Jennifer Welch reacts to a run of recent political news, starting with Donald Trump's Arlington National Cemetery speech and his remarks on Venezuela. She discusses reporting that Stephen Miller plans to court young and minority men in his new White House role, and plays a Rachel Maddow clip warning about immigration detention centers.
The episode also covers reporting that ICE reportedly hid the locations of tens of thousands of detainees, White House preparations for congressional oversight, and an Eric Trump-backed robotics startup in talks with Israel's military. Welch argues these developments point to corruption and calls for accountability, and listeners get her perspective on each story.
In this episode Jennifer Welch
This IHIP News episode on Stephen Miller's White House role and ICE detention reporting was made with HappyScribe's AI note taker.
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Despite the amazing news that we all experienced last Tuesday evening, Yina Hu is still the President of the United States and continues to put on a masterclass on how to be president while having dementia and a moron at the same time. Um, he turned his speech at Arlington National Cemetery into a campaign speech. Let's play—let's listen in.
And we lost 2,500 service members and got very little from any of these wars. In our case, we had Venezuela where we're taking out billions and billions of dollars of oil and all sorts of other things. It'll be hundreds of billions very soon. Nobody's ever seen anything like it.
Okay, I've heard enough. Think—stop for a second and just imagine the President of the United States is saying, "We are stealing the national resources from the country of Venezuela and making billions and billions and billions of dollars," and nobody's ever seen anything like it. And it's just—there's no accountability. I mean, the arrogance, the American foreign policy arrogance was bad before Trump, but now they're just stealing from the people of Venezuela. And everything for this guy, it wasn't enough that he took over the United States of America to be his own, uh, big, giant piece of real estate, the White House to be his own personal home where he can build his bunker and his ballroom and desecrate it and put up this horrific patio, and he has to label everything Oval Office, Rose Garden, Colonnade, because he doesn't know where he is half the time.
But now he's opened up the entire globe into being his personal piggyback. And part of that is Venezuela. And of course, he did the most dictatorish move of all, when after the Blue Nami, last Tuesday, he said in an interview, "Yeah, immigration probably went too far." But what I'm going to do is I'm going to make the architect of the immigration plan the biggest, uh, sadist that I know, Stephen Miller.
I'll make him the White House Chief of Staff. And there's new reporting on Stephen Miller in that role. And this is just—I thought this was satire. Pop this up. Stephen Miller wants to use his new role as White House Chief of Staff to win back young and minority men who helped elect President Trump in 2024, but swung towards Democrats in the midterms.
I think I support this. There's—he is such a repellent. He is a human repellent. The fact that Stephen Miller thinks that he has enough rizz to win back young men, especially minority men, when you're—all you do is traffic in white nationalist rhetoric, is just more than I can take. But whatever the Republicans are doing with men, the backfire is so massive. I don't know if it's from Donald Trump talking about how hot everybody is or how hot this guy's ass is, or trotting out Stephen Miller all the time.
I mean, he's always on TV. And every time he's on, he's just an absolute human repellent of the highest order. I mean, I think the guy's probably 5'3" and, uh, probably weighs 110, soaking wet. No disrespect to anybody who has those same stats. My point with this is not to pick on his height or weight, is that everything with these guys is a veneer. We're such tough guys. We're so smart. We're so masculine.
Yet the President of the United States wears a full face of makeup and thirst traps after men throughout the entire, uh, campaign. The whole entire primary, the through line was, "The President's horny and can't quit talking about how hot men are." I mean, that was my takeaway from the Republican messaging. So as repellent as Stephen Miller is, I can't believe I'm even saying this. Do it. Trott him out. Let's put Stephen Miller on a 50-state tour.
I mean, take this—take your shtick to the men and just see how much they see you and go, "I'm not like you. I want nothing to do with you." And then, shifting gears a little bit, Rachel Maddow is warning her viewers and Americans at large of Trump's plans for immigration detention centers. Let's play that clip.
I think we talk to each other and we say, like, "Oh, that's how they want to treat immigrants." You know, "That's what they want to do." We think about it as a special class of behavior by the government that's just for immigrants. And we think, therefore, "Oh, you either care about immigrants or you don't." No, I'm sorry. With a president like this, if you give him 7 to 10 prisons around the country that hold 10,000 people each, where he can hold people without trial, without access to lawyers indefinitely, you think he's only going to leave immigrants in there? I just don't.
I think that what they first do to immigrants, they want to do to the rest of us.
I completely agree with her. And the reason I agree with her is straight from the horse's mouth. In the election of '24, Trump, Stephen Miller, all of them ran on getting out the enemy from within. Donald Trump is the only president in my lifetime when he wakes up on Christmas morning and says, "Merry Christmas." It's to everybody except half the country. So I completely agree with her, but this message isn't new.
I mean, this is why the civil rights movement has been so important in this country, and trying to get that right for so long has been so important. And our failures to remedy that have led to incubating this current form of fascism. Because if we are not outraged at over-policing and human rights violations in the Black community, and we let those, you know, go unaccounted for and there's no justice there, then the oppressors move the goalposts to other groups.
And we hear the language from the right concerning, you know, the radical leftist terrorists that want to come out and kill us. I mean, all I've heard online recently from these people is, "The left wants to kill you." And it's like, "You're wrong. We don't really like you. We don't want to have a beer with you. But we want you to have health care. I want your children to live in a community where they have a great public school that's very well-funded, that's secular, and that if you can't afford it, your child is going to get lunch.
I want us to have great infrastructure." And my desire for those things crosses over from the party that I'm a member of, the Democratic Party, to the Republican Party, to even independents. That's the opposite of their message for us. And again, think about how insane it is that every single holiday, Labor Day, Veterans Day, Valentine's Day, Christmas, Hanukkah, whatever, this asshole gets on My Social, which is insane because he had to even create that platform because he got kicked off all of the others because he incited an insurrection where his followers wanted to kill Mike Pence.
Okay? So that's why he has this. But he gets on there and he says, "Merry Christmas to everybody except for the radical scum vermin." Who talked like that in the past? Think about it. Google it. It's not good. He does not keep good company. And now there is new reporting on ICE detention. Pop this up. The New York Times confirms that ICE deliberately, electronically disappeared tens of thousands of people in detention and ordered contractors to refuse to reveal where they're held to family or to lawyers.
30% of all immigrants detained in ICE jails now have their location hidden. I don't know how else to say this, but, like, we're not the good guys here. Our government, this is the stuff that when I was growing up I would read about, you know, some other country doing something like this. This is taking the rule of law and completely turning it upside down. This lie that the Republican Party, the MAGA Republican Party, still perpetuates people. "We love freedom.
We love—we're the party of law and order." It's just such a jet stream of bullshit. These people are sadists to their core. And they lecture everybody, the people in this administration, about Christian family values. And I'm not a Christian, but I cannot see the central character of that faith, Jesus Christ, endorsing all of this, dehumanizing people, not telling their loved ones where they are. Can you imagine the horror of not knowing where your people?
Like, think about how important that is as you live your life and you have your people, your closest people in your life, and you don't know where they are. It's just inhumane and cruel. And these people are cruel for sport. They like this and they do it for sport. And the White House, even though they're doing all of these things, they are still preparing for investigations. Pop this up. The White House is lawyering up.
I guess they got the memo from Robert Garcia. The White House anticipating a surge of congressional oversight and legislative probes has started staffing up its counsel's office with 15 additional hires so far as it prepares to do legal battle. Investigations are expected to ramp up aggressively in January. And just think about this. This is just—we're paying all of these people for their jobs.
They're using the credit and the goodwill of the American brand to, you know, Jared Kushner's got all these bank accounts, Steve Witkoff, they're doing all of these shakedowns and quid pro quos. Trump has this company called MAGA Inc., a PAC, where he says, "If you make a donation here, I keep that money," and then you get a government contract. And then all the lawyers and the taxpayers are funding all of that at the taxpayer's expense.
Taxpayer gets zero benefit except for adding to the $40 trillion that all the previous Republican presidents have contributed more to in debt. And then we're going to pay for their lawyers. I mean, it's just like, what part of we voted for complete total change of the status quo are people not getting? I mean, this stuff has to be remedied. We will not have a country if we continue at this rate. It's utterly insane. And of course, Eric Trump now has a new grift.
And this is so dark. I mean, this is really disturbing. Pop this up. Clash Report is reporting that Eric Trump backed startup and talks to supply humanoid robots to the IDF. Foundation Future Industries, a humanoid robot startup backed by Eric Trump, is in talks with the Israel Defense Forces to supply machines for Hamas tunnels in Gaza and possibly for combat, The Financial Times reports.
And we know the following pertaining to that. If Jared isn't—I mean, if Eric is in talks to do this, as long as Donald Trump gets, you know, to get whatever out of it for the Trump family, he's going to go ahead and say, "Yes, we'll do it." And we know that Donald Trump cannot stand up to Benjamin Netanyahu or the government of Israel for whatever reason. He just simply cannot tell them no. So it is just corruption on top of grift, on top of just horrific inhumane treatment of fellow citizens of the world.
And as we go in through these next two years, we were all sugar high this last week. These last two years of his regime, I think, are going to be the worst. He is doubling down on all of these ridiculous policies. So please make sure you are engaging with our Democratic elected leaders that we want. The accountability part is so important. It is so important that we hold these people accountable, that there are investigations and ultimately prosecutions and trials of these people.
All right. That's all I have for this episode. Make sure you're subscribed on YouTube. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Go hit us up on Substack and order my book, Not Today: Fascists. And I'll be back later with more news.
Stephen Miller thinks he can win back the young men in America.
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