Live with Adam Parkhomenko

[ Transcript edited for clarity and flow]

Hello everybody, and welcome to this Substack Live. I am here with Democratic strategist, proprietor of The Alt Media, and my friend, Adam Parkamenko. Hello.

ADAM:

Good to see you. My favorite was still when you said the Alt-Right Media that one day.

MARY:

Yes. Every time I think about that, I blush because I felt like such an idiot. I was talking with Joyce Vance a couple weeks ago.

ADAM: A Trump Vance discussion.

MARY:

Yes, that’s right. The alternate Trump Vance ticket. If only. I was around when she was starting her Substack, and she was bouncing some ideas for titles off me. I’m quite familiar with her Substack. When I had her on live a couple of weeks ago, I could not remember the name of her Substack. It was embarrassing. It’s Civil Discourse.

ADAM:

She absolutely loves you, so no issue there.

MARY:

It’s absolutely mutual. I recommended that the name be Uncivil Discourse, but that is SO not Joyce’s brand. And then I temporarily forgot the name of it.

ADAM:

A lot of things seem to age well in this time.

MARY:

Yes, indeed. Milk or something.

ADAM:

Whole milk.

MARY:

Adam, welcome. And for those of you just joining, I’m here with Adam Parkamenko, a Democratic strategist and an awesome person.

ADAM:

Thank you.

MARY:

One of the problems I think we’re all facing right now is where to start, how to organize our thoughts around what’s going on. Because as you well know, on the one hand, a lot of this stuff is designed to be a distraction, but it is also, in and of itself, extremely important. Sure, Donald might be ordering ICE to attack and commit violence against American cities in Minnesota as a distraction from the Epstein files. He may be contemplating invading a sovereign, well, sort of semi-sovereign nation and member of NATO to distract us from the Epstein files. But Adam, these are two extraordinarily serious things we’re facing that I think, both domestically and internationally, can change the way the United States of America is thought about from here on out. What are your thoughts about that?

ADAM:

I mean, it’s a good point. I don’t even know where to start. I went to breakfast yesterday, and I was sitting there with the family, and then I see Tony Blinken walk in with his son, and I’m like, “Oh, some normalcy here.” Yeah. Different times.

MARY:

If only.

ADAM:
You make such a great point. And I know you’re going to talk about Greenland later, but basically you’ve got a conversation about Greenland. You’ve got Minneapolis. You’ve got what’s going on with Maduro and Renee Good. And the one thing that we’re not talking about anymore, it seems, is Epstein. This was all predictable. However, they’re all serious in their own nature. And I think it was yesterday we learned, maybe 12 days into the year already, that we had already had our sixth death in an ICE facility that we know of. Every one of these things is, I would say, almost equally important. But what’s happening on the ground in Minneapolis, and the reports that we’ve seen about 1,500 paratroopers being activated in Alaska to potentially go into Minneapolis, that those paratroopers are there to make us safer against China. We are weakening ourselves in one area of our country to basically create this sort of manufactured war on the streets so that he can utilize and weaponize our military.

MARY:
It’s performative violence for the purposes of terrorizing American citizens and giving Donald an excuse to declare martial law or what have you, because we know he does not want to hold midterm elections. But another really alarming thing. Well, before I get to moving the Alaskan paratroopers, because that is a whole other issue, I just want to talk more broadly about the tactic here. And it’s something we’ve been dealing with this for 10 years. So even though we know that this is all intentional, because it’s escalating to such an alarming degree and he is literally facing no pushback from the only party that could provide it, I think it’s harder to take a step back and say, “Well, this is what they want. They want us to feel the chaos. They want us to feel demoralized,” because it does feel like it’s working.

Do people know, for example, that the DOJ blew past its December 19 deadline that required them by law to release all of the Epstein files? Do people know how little of the Epstein files have been released? And Adam, I guess you could say, compared to basically the dismantling of civic life in America, and compared to either creating some kind of nuclear conflagration or making America a pariah on the world stage, maybe the Epstein files don’t seem so important. But is that the wrong way to look at it?

ADAM:
I think so, because I think that one thing that we’ve always sort of accepted as conventional wisdom has been that the more we were talking about Epstein, and the further progress was made in terms of support for the victims and getting to the bottom of the truth, the more we’ve seen Donald completely unravel publicly. It has always felt like there is a denial of multiple different things, including his ability to draw weird things on a letter to Jeffrey--his good friend Jeffrey. I think these are all really important parallels.

