Was there a point to you where it became clear that the federal government had made a miscalculation about the city, that, that this was not playing out in the way that they had hoped that it would or intended it to?

Yes, absolutely.

I, I think the, the killing of Rene Good was such a turning point.

Um, you know, the whole country pretty much saw that, and then they saw it again with Alex Pretty.

Um, people saw not only what looked like someone just being, without justification, just murdered, but they also saw the lack of training on the part of a lot of these ICE agents, n-not just with those killings, um, although that's where obviously it was most, uh, extreme.

But even in some of the smaller nonviolent encounters, you just-- These people kind of looked clumsy.

And I think, you know, there was a, there was a feeling that, um, this is not, um, not a well-organized operation.

But i- if we look at Minnesota as a sort of test case for both the administration's immigration enforcement and effective resistance, what, what, what are the lessons here? What are the takeaways here?

What's your view of that?

I do think there's some perform- formative cruelty.

I think there's an effort to intimidate people.

There's that now famous clip of video, and then the agent says something like, and this is just after the killing of Rene Good, "Haven't you learned? Haven't you learned?" In other words, "We just killed someone.

You know, stay the hell away from people like us and let us do our work." So I think there's an effort to spread fear, and, and again, that very much echoes with my experience covering these insurrections in the Middle East.

But what strikes me also is that this is backfiring.

If their goal is, as they say, to arrest as many illegal migrants as possible, one can't help thinking that for a lot of Americans, immigration enforcement writ large is now gonna be associated with Gestapo-like tactics.

It sounds like people in Minnesota have been trying to do their best and keep these caucuses safe, but what could this suggest about what democratic participation in the United States might look like in the months ahead? I mean, that's little D democrat, I mean, not participation in the Democratic Party, but could this kind of military presence on the street scare people from voting?

So explain to us first, what is the American position on the new Syria?

The, the American position is fundamentally this.

After Assad fell, Trump made clear that he thought Syria was a basket case, Syria was a dangerous place.

He wanted to stay out.

But that changed dramatically in May because Trump went to the Gulf, and there he met with the leaders of the Gulf states and with Erdoğan, the president of Turkey.

And all those countries have a very clear position.

They want Syria to have a strong central government.

And what is your take on, uh, al-Sharaa himself?

Where does Syria fit in?

Syria, first of all, is in the center of the Levant, so it has borders, um, with Iraq, with Lebanon and Israel and Turkey.

So just as a kind of crossing point between these other countries, and it's, it's incredibly important.

And that's why it was so crucial, uh, for, for decades and decades under the Assads, uh, Bashar al-Assad and his father who, who was before him, Hafez al-Assad, that Syria was this part of this axis of resistance.

It was, it was a way for Iran to get directly at Israel and that was, you know, fuel for the ongoing conflict.

Syria has always been, uh, you know, it used to define itself as (Arabic), the heart of Arabism.

It was central to the discourse of Arab nationalism.

How did he become radicalized? And just, uh, I'll repeat that he founded the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda.