Sam Stein Used to Be a Thief

**Tim Miller** (0:12)
Hello and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We have managing editor Sam Stein back on the show, and here's why. I'm going to tell you why. We're still at the end of the August doldrums, okay? With the end of August, I don't know what Trump is doing if he's getting a facelift, he's just bleeding all day, but he has been a little less on the crazy lately, as far as the new news is concerned. That's one thing. Everybody's getting back into school, they want a little fight. So I was like, what can we do this week to loosen it up a little bit?
Sam's laugh is one thing. People have been counting on his new beard, and they're a little worried about him. I received some texts or concerns that Sam is being held hostage. He was on vacation getting into the hard drugs.
So what we're going to do here is we have a mailbag for you and the cabinet rankings. We're just going to have fun, and we might dabble in some conspiracies, because it's important to have fun and dabble in conspiracies because I was looking at the YouTube rankings. The shit that is still in front of us, Sam, there is lefty conspiracy theories. Jimmy Dore is beating me. Do you know Jimmy Dore? He was doing a segment about whether Charlie Kirk was hit with a drone this week. That's beating me. Okay, the right wing nonsense. Sorry, one second.

**Sam Stein** (1:29)
Was the segment that Charlie Kirk this week was hit with a drone? No. Okay.

**Tim Miller** (1:34)
No, the death. The assassination wasn't really a gunshot, it was a drone.
And it was a pretty precise drone, I gotta say. Like just the neck, okay. Didn't hit anybody else there at Utah University.

**Sam Stein** (1:48)
How big was this drone?

**Tim Miller** (1:49)
Small.
And so, you know, and then you got all the right wing losers beating us, Candice, Megan. And so I'm just like, this might be the path, Sam. Begging people to subscribe, if you're watching on YouTube, click to subscribe and also doing the types of content that people want, which is Natalie Harp conspiracies.

**Sam Stein** (2:08)
Yeah, I don't want to beg people because that looks a little desperate, but you guys should be out there, you guys should be subscribing as a way to bolster the idea that you don't have to dive so deep into the conspiracy land in order to be a success in this industry. Help us prove the premise that you can be sane and still attract an audience.

**Tim Miller** (2:29)
Just some light thoughts about, I am dabbling in some light thoughts about whether Natalie Harp is Russian or about her health, history, her story, her brother, the communist.
I have a lot of thoughts. We will get into all that at the end.

**Sam Stein** (2:42)
Okay.

**Tim Miller** (2:43)
Serious news first.

**Sam Stein** (2:44)
Yes.

**Tim Miller** (2:45)
Almost like 15 minutes of seriousness, 40 minutes of Sam interrupting me and laughing.
New York Times this morning has done the analysis on the soaring number of arrests that ICE has done for non-criminals. It's been happening this summer. Thousands of people who had not previously been the focus of the mass deportation campaign have gotten rounded up. They included people married to US citizens, including one that we sent to Central African Republic, people who had entered legally and were pursuing an asylum claim and then obviously the Haitians and others with temporary legal status that the administration pushed to revoke. We have a chart we'll put up for the video folks right now. And you can just see, it's just like hockey stick go up of people who are being detained who have no criminal history, no issues at all. And that's what they're doing to get their numbers.

**Sam Stein** (3:34)
Why do you think they're doing this? I mean, that was a question I was kind of asking. I had a couple of theories.

**Tim Miller** (3:40)
What's your theory?

**Sam Stein** (3:42)
Well, one is that Mark Wayne Mullen had this brief period of time where people were mad at him. There was those two deaths and then they made some sort of policy change where they weren't going to do the traffic stop arrests. And then everyone freaked out on the right about Mark Wayne. And so I think he recalibrated. That's one theory. The other is that Trump's got nothing else really going on. And all the foreign policy stuff is distracting. And so he's going back to his bread and butter.
But those are the only ones I have. And I don't know if you have any other profound thoughts.