I think there’s also a lot of history that repeats itself here. If you look at photos of ICE, they almost look more military than our military. And if you Google photos of the FSB in Russia, they look identical, except for the nomenclature or the language on the patches. This is something that Putin learned in the early 1990s when the military failed to shoot on Yeltsin. And when Putin took over, one of the things he did was consolidate all their military and police forces, and he put basically just one person that he trusted in charge of all of that, which was his chef.

We’re seeing Donald do a lot of the same here. It’s very hard to distinguish the difference between our military and ICE, minus the fact that our military almost seems more visible and exposed when they’re out there. Although we have yet to see what happens if their paratroopers start dropping out of the sky into Minneapolis.

MARY:
Hey, it will look good on TV, and we know that’s one of the things Donald cares most about. I think it’s a really good point. We have a paramilitary organization in ICE and the CBP. And just what Customs and Border Patrol is doing in a state that is very far away, last I checked, from the Mexican border is beyond me. But they are policing, not just policing; they are acting against American cities.

They’re taking so much out of the Nazi playbook, out of Putin’s playbook. You were a reserve officer in DC for a long time, and they’re building on this alarming trend that’s been going on for at least a couple of decades of militarizing local police forces. We have police forces that have tanks, RPGs, and tons of semi-automatic weapons. They’re exploiting a weakness that already existed in the system, right?

ADAM:
Yeah. Almost a decade and a half with DC police. And there are a lot of differences. You’re always going to have, I hate to use the term bad apples, but we’ve seen officers who are just not good officers.

But the main difference is, for instance, with DC police, when they’re out there with riot gear, they have a size 50 font on their helmet with their badge number. I would venture to guess that a majority of these folks with ICE are the same people who said they couldn’t breathe and refused to wear a mask during COVID, who are now covering up.

If you use OC pepper spray on the street in Washington, DC, that was and still is considered a use of force. You have to do paperwork if you take that out and spray it, whether it hits somebody or not. If you pull your service weapon out, that is a use of force. We’ve seen videos of ICE officers holding their service weapons three feet away from the head of an unarmed protester.

We saw six DOJ attorneys in Minneapolis resign because it sounded like they were starting to get pressure to look into Renee Goode’s widow. This is something like we’ve never seen before, and there’s just so much of it happening at every moment.

MARY:
And again, that’s intentional. I want to build on that a little bit because we have on the one hand the situation in Minnesota, and the DOJ basically refusing to fulfill its mandate, which is to investigate police violence. They are not just refusing to investigate Jonathan Ross, who, if you look at all of the videos as closely as we did and listen to them as closely as we did, can come to the conclusion that he murdered an unarmed woman who posed no threat to him whatsoever. That’s not being investigated. Even if you believed that it’s ambiguous or that it wasn’t murder, this is something that the DOJ should be investigating.

ADAM:
Yes, let’s just say for a moment that they wanted to even pretend to care. They would investigate this with the evidence that they’re refusing to hand over to the state officials in Minnesota, and then they would have come out with no charges. They’re not even doing that. They’re just doing this out in the open right now. You’ve got Kristi Noem, of all places, on CBS This Morning, saying to the anchor, “Don’t say his name out loud.” And the anchor says his name is public, and she goes, “Well, you’re just further doxxing him.” What’s the signal that it sends? You’ve got officers and agents from ICE out there. It says this will be accepted, tolerated, and it’s acceptable.

MARY:
You have ICE agents literally saying, “Hey, haven’t you guys learned anything to protesters? Haven’t you guys learned anything from what happened a couple of days ago?” They’re acting with impunity. And I think it’s safe to say, given what we now know about the lax hiring practices and the very low bar to entry point.

ADAM:
Yeah.

MARY:
The worst of the worst in ICE.

ADAM:
Yeah. One of the videos you’re referring to was the one, I think, two or three days ago. “Didn’t you learn anything?” and she said, “What’s the lesson? What’s my lesson?” And then he grabs her phone and steals it. But the training piece is huge because they have continued to cut back and cut back on training. These are not people that are even truly trained for real traffic stops. When you come out of a police academy at any of these departments throughout the country, whether small cities, sheriff’s departments, or big cities, you have a field training officer. Even outside the academy, you may have put a thousand or 1,900 hours into the academy. There are certain things you have to do. You don’t want to go out there and just find an arrest to find an arrest. But you’re not going to be out there driving around by yourself until you’ve made different types of arrests and been on the scene for different types of things.

And there are a lot of signs I see that even in cold weather, these people have no idea what they’re doing. One is every officer I know typically with the trigger finger would have the piece of their glove cut off that they use. That is for your safety and the safety of the public so that you’re not getting a glove jammed in your weapon and either being unable to react in real time or accidentally discharging, as we’ve seen a number of these. Same thing when you walk up on a vehicle, you’re not wearing gloves, you’re touching the back of those vehicles, and you’re putting your fingerprints on those vehicles. In the event that you are injured or shot as an officer and that vehicle drives off, that is key evidence to show that is the vehicle that you were with. You don’t see them doing any precautions.

The other big piece is what happened with Renee Good, and that is you’ve got one person screaming to get out and one person screaming to move on. And we’ve seen that in a number of videos since her tragic murder.

MARY:
Right. Which is why, when people think it’s totally fine that Jonathan Ross killed an unarmed woman who was moving away from him, they say, “Well, she just needed to follow instructions.” Which ones? Tell me. Obviously, they haven’t been trained in crowd control or de-escalation. In fact, the opposite. They seem to want to escalate the situation. It’s worth remembering, and after I mention this, I want your take on whether you think they’ve gone too far. This is all because the little Nazi in the White House, Stephen Miller, created a 3,000-detention arrest per day quota, which has driven these mass hirings of unqualified people into ICE and CBP.

ADAM:
Yes, I think Stephen Miller is running this country. And look, we’ve seen this. We saw that Stephen Miller put his house for sale. I don’t know if it’s sold or not, but it’s because he moved on base the same way on a military base. These are folks not only running this country for Donald or with Donald, but they’re also putting themselves behind military for their own protection. That speaks to the larger part of how they’re consolidating all of this and making it work for them as opposed to the American people. To your point too, the de-escalation piece, I think a lot of that probably goes back to exactly what Stephen Miller wants out there. Policing is about protecting the public, and what can you do if somebody has a flat tire on the side of the road, and they’re escalating while doing that at every turn? They’ve got videographers filming all of it for whatever they plan to do with that footage.

MARY:
Yeah. I guess another music video for Kristi Noem.

ADAM:
Yeah.

MARY:
Because that seems to be the only thing.

ADAM:
Or Laura Trump.

MARY:
Oh, which is worse, the pumping murderer or watching Laura Trump dance? I don’t know if that’s indeed what she was doing. She was either dancing or having a stroke? I’m not sure.

ADAM:
There’s still plenty of time for Laura Trump to do worse things, but she did seem to drop behind the scenes of her new music video this week.

MARY:
Wow, that’s something. It’s better than watching a senatorial campaign from her. I wanted to get back to the Alaska paratroopers being moved into Minnesota.

ADAM:
Well, kind of the same, maybe.

MARY:
Maybe. We’ll see if they’re willing to follow illegal orders. One reason we’re told that it’s that unit being moved is because they specialize in cold conditions. As you mentioned, we’ve seen lots of videos of untrained ICE officers slipping in ice and snow because they’re not aware it’s cold in Minnesota in the winter. They’ve never heard of yaks or don’t know how to buy winter boots. They’re trained to work in harsh winter conditions. Adam, what other place in the world do we need to be concerned about that is cold?

ADAM:
Well, I think this is maybe the segue to Greenland, but you just made me think of one thing I haven’t thought of. It’s interesting what they’re activating in Alaska because, as it starts to warm up, Russia always runs into problems with the ongoing war in Ukraine. Their technical equipment does not do well once the snow and ice are gone, once the ground softens. There’s a little bit of a connection there in terms of the way. Greenland. Going back to the Maduro piece, right? You see a lot of differing opinions. A lot of people are like, “So glad this happened. Hopefully it turns into democracy.” This case may all fall apart though. But at the same time, that is very different than when we’re talking about Greenland. I think of all the people, including my father, who spent 30 years working on behalf of this country and how much of that work, some undone in a day, some undone in a month, that seems like not… even if Donald wants to say it’s to protect us from Putin, what a big win for Putin that would be if we did that.

MARY:

Exactly. We’ve heard that Putin thinks it’s a great idea, so that should tell us something. You said something earlier I want to get back to because this is relevant in relation to practically everything the Trump regime is doing. By withdrawing 1,500 specialized troops from Alaska who were there to protect us from Russia and China, we were left vulnerable in a very curious way, all to make an American city less safe in the name of making it less safe. We see this in the way funds are reallocated. ICE has been funded with at least $40 billion at this point. Meanwhile, programs that help children get food are being defunded. That seems to be part of the whole agenda, reallocating resources, taking them away from things that actually keep us safe in terms of national security or meeting basic needs. Is that a trend you see continuing? What do we do about that?

ADAM:
Yeah. Another interesting thing is let’s say they follow through with this and you get these 1,500 out of Alaska. The other piece, in addition to all of the destruction, chaos, and murder taking place in our country because of this administration, which also makes us unsafe in other places like Alaska when it comes to China and Russia, is the continued projection in saying this stuff out loud prior to ever doing it. One example: going back to Maduro, you had former CIA officers who could not believe that months before this happened, and now the timeline matches August of last year, that Donald announced he had CIA on the ground. The number of lives he risked in that operation is huge. They then had to continue to do what they were doing but look out in a totally different way every single day.

Now we’re doing the same thing. We’re just announcing this news prior to doing it. Even though it shouldn’t be done, it makes us less safe because by the time we find out where these folks came from, we give China and Russia a runway to plan. And every single day they’re testing the limits with airspace and other things in Alaska.

MARY:
Yes, It’s an increasingly fraught and dangerous situation. One alarming thing is that it seems Donald is the only person ostensibly in charge. I agree with you. I think Stephen Miller is running this country. But you don’t see any other people in the administration, cabinet officials, or Republicans of Congress pushing back or offering alternatives. It’s his way or the highway, and it’s making the country and the world less safe.

ADAM:
There are probably different levels of variation while we don’t see or hear those people. Some are up for reelection. Some are named Susie Wilde, who hasn’t said a word since she said a lot. Others want to allegedly run for president if they think this guy is leaving office. We’re seeing more retirements than we have in a long time.

MARY:
Yes, because there are such brave people.

ADAM:
If they were brave, they would do it and leave immediately.

MARY:
Not wait until—

ADAM:

November.

MARY:
Exactly. Two quick things to wrap up. I hear it’s time for the 25th Amendment. Adam, first question: is there anything Donald could realistically do that would get Republicans to come together and demand that the 25th Amendment be invoked?

ADAM:
Seriously, it’s a great question. It wouldn’t seem that way based on what we’re watching. I’m from the camp that doesn’t believe anybody will ever be able to get away with what he has. This might be one of those moments, and what is still the experiment that is the United States maybe had to go through this so it could never happen again. With that said, if real health reports were leaked out of Walter Reed, that could be problematic for him. One of the folks we see on TV often, who was Dick Cheney’s doctor, says the nomenclature and words Donald uses when he talks about visits just don’t exist. There is more there. It’s not just the annual physical. What that is, I don’t know, but it sure isn’t killing innocent people on the street, which seems to back up one of his famous lines.

MARY:
Exactly. Last thing. We both understand that our only hope is getting Democrats back into power, but a specific kind of Democrat. What should Democrats be doing to make the argument to Americans that they need to vote across the board?

ADAM:
Not be going on Ben Shapiro again like Gavin Newsom in the last 24 hours.

MARY:
What?

ADAM:
I just saw another clip. Newsom came out and is not supporting abolishing ICE. Allegedly it’s a new interview. An old friend used to say, “You’re majoring in the minors.” I don’t understand this. I think it’s as easy as making sure everyone you know is registered to vote. There’s a great website: iswillvote.com. Check your voter registration, fix what you need to. Make sure your friends, family, and neighbors are registered. March 3rd is the first day of primaries this year. Make sure Democrats who will do what we need once in power get through primaries. We need to win really big this year. Anytime you hear of a special election, get involved. There are a couple coming up, there’ll be more. Do what you can: postcards, phone calls, or going out. This has hit a wide-ranging group. Farmers, soybean issues—this is starting to impact everyone. Some haven’t recovered from the government shutdown when Republicans played games with EBT. Unfortunately, some people voted without understanding how it would impact them. Folks need to wake up and get involved. I will say, The Daily Caller posts photos of Black Americans lawfully exercising Second Amendment rights. The right only seems to have a problem when that person is not a white male. I support people stepping up lawfully in their communities. Those are the types ICE is not going to mess with. It might make people think twice before messing with these communities.

MARY:
Absolutely. Short of that, blue state governors will have to call in the National Guard to protect peaceful protesters against an American agency called ICE. That is just where we are. Adam, thank you so much for your time. It is always great to chat. Everybody, please check out Adam’s Substack, The Alt Media. It’s fantastic, hysterical, and if you like swearing, it’s right in your wheelhouse.

ADAM:
Hey, and most importantly, congrats on your wedding.

MARY:
Thank you very much.

ADAM:

Absolutely. Thank you to everyone supporting Mary. You’re the best. Had a lot of fun.

MARY:
All right. Same here. I’ll see you soon. Bye everybody.