Hi everyone, this is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.
This is an emergency pod. We do these from time to time with news, especially if it's breaking, and obviously what's happened over the weekend in Minnesota has been heinous in many ways, in all ways actually. So we had to jump on here to talk about the situation.
Tensions are exploding in reaction to federal agents shooting and killing 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Prey in Minneapolis on Saturday. This is the second fatal shooting by federal agents this month, with Governor Tim Walz calling for Trump to halt ICE operations in the state. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is trying to cast blame on the victim and local Democratic lawmakers. Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino appeared on CNN's State of the Union with Dana Bash earlier. And here's what that tiny horrible man had to say.
All of the video that we have seen shows him documenting it with his cell phone, which is a lawful thing to do. And the only time he seemed to interact with law enforcement is when they went after him when he was trying to help an individual who law enforcement pushed down. So where do you have the evidence to show that he was trying to impede that law enforcement operation?
Sure, Dana. First, he was there in the scene. He was in the scene actively impeding and assaulting law enforcement to the point.
But that's not illegal. He wasn't impeding it. He was filming it, which is a legal thing to do in the United States of America.
Dan, let's not freeze-frame adjudicate this now.
Let's freeze-frame adjudicate it. Everyone saw it from a hundred different angles. There was video everywhere. And this small little Himmler wannabe doesn't seem to understand that. Attorney General Pam Bondi gave Tim Walz three conditions to, quote, 'restore the rule of law.' She wants them to hand over the info about the state's welfare programs, grant access to state voter rolls, and repeal sanctuary policies. Let's focus on the middle one, which we will. They want these voter rolls because of the midterm elections.
Let's talk about the Democratic response. Democrats are obviously in an uproar, and AOC and others calling for Senate Democrats to block ICE spending this week. Democrats would have to shut down a large portion of the government in order to do that. They seem willing to do so. Representative Robin Kelly of Illinois is asking colleagues to sign onto her articles of impeachment against DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
Meanwhile, Megyn Kelly appeared to agree that ICE should get out of Minnesota, but she was just being awful. She tweeted at real Donald Trump should pull ICE out of Minnesota today and announce there'll be no more immigration enforcement in Minnesota at all. All illegals in the US are encouraged to move there. If any illegal is found outside of Minnesota and gets deported, they will never be eligible for re-entry. She is a cruel and tireless demagogue.
Hours after this young man was killed, Trump and Melania went ahead with a previously scheduled screening of her new documentary Melania at the White House. Guests included Tim Cook along with AMD CEO Lisa Su, the CEO of Zoom, and Mike Tyson and Tony Robbins. Strange group of people, but a lot of tech CEOs. Also Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon. In any case, a really terrible day for the United States of America. Scott, your thoughts?
Well, typically you'd want to de-escalate and say, 'Let's wait until there's a full investigation,' but unfortunately the institutions conducting these investigations now are no longer trusted. And with good reason, the American public doesn't believe that these investigations will be fair investigations. So you have to turn to the, you know, kind of the frame adjudication.
And what the frame shows is that one, this individual was clearly exercising just free speech. All free speech is not exempt. You know, if you incite violence, that's not free speech. But it's difficult to see how in any way this individual was inciting violence. He was just filming what was happening. He moved to help protect somebody or comfort them after they had been knocked down.
So his First Amendment rights were clearly violated. Two, the Second Amendment is the right to bear arms. He was carrying a weapon which he had a legal license to carry. The gun was removed from him. He did not take out the gun. He did not wave it at anybody. It was in his waistband. It was taken out. And then so his First and Second Amendment rights were violated in about 15 seconds.
And then a couple of things that I noticed that were even more disturbing were one, when a gunshot goes off, these quote-unquote trained federal agents scattered. When your gun goes off, you're supposed to make sure the person you think is firing the gun, you look for their hands, you look for the gun. They did none of that. They scattered.
And Representative Seth Moulton, who's a veteran and I believe a Marine who served in, I believe it was Iraq, said that if this had happened in the middle of a combat zone and an enemy combatant who had been disarmed was treated this way, the officers and the enlisted men involved in that murder would be court-martialed. So the rules of engagement are now more reckless and more violent in the suburbs of Minneapolis than they are in Mogadishu during a war.
So this has gone so far, and this notion that this has anything to do with the Constitution. Everyone is now ignoring the Constitution. The other word that comes to my mind is cowardice, and that is Trump and Secretary Noem are perpetrating violence under the auspices that it has something to do with immigration. They want a third party that will take the blame or be the shock absorber for this depravity, and that is an agency full of masked secret police. I mean, they're not even taking responsibility for this violence. They're trying to keep it in arms.
No, they said the victims were the ICE officers. That's what Gregory Bovino said to Dana Bash, who did a terrific job trying to explain to him why he was lying, essentially. But go ahead.
What are your thoughts on this character?
I just, Scott, this is repulsive in every way, on every aspect of it, what had happened there. I mean, at one point I called these people incompetent. Everyone's like, 'No, they're evil,' and evil is incompetent. They're both evil and incompetent. And I don't throw around those things. I don't throw around Nazi terms very easily. But this is what it looks like, that's what it is.
And especially even the outfit, as Governor Noem pointed out, with Gregory Bovino, who is completely incompetent and also evil. And I don't use those terms lightly. I really don't. But this man was using a phone to take pictures. And that's what he's allowed to do. He was peaceful. He was leaning down to help a woman who was shoved down by police who was doing nothing but exercising her right.
They kept calling it a riot. Todd Blanche, another terrible person in the administration and a pedophile protector, let's just note that, was saying that it was a riot. It wasn't by any means a riot. They were blaming the police of Minnesota. And I just interviewed the mayor of Minneapolis. They have 600 officers. There's 3,000 ICE members. They can't protect them, especially when they're behaving like thugs and attacking the citizens.
They're there to protect the citizens, not the ICE force, which is enormous, and you can't do that. And they are trying to create violence. It's very obvious what they're trying to do. And then laying the blame on them. There's literally nothing. I don't believe we're even arguing that this guy did anything. He didn't. And everyone can see it.
And what was really astonishing to me was all the angles and the people and the citizens there putting themselves in harm's way to take these pictures, right? This woman in the pink jacket, there's a woman in a car. There's every angle of this thing. There's a woman in a car straight on. There's one across the street, there's one in front of him, there's one on the other side. These people don't understand. We see you. We see what you're doing.
And to try to look at it any other way, and especially because he was on the ground, you can absolutely see what happened. And then the guy pulls out the gun and shoots him for no reason. And one of the things which was astonishing, one of the people taking the pictures said, 'What did you just do? What did you just do?' And that is the question: why in the world would you do that? There were six, seven people on this guy.
And I have to tell you one thing, the power of digital is really strong. You see, people see it. Like, I don't understand why these people don't think cell phones exist in this world. The second part is the silence from our business community, the silence from these people. They went to the White House last night. Could they just beg off, like, to go to the Melania screening which nobody wants to see? Could they say something publicly? Like, I just, the silence of our business people, especially the tech people.
And then many people like Bill Ackman, as usual, because you can't shut his diarrhea mouth, could not help but blame everybody but who shot this man, which were these officers. Obviously Minnesota has moved this time because they learned from the first one. This is a murder, is what this is. They learned from the first one that they tried to take evidence, they scattered. As you said, you can't leave the scene of a fatal shooting like that.
And then the last thing I would say is the citizens of Minnesota. I'm wearing a Minnesota Star Tribune. I have to say the press is doing a great job there. The Minnesota Star Tribune and others, these are citizens that are not going to take this. And I know you call for leaders, but we are the leaders, right? Citizens are the leaders, not our politicians.
I will say the Democrats had, especially AOC, especially, you know, all of them were very strong about what was going on. The Minnesota people were actually quite under control over what's happening. Governor Walz, I thought, conducted himself really well. The police officers of the state of Minnesota are horrified. You can see that, and they conducted themselves really well.
The only people conducting themselves like the thugs and fascists they are are the Trump administration, and the shame will outlive them of what they've done, and they don't care. So that's the only problem here.
Yeah. In Switzerland last week there was a lot of talk about, I thought, how can I take my time here and make it effective. So I spent a lot of time when I was on these panels talking about how the Islamic Republic is executing people on the street. And my colleague Katherine Dylan reminded me, she said, 'Scott, you realize that our government is executing people on the streets of Minneapolis right now.'
Which was a very puncturing point.
Yeah.
And just to, if it's okay with you, move to potential ideas around how to counter ICE. Timothy Snyder, I always go to his feed and to Heather Cox Richardson to try and find something amazing from them.
Around this. And Timothy said something really powerful. He said, 'If you're waiting,' and this is my thought, I'm always kind of waiting for a democratic Jesus to pop up and lead us like a Mandela to the promised land. And typically real movement doesn't happen from political parties. It happens from people or citizens. And protest is really powerful. It's very symbolic.
But in this instance, I think it's actually quite, I don't want to say it's not effective, but I don't think the administration cares. I don't think that's going to move the needle in the short run, maybe in the long run. I think what Governor Walz and some politicians have said is more powerful, and that is start making a list, quite frankly and very publicly, saying that the statute of limitations on murder is never, and in exactly two years and eleven months we're coming for you. I think we have to create new incentives here.
And then something I'm spending a lot of time thinking about and trying to get some politicians on board with and some public figures is the following. If you want to look at the fastest political movement in history, it was actually about exactly six years ago, and that was 2020 when the GDP went down 31% because of COVID. We had the greatest political movement in history in terms of actual move to action.
And my fear is that every few years we protest, we make signs, we chant, we gather, it feels good, it looks great on CNN, and then nothing happens. If you want to understand real power and the difference between being right and being effective, stop watching protests and start watching gross domestic products, specifically GDP. Trump does not respond to outrage. He responds to markets. And that's not cynicism. It's mechanics.
I'm not talking about a labor strike. This isn't unions, picket lines, or collective bargaining. I'm talking about something quieter, far more unsettling to the system, and that is an economic strike. A short-term coordinated withdrawal from spending, and maybe work. No marching, no slogans, just less.
Well, we forget they did that in Minnesota. They had a day. The businesses were closing.
It can't be a day. A day is annoyance. It needs to be a week or a month. And it needs to be national. The US economy is 27 trillion. That's 74 billion a day. And here's our power, Kara. Our economy is 70% consumer-driven. Consumers actually have more power, not in signs or in guns or even in their vote right now. They have it in the power of the purse.
In that a very small change in behavior could have an enormous effect, and that is nothing in modern American history moves policy faster. Not marches, not speeches, it's just math. And then if you think about what you could do here, if wealthy households took their spending down 10% and middle-class and lower-income households, which have a difficult time reducing their spend, took it down 5%, you would take GDP negative almost overnight.
And then it's hard because it requires coordination. It's risky, especially for people living paycheck to paycheck. But that's exactly why it works. And that is power fears withdrawal more than resistance, because resistance is noisy, but withdrawal is expensive.
And it's a question around what actually works, and the history and the data, I believe, are not ambiguous. When nothing moves, everyone listens. And that's not ideology, it's economics. And that you don't need permission to opt out. And in a system, capitalism built entirely on participation, the most radical act in capitalism isn't protest, it's nonparticipation.
If you wanted the fastest blue-line path, and there might even be a simpler way, I believe if you could convince America, the entire economy now is built on AI. If you could convince a bunch of Americans to cancel their ChatGPT or OpenAI accounts, and all of a sudden OpenAI had to announce that their subscriptions had fallen off a cliff, that would ripple into Nvidia. That would ripple into Microsoft. And these are the people that Trump cares about. And this is what the S&P, this is what the economy cares about.
I say this point. I don't agree with you about protests. I think they do. It's all part of the same package. It's an aggressive media who follows this and reports on things. It is these protests because I do think people putting their lives on the line in the street matters. I think it does.
I don't mean to diminish it. I worry it's more cinematic than effective because I don't think the Trump administration cares.
Different in this new environment of video everywhere. I do think it is effective and I do think it definitely from a policing and an accountability standpoint.
And it changes people's minds because people are, I mean, people are, it's horrifying and everyone, 'We can see you. We see you' is a really powerful thing. I think the media has to step up and there, everyone, folks, there's a reason these billionaires, right-wingers need to own this stuff because they're trying to control the message. Absolutely. No question. They're trying to even hand it.
I was told by someone at CBS, they're like, 'You could watch this and if you were pro-MAGA, you'd like it, and if you were anti-MAGA, you'd like it.' And that's how we want it to be. That's a terrible thing to try to do. There is truthful, not neutral, is the way the press should be acting right now.
I think a lot of them have been woken up into this in a much more, instead of a, 'Well, what are your thoughts here, Scott Jennings?' Like, that's enough. That's enough of that. Seriously. There's no thoughts here about shooting someone.
And I was listening, I often listen to comics during times like this because I think they get to the heart of it in a really effective way. And Josh Johnson, who I've interviewed, is an amazing young comic. And he said, I sent this to you, it was, this is an argument about legality versus morality.
And if you, the idea that Todd Blanche was sitting there saying, 'Well, it was a riot. Well, he was resisting.' If we get into arguments with these people about what we can see with our eyes, we lose, right? Because they're going to find some reason that this young man deserved to get shot, or that Renee Good deserved it because she was mouthy, because she wouldn't move her car. They try to twist everything.
And so you're not going to win in a face-to-face argument with these people. You're going to win by marching. I agree. And economic resistance is critical here. The problem was with a lot of people with Tim Cook being at the White House. And by the way, Tim, I like you very much, but Steve Jobs would be ashamed of you. I know he would be ashamed of you.
It's a grotesque way to end what has been a very successful career as a CEO. You could have walked away. You could have walked away. Shareholders are not everything. The Apple brand stands for more. So a lot of people wanted to give up their iPhones. Like, 'I'm going to give up.' Let me just tell you, the founder of Google is dating a MAGA influencer and is quite right-wing now. So there's nowhere to go, unfortunately.
And that's the problem, is we have been held captive by these men-boys who are now deciding they want to dabble in fascism or at least turn a blind eye to it. And so part of me is like, what do you do here? Right? What do you do?
