system is supposed to do when a claim is made. It tested the claim. The right didn't broadly accept the result of that testing. The courts became corrupt. Republican officials who could not help overturn the result became weak or disloyal. Election workers became targets, cities, symbols of fraud, mail ballots became suspicious. The absence of evidence became part of the conspiracy rather than a reason to abandon it. And once a belief is built to protect identity, evidence has a harder time reaching it. But the election lie was never only about ballots. It's about the rights difficulty accepting that the country is larger than the people it recognizes as the rightful nation. If voters in Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Phoenix, and other multiracial urban centers help decide an election, the result can feel illegitimate to people whose image of America doesn't fully include those places as equal authors of the country. The vote becomes suspect because the voters are suspect. That's how the older boundary enters the voting system. The right doesn't need to say openly that citizens count less. It can speak through procedure, doubt, suspicion, audits, lawsuits, voter restrictions, and claims about integrity. The language sounds neutral, but that distrust travels toward predictable places. Journalism receives the same treatment. A free press has a basic function in a democracy. It documents public life, investigates power, checks claims, exposes misconduct, and creates a record citizens can use to judge leaders. Journalism can be flawed, reporters can make mistakes, institutions can have a bias, incentives, or blind spots. But a serious society can criticize journalism without destroying the public need for verified information. The rights attack on journalism goes far beyond criticism. Fake news became a way to train rejection before evaluation. Once a source is marked as hostile, the audience no longer has to answer the specific fact. A report on corruption becomes fake news. A recording becomes out of context. A former aide disgruntled or a court filing political. A journalist asking a direct question becomes rude, dishonest, or unpatriotic. The accusation doesn't need to disprove the evidence, it changes the status of the messenger. And that shift protects leaders from accountability. If the press is treated as an enemy of the people, then information coming through the press can be dismissed as an attack by definition. The audience doesn't have to ask whether the reporting is accurate or documented or corroborated or methodologically sound. The political identity of the institution decides the meaning of the information. The political identity of the institution decides the meaning of the information. Conservative media gives the audience a different experience. It creates an environment in which the rights, fears, grievances, and enemies are repeated until they become atmosphere. Crime is tied to cities, immigration is tied to invasion, gender is tied to danger, schools are tied to indoctrination, Democrats are tied to corruption, protest is tied to chaos. The audience receives a continuous education in what to fear and who to blame. That experience doesn't feel like propaganda from the inside. It feels like clarity. It feels like finally seeing what others refuse to admit. The viewer is told that experts are lying, journalists are covering things up, and schools are captured, courts are biased, Democrats are cheating, and only their movement has the courage to say the truth. Once that emotional world is built, outside information sounds less like correction and more like confirmation that powerful enemies are hiding something. Science produces a related problem for the right because science can force political consequences that Republicans don't want to accept. Climate change is the obvious example. If climate science is accurate, then fossil fuel companies become implicated in harm. Regulation becomes necessary. Public investment becomes necessary. Consumption, infrastructure, energy policy, transportation, agriculture, insurance, housing, and international obligations all come under pressure. Think about it. Big meat, big tobacco, all of them. The free market cannot be treated as morally neutral if the market is producing damage that other people will absorb. Republicans have spent decades weakening that conclusion. Climate science has been described as alarmism, hoax, socialism, elitism, globalism, or an excuse for control. The attack doesn't need to defeat every study. It only needs to keep enough doubt alive that action becomes politically difficult. Delay benefits the industries already making money. Doubt becomes profitable because inaction has owners. COVID placed the same conflict inside daily life. Public health required people to accept that individual behavior could harm strangers. It required trust in institutions, data, changing guidance, and a method that revises as evidence changes. That created a difficult public experience because science was unfolding in real time. Guidance changed as knowledge changed, and Republicans used that change as evidence of deception rather than evidence of a method adjusting to new information. Masks became submission. Vaccines, tyranny. Public health officials were villains. Pharmaceutical companies became big pharma when vaccines were tied to public health policy. The criticism rarely developed into a serious challenge to the profit structure that gives pharmaceutical corporations so much power. The broader system that makes drug companies powerful remained protected because the system belongs to the world of markets, stocks, innovation, and capital. The anger was allowed to rise just far enough to attack the mandate, then stopped before it reached the economic structure. Public education threatens the right in a different way. Schools do more than transmit information, they shape what the next generation understands as normal, possible, shameful, admirable, dangerous, and true. A classroom that teaches accurate history gives students tools for understanding the present. A library that includes different families tells children who exists in public life. A curriculum that explains racism, labor, gender, religion, science, and government gives students language for systems they would otherwise experience only as personal fate. And the right is smart enough to understand the stakes of that process. It often describes schools as places where children are being indoctrinated, but the panic usually rises when schools teach material that weaken their older story of America. Lessons about slavery, segregation, redlining, indigenous removal, labor violence, Japanese incarceration, civil rights, LGBTQ plus life, or gender variation make the country harder to describe as innocent. They show that inequality was built through policy, law, money, and force. And it shows who did it by making the hierarchy visible. Movement invested in national innocence has to manage history carefully. It can celebrate the civil rights movement after stripping it of conflict. It can quote Martin Luther King Jr. while avoiding his criticism of capitalism, militarism, and white moderation. It can praise abolition in hindsight while resisting present claims about racial inequality. It can honor protests once it's safely distant, then condemn living protests as divisive. History becomes acceptable when it flatters the country's self-image, and it becomes indoctrination when it explains how power operated and operates. That creates a strange relationship to patriotism. A mature patriotism would allow the country to remember accurately. It would understand that love of country doesn't require the country to appear innocent. The right often demands a more fragile version of patriotism, one that treats historical honesty as hostility. If a student learns too clearly how the country distributed land, wealth, citizenship, policing, education, and labor, then patriotism may become less obedient and more demanding. And therefore more costly. The attack on history therefore protects more than emotion. It protects property, status, and policy. It protects wealth. If racial wealth gaps are tied to housing policy, then current inequality becomes harder to explain through individual failure. If labor history is taught seriously, workers may understand their rights were won through organizing rather than gifted by employers. If environmental history is taught seriously, students may see pollution as a political choice rather than an unfortunate side effect of progress. If gender history is taught seriously, traditional hierarchy becomes less natural. If immigration history is taken seriously, the story of a pure nation invaded by outsiders becomes harder to sustain. And each one of those stories is costly, both financially and socially. The same structure appears in attacks on courts and legal accountability. Republicans praise courts when courts deliver outcomes they want. They celebrate constitutionalism when a court restricts abortion, expands gun rights, protects conservative religious claims, limits federal regulation, or weakens voting rights protections. Judicial power sounds noble when it protects the rights' priorities. But when the courts or prosecutors reach Trump and his allies, legal institutions become corrupt. Trump's conviction on 34 felony counts in New York didn't lead Republicans to treat him as the criminal that George Floyd was. Many framed the case as proof that the justice system had been weaponized. The conviction became evidence against the court rather than evidence against Trump. The legal system was trusted when it punished opponents, migrants, poor defendants, protesters, or ordinary people accused of crime, but it became illegitimate when it touched a leader. And that becomes more dangerous when it's paired with political violence. January 6th was built on a false claim about an election. People entered the Capitol because they were told the country had been stolen, and that lie gave violence a moral frame. A person who believes a candidate lost an election may organize for the next one, but a person who believes the election was stolen may begin to see unlawful action as defense. And after the attack, Republicans had to decide whether to treat the event as an assault on democracy or an embarrassing action by people they still recognize as part of their own political party. But the decision for Republicans to play down January 6th teaches people something. It tells them that violence committed in service of the right may receive political protection later. It tells them that the law is flexible when the cause is treated as righteous. It tells them that loyalty can matter more than the damage done. But a democracy cannot survive if every institution becomes legitimate only when it protects one side's story. Elections cannot function if losses are automatically suspicious. Courts cannot function if accountability is called persecution whenever it reaches power. Journalism cannot function if unfavorable facts are dismissed as fake before they're even evaluated. Science cannot function if findings are accepted only when they don't threaten donors, industries, or identity. And schools cannot function if history is allowed only when it keeps the country comfortable. And the right's hostility toward these institutions has a consistent direction. The institutions become enemies when they make the preferred group answerable to something outside itself. Elections make the group answerable to other voters. Journalism makes leaders answerable to documented facts. Courts make conduct answerable to law. Each institution weakens ownership by introducing an outside standard. The conservative response has been to replace outside standards with loyalty. The leader says what happened, the movement decides which facts matter. The preferred media ecosystem tells the audience who to trust. The party decides which elections are real. The courts are praised or condemned by outcome. Science is accepted or rejected by convenience, and history is permitted or banned by its effect on national innocence. And once politics moves that way, reality becomes a possession struggle. The question shifts from what happened to who has the authority to define what happened. That's a dangerous place for a democracy because democratic life requires people to lose arguments, lose cases, lose elections, face evidence, accept records, revise beliefs, and share institutions with people they dislike. But the lesson here is that the rights reality problem serves wealth. When Republicans say they're defending America, they often mean they're defending the right of one group to define America. They are defending the symbols, institutions, and stories that make that group feel like the country's natural owner. Elections, journalism, science, courts, and schools become threats because they allow other people, other facts, and other histories to enter the record. The right doesn't only ask who gets to be a patriot, it asks who gets to define reality for everyone else. And the answer, again and again, follows the boundary.

SPEAKER_00 2:18:29

Right now in America, there are forces dogged, organized, and well funded, doing whatever is necessary to make socialism happen. Today's demonstrations are part of an ongoing step-by-step agenda to change our country at its very core. They demand the abolition of ICE, immigration and customs enforcement, and the zero tolerance policy of the Trump administration.

SPEAKER_01 2:18:57

I think we need to abolish ICE. That seems really clear. They have strayed so far from the interests of the American people and the interest of humanity.

SPEAKER_00 2:19:06

Cynthia, are you stupid? I know as an actress, you're used to saying what's on the script. And this government thing is new to you. What strayed so far from the interest of the American people? The whole point device is to protect the American people from illegals who would do us harm physically and financially.

SPEAKER_74 2:19:32

The newly elected socialists are plotting their takeover of some of America's largest cities. And in New York City, Zoran Mamdanny wants your money. And the socialist elect just endorsed a Palestinian activist for New York City Assembly, even though she just moved to the district within the past year. After studying Islamic liberation theology in South Africa, she also made some disgusting remarks about 9-11, but he chose to endorse her. And then in Seattle, Katie Wilson is making her plans known. Quote, here's what she said I will appoint a cabinet of exceptional leaders whose lived experiences reflect the diversity of Seattle's Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Pacific Islander, Latin, ex-Hispanic, and people of color communities, as well as that of women, immigrants, and refugees, two S LGBTQIA plus communities, people with disabilities, people of all faith traditions, and residents from every socioeconomic background. Boy, that's a lot. Joining me now, Trump advisor Alex Brussowitz. Alex, these plans that are taking place across the nation, I don't understand much of them. And it's really shocking that this is the moment we're at. You're a young man, you appealed to Gen Z young men on the Trump campaign, and now we're seeing these kind of crazy plans across the country.

SPEAKER_08 2:20:48

Yeah, Kayleigh, well, thank you for having me on. And their plans are absolutely crazy. I don't even know what half of the terms that they used uh actually mean, and I don't even think they know what they mean. And I think honestly, most of that stuff is just a sideshow.

SPEAKER_33 2:21:02

Well, the results are in, and the lore of socialism is alive and growing across the country, even in our capital of capitalism, New York City. Democrat Socialist Zoran Mandani is going to be the mayor of the Big Apple, and with him come some very costly ideas.

SPEAKER_47 2:21:19

This will be an age. What do New Yorkers expect from their leaders? A bold vision of what we will achieve. An agenda that will freeze the rents for more than two million rents stabilized. Make the budget state-free.

SPEAKER_33 2:21:43

Now, how he pays for all these multi-billion dollar programs is still not clear.

SPEAKER_47 2:21:48

New York. Many said the only way out of this was slashing services and passing an austerity budget. We rejected that. After months of painstaking work, that deficit is now zero. Our city is now on firm financial ground. We achieved this in two major ways: increasing revenue and support from Albany, and cutting waste and finding savings here in New York City. Thanks to Governor Hochul, State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart Cousins, Assembly Speaker Carl Hasty, and months of organizing from New Yorkers, we taxed the rich. That tax alone will raise half a billion dollars per year. And that's not all. Thanks to Governor Hochul and our partners in Albany, we finally got a better deal for New York City. We're getting billions more from the state to help tackle the gap. At the same time, we've been pouring over the city budget to identify savings. We reduced unnecessary overtime and found smarter ways for government to deliver services. This all added up to $1.77 billion in total savings. Our budget isn't just about closing deficits, it's about building a city New Yorkers can actually afford.

SPEAKER_49 2:24:03

And when Democrats have enough power to govern, the direction is usually clear. Obama had a Democratic Congress for his first two years before Republicans gained power. During that time, he passed the Affordable Care Act, the Recovery Act, Fair Pay legislation, expanded children's health insurance, student loan reform, and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Biden's first two years, too, had a Democratic Congress. He passed the American Rescue Plan, Infrastructure Investment, the Chips and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, Veterans Health Care through the PACT Act, gun safety legislation, and the largest climate investment in American history. These laws were aimed at healthcare, workers, public investment, climate infrastructure, education, veterans' equality, and ordinary families. Then Republicans regain power and the machinery changed. Government becomes obstruction, repeal attempts, debt ceiling threats, shutdown politics, investigations, blocked appointments, and culture war spectacle. So sure, Democrats fail. They compromise too much, they negotiate too early, and they let money narrow what they're willing to fight for. But Democrats usually fail while trying to expand the circle and the boundary. Republicans consistently try to shrink it. A party that falls short on universal rights is not the same as a party organizing itself against universal rights. A party compromised by money is not the same as a party using culture war to protect money while narrowing who counts as an American. A Democratic Party deserves criticism, but the Republican Party deserves condemnation. And the reason is simple. Nearly every value the Republican Party claims to defend collapses when it's applied universally. They say they defend free speech, then punish dissent. They say they defend religious liberty, then try to make Christianity the governing religion. They say they defend parental rights, then deny those rights to parents who want their children to learn accurate history or biology, who want their children to count as a person, to have rights, or don't want guns to be the leading cause of death of their child. They say they defend bodily autonomy, then put the state inside a woman's body, dictate what care someone gets based on their gender. They say they defend law and order, then excuse January 6th. They say they defend equal protection, then write policy around unequal belonging. They say not to make everything about race when they helped build a society literally built around race. They fucking invented race to do it. They say they defend the Constitution then attack the very conditions that make constitutional democracy possible. These things, by definition, are against the Constitution of the United States of America, against the ideals of the founding fathers, and literally the antithesis of a patriot. The First Amendment isn't there to protect obedience, it's there to protect dissent. Equal protection is not there to protect people already accepted as fully American. It's there because citizenship has to mean something beyond race, religion, gender, wealth, sexuality, or political tribe. Religious liberty isn't there so one religion can govern everyone else. It's there because the state isn't supposed to belong to a church. Voting rights aren't there so the powerful can choose the electorate. They're there because the government is supposed to answer to the people. So when Republicans attacked protest, restrict voting, impose religion, police bodies, punish difference, excuse political violence, protect money from democracy, and narrow who counts as an American, they are not defending the Constitution. They are fighting the Constitution's core purpose and democracy itself. And then they call that patriotism. And anyone that disagrees is making things political or racial or whatever the fuck. Ultimately, this all survives because it serves power. A politics built around selective belonging gives people an emotional answer before they arrive at a material one. It tells them who they are, who threatens them, who counts as American, who deserves suspicion, and who deserves protection. It gives shape to fear, it gives direction to anger, and it offers a story in which the country is being taken by weak, by the foreign, by the poor, by the urban, by the educated, by the secular, the queer, the immigrant, the black, the protester, the teacher, the journalist, the bureaucrat, the student, the librarian, the person asking for help, the person asking to be recognized. That story has a political use. It keeps people looking away from the owners. The right gives many ordinary people a feeling of cultural ownership over a country they do not materially control. It tells them that they are the real Americans, the people with common sense, the people who built the country, the people whose faith and anger and symbols deserve respect. That message can feel powerful to someone whose wages are stagnant, whose town has lost jobs, whose health care is fragile, whose rent has risen, whose children are anxious, and the community feels less stable, whose future feels harder to imagine. It offers dignity in the form of rank, and it tells someone who may feel powerless in the economy that he still belongs above someone else in the nation. The wealthy receive something more concrete. They receive tax cuts, deregulation, weak labor power, privatization, favorable courts, public subsidies, cheap labor, fossil fuel protection, weakened environmental rules, reduced oversight, hostility toward unions, and a politics that treats capital as fragile while treating ordinary people as responsible for their own precarity. They receive a public trained to distrust the institutions that could explain how ownership works. They receive voters angry at the people beneath them rather than the people above them. And that exchange is old. Status moves downward while money moves upward. A worker is told that immigrants are stealing the country while employers use immigrant labor because it's made cheap, insecure, and politically vulnerable. A parent is told that teachers and librarians are corrupting children while schools remain underfunded and families struggle with health care, medical bills, housing, food, and time. Patient is told that public health care is socialism while private insurers, hospital systems, drug companies, and investors turn sickness into revenue. A tenant is told to fear cities, crime and disorder while landlords and private equity firms turn housing into an asset class. A voter is told that welfare fraud is a danger while tax policy, corporate subsidies, loopholes, and inherited wealth quietly structure the country around people who already have money. Lots of money. It's managed. It doesn't need to solve the conditions that produce anger, it only needs to keep the anger from moving toward people who profit from those conditions. If the worker blames immigrants, the employer escapes scrutiny. If the parent blames the school, the funding system escapes scrutiny. If the patient blames public health officials, the insurance industry escapes scrutiny. If the voter blames poor people, the tax policy escapes scrutiny. If the town blames urban liberals, the corporation that extracted wealth and left received less attention. Culture war works because it turns material injury into identity conflict. People feel economic pressure, social instability, loneliness, humiliation, fear for their children, distrust of institutions, and a sense that the country no longer feels familiar. But the right gives those feelings a target that rarely threatens wealth. Immigrants, trans people, black protesters, feminists, Muslims, teachers, students, journalists, cities, welfare recipients, the less visible actors continue operating through markets, courts, boards, donors, lobbyists, contracts, and ownership. This is why the right's language of freedom so often protects people who already have leverage. Freedom for a corporation means fewer limits on profit. Freedom for an employer means fewer obligations to workers. Freedom for a landlord means fewer protections for tenants. For the people living under those freedoms, life can become less free. A worker without bargaining power has fewer real choices. A family tied to employer-based healthcare has less mobility. A patient afraid of medical debt has less autonomy. A pregnant woman governed by state law has less control over her body. Republicans talk about freedom as though government is the only possible threat to it. That definition protects private power. It allows coercion to appear natural when it comes from employers and landlords and insurers and drug companies. If the government tells a corporation to raise wages or reduce pollution, the right calls it interference. But if a corporation holds wages down, poisons a community, denies coverage, raises rents, funds union busting, or moves jobs to cheaper labor markets, the harm is described as the market, the economy, efficiency, innovation, or the price of doing business. And that same structure appears in fiscal politics. One of the hills I will die on. Republicans call themselves fiscally responsible, then become much less alarmed when money moves toward defense contractors, police, prisons, border enforcement, fossil fuel interests, corporate relief, wealthy households, tax cuts, and the Trump family. Spending becomes a crisis when money is directed toward food assistance, health care, childcare, housing, public schools, student debt, and programs that make less that make life less brutal for poor and working people. The moral concern follows the recipient. A poor family receiving help is made to represent dependency. A corporation receiving public support is made to represent growth. A student receiving debt becomes unfair, but a wealthy household receiving a tax cut becomes incentive. Those interpretations shape policy and they make upward redistribution look responsible and downward support look suspect, and they make the wealthy appear productive by definition and the poor appear morally questionable by default. And once the country accepts that framing, public resources can keep flowing toward the people who need them least, while resentment is aimed at the people with the least power to change anything. That is why the politics of belonging matters so much to wealth, because money alone is not enough. People eventually notice when they are being squeezed, and they notice when their pay doesn't cover life, they notice when housing becomes unreachable, when healthcare becomes a bill collector, they notice when schools weaken and hospitals close. But the conservative task is to make those conditions mean something other than ownership and policy. It tells people the problem is moral. Decline. It tells them the problem is immigration and cities and secularism and crime and elite universities. And it turns a class structure into a cultural dilemma. And it gives people someone to blame who is closer, weaker, more visible, and easier to punish. Someone outside the circle. And it offers the group inside the circle a symbolic reward for the division. It tells them that they are the responsible ones, the patriotic ones, the normal ones, the forgotten ones, the people who deserve the country more than the people asking you to change it. And that reward matters because status is a form of compensation. It doesn't pay the medical bill or raise the wage, but it gives the suffering a rank. It tells a person you may be struggling, but at least you're not them. You may be ignored by your employer, your insurer, your landlord, and your government, but you still belong to the real America. And that's the cruel bargain. The wealthy keep material power, and ordinary people get a story that makes them feel closer to power than they are. And they rely on people feeling like they're one day gonna be part of that elite class, but in reality, they're not. And that also explains why Republicans keep returning to patriotism. Patriotism is one of the most efficient ways to disguise ownership. It turns a political and economic arrangement into a sacred identity. If the country is imagined as belonging naturally to a certain kind of person, then challenges to hierarchy can be framed as a tax on the country itself. Demands for voting rights, for racial justice, for gender equality, for labor power, for climate policy, for public health care become a tax on the country. And once that happens, anybody asking for those things becomes a radical. But that entire division is useful to owners because it keeps public attention focused on loyalty rather than distribution. Instead of asking who owns the housing, people ask who belongs in the neighborhood. Instead of asking who profits from healthcare, people ask who deserves it. Instead of asking who funds politicians, people ask who hates America. Instead of asking why wages are so low, people ask why are immigrants here? Instead of asking why schools lack counselors and nurses and supplies and support, people ask whether a book contains the wrong family. The questions become smaller than the systems producing the pain. And this is why attacks on reality-producing institutions serve wealth. Journalism can show who funds campaigns, science can show who causes harm. History can show how wealth was built. Courts can expose illegal conduct. Schools can teach students the whole fucking thing. Elections can give people a way to change those things. Each institution at its best can make power answerable to something outside itself. And a party serving wealth cannot fully destroy those institutions without destroying democracy outright. But it can weaken trust in them. It can flood the public with doubt. It can train people to treat experts as arrogant and journalists as enemies and teachers as indoctrinators and courts as corrupt, and public officials as tyrants, whenever they interfere with the preferred story. And the result is a public less capable of coordinating against the people benefiting from confusion. Confusion is profitable. Delay is profitable. Distrust is profitable. A public arguing about whether climate change exists is less able to force fossil fuel companies to change. A public arguing about whether poverty is personal failure is less able to force employers, landlords, insurers, and policymakers to answer for it. The wealthy don't need every person to believe the same lie. They need enough people unsure, angry, distracted, and divided that organized pressure becomes harder to build. And the Republican Party is absolutely fucking flawless at this. And their hypocrisy is more than just a moral flaw, it's a part of governing strategy, a selective freedom that protects ownership, selective law that protects hierarchy, a selective reality that protects the story. And maybe most importantly, selective patriotism that protects the people who claim the country while selling pieces of it to the highest bidder. Republicans ask people to love America as a symbol while accepting an America that works increasingly like poverty. They ask people to worship the flag while donors shape policy, corporations shape work, insurers shape illness, and they ask people to fear those with the least power while trusting those with the most. A country that belongs to everyone would organize politics differently. It would ask whether people can live, work, learn, heal, vote, breathe, speak, and raise families with dignity. It would measure freedom by the conditions of ordinary life, not by the comfort of owners. It would treat democracy as a threat to concentrated power and a protection for everyone else. That is why the Republican Party resists a country that fully belongs to all of the people. A truly shared country would make wealth answerable. It would make power explain itself. It would make the symbols of America belong to people demanding repair as much as people demanding reverence. The Republican Party says it loves America, but watch what it protects. It protects employers from workers, insurers from patients, landlords from tenants, billionaires from taxes, fossil fuel companies from accountability, police from oversight, men from consequences, churches from pluralism, guns from children, and leaders from elections. It gives ordinary people enemies instead of power. It gives the wealthy policy instead of accountability, and it gives cruelty a flag and calls it freedom. So who gets to be a patriot? Not the person who serves the country, not the person who tells the truth about it, not the person trying to make it live up to its promises. That's why this is not just hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is too small of a word for a movement that knows how to apply universal principles and choose not to. The problem isn't that Republicans forget their values. The problem is that their values are filtered through belonging. Freedom for us, control for them, mercy for us, punishment for them, speech for us, silence for them, elections when we win, corruption when we lose, patriotism when we attack the Capitol, hatred of America when you kneel during a song. That is not patriotism that is possession. It's the belief that America is not a shared political project, but an inheritance. It belongs to the people who look right, worship right, speak right, vote right, love right, work right, obey right, and remember the country in the right way. Everyone else may live here, pay taxes, fight wars, teach children, build cities, care for families, win medals, and die here. But their belonging remains conditional. They can be useful, they can be tolerated, they can be praised when they serve, but the second they demand equal authorship of the country, they become political, divisive, radical, ungrateful, dangerous, or anti-American. And that is where patriotism ends. This isn't other words, I'm Tyler Smith.

SPEAKER_78 2:40:39

Donald Trump and his enablers often equate nationalism with patriotism. But this couldn't be further from the truth. Trump's nationalism is rooted in fear of outsiders and the belief that Americans, especially white Americans of European heritage, are inherently superior to others. Patriotism, by contrast, isn't about exclusion. It's about inclusion. It involves taking on a fair share of the burdens of keeping America going. Nationalism blasts immigrants as criminals, demands a border wall even when immigration is down, and scapegoats foreigners for our economic woes while ignoring real investments in the American people. This sort of we're better than anyone else nationalism, tinged with racism, typically emerges when demagogues build their base of power by fueling fears of others outside the nation's borders. Throughout history, demagogues have used anger to target scapegoats, thereby dividing and conquering and distracting people from the real sources of their frustrations. As George Orwell dryly observed, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, and revenge, the nationalist is uninterested in what happens in the real world. Patriotism, on the other hand, is rooted in our common ideals. These ideals led Lincoln to proclaim that America might yet be the last best hope for humankind. These same ideals prompted Emma Lazarus, some two decades later, to welcome the world's tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Americans are not a race. We're not a creed. We're a conviction that all people are created equal, that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. And that government should be of the people, by the people, and for the people. If we're losing our national identity, it's not because we're becoming browner or speaking more languages than we once did. It's because we are losing our sense of true patriotism. True patriots don't fuel racist or religious or ethnic divisions. They aren't homophobic, transphobic, or sexist. They don't hate others outside our borders. To the contrary, true patriots confirm the good that we have in common. They seek to strengthen and celebrate the we in we the people. What do you think? What does patriotism mean to you? Let us know in the comments. If you found this video informative, be sure to also watch our video on Trump's divide and conquer strategy. As always, thanks for watching and be sure to subscribe to this channel for more videos like this one.