With a vote on impeachment looming, political analysts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the shortcomings of political coverage, including the role spectacle has played in creating the crisis and how partisan media has manifested a dangerous alternate reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| I am clearly made up my mind. | |
| I'm not trying to hide the fact that I have disdain for the accusations in the process, so I don't need any witnesses. | |
| And everything I do during this, I'm coordinating with White House counsel. | |
| There will be no difference between the president's position and our position. | |
| We all know how it's going to end. | |
| There's no chance the president's going to be removed from office. | |
| I want you to get up now. | |
| I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. | |
| I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore! | |
| Let's go beyond the stale and tired narratives. | |
| Let's use historical context and alternative perspectives to fully comprehend. | |
| Let's dig deeper to tackle the news and bring a little order to these chaotic times. | |
| That's what your hosts Jared Yates-Sexson and Nick Hauselman will do. | |
| Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| So, Jared, how many times have you watched Network today? | |
| Oh, man. | |
| First of all, I have to say, I'm so glad you brought up network because that is so pertinent to what we're talking about today with how this media establishment that we've created in this country is really, really dire and dangerous. | |
| To think that that movie came out so many years before what we have now and predicted so much of what we have. | |
| If people are listening to this podcast and they haven't seen Network, I'm going to do a taboo here and say, press pause on the podcast and just go watch Network. | |
| And the honest truth is I just watched Network a couple of weeks ago because I think that's the equivalent of splashing cold water on your face. | |
| That is a dire prophecy for the country and where we're at. | |
| Yeah, and by the way if you watched the movie Joker at the very end they do a direct reference to Network as they pull away and you see all of the TVs with all the different things on it as they pull back and it's exactly right from Network and I know he did that on purpose. | |
| So we can't get away from it. | |
| And certainly, most people would probably have heard, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore, directly from that movie, even though they might not even know what the reference is. | |
| But that's how Paddy Chayefsky has influenced our culture, and it really is frightening how, you know, I think what writers do, certainly, you know, in any given era, is they take with the reality of the situation of the day, and they try and heighten that, and they try and expand and figure out, well, let's go ten steps beyond where we are. | |
| And I suppose that's what he did. | |
| And we are now, I would say, even more than 10 steps beyond that. | |
| And we have this interesting issue. | |
| And I know you want to talk about it, too, as far as like how this whole thing is being covered and how the media, their role in all this and whether they're complicit. | |
| Well, yeah. | |
| And to be frank, this is one of the reasons why I wanted to do this podcast in the first place is that the problems that have led to Donald Trump and I say it all the time and I'll probably say it once an episode. | |
| He is a symptom. | |
| He is not the disease. | |
| What has led to this moment in a lot of ways is the treatment of politics in American culture and the way that we have, over the past few decades, | |
| Started to treat it as if it is an entertainment as if it is a television show that we are supposed to watch with bated breath and and and with cliffhangers and characters who Frighten us and inspire us and it's supposed to be this incredibly entertaining spectacle at all times and how and the reason we're talking about this now for people who haven't seen it is | |
| The pundits on cable news at this point are doing a real disservice to themselves and their viewers in the country talking about the impeachment crisis. | |
| And they're saying, well, yeah, the Democrats have presented a damning case against Donald Trump. | |
| Obviously, he's committed impeachable crimes. | |
| But these hearings, they're not quite entertaining enough, Nick. | |
| They don't have pizzazz, as some people like to say it. | |
| Or, you know, there's even people, and to put this out there, there are people who are making six figures who are going on television saying that they're bored by the impeachment proceedings, and that's their job. | |
| They have national soapboxes to go on and analyze the news, And they're actually operating as media critics saying that somehow or another, this impeachment isn't fun enough. | |
| It's not interesting enough. | |
| And what we're watching is America's system of government unravel in front of our very eyes. | |
| And these people can't even be paid to care. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, you know, it's funny because with my YouTube channel, it's gotten to the point where if I want my audience to like a specific type of video I'm going to do, I literally have to train them to like it. | |
| And a lot of times it might take several weeks. | |
| Maybe a new song I want to use and they rail against it, rail against it, but eventually you train them and they get into it and now all of a sudden they like that song and they can't have it any other way. | |
| And I kind of feel like that's what the news has done as well. | |
| We were trained for a long time to simply, Walter Cronkite would sit in front of, behind a desk and he would tell us the news in a very unaffected way. | |
| And then all those people in that realm, in that kind of, in that kind of a genre. | |
| And, you know, I can remember in the mid 80s, you know, Forrest Sawyer and Maria Shriver would be on the news in the morning and they would tell us the news. | |
| We didn't, I don't remember, you know, having people would come on and weigh in with opinions. | |
| That seemed to be a thing where you weren't supposed to do that. | |
| Yeah, that was actually never the intention of this. | |
| We have a long history in this country. | |
| And the thing about it is people like to talk about what journalism is and what it isn't. | |
| To begin with, in the founding of America and in the first few decades of its existence, Um, journalism was kind of a dirty business. | |
| It was a partisan affair. | |
| So everyone who likes to talk about how journalism is supposed to be nonpolitical or whatever, they're actually not talking about the history of it. | |
| It starts out as a partisan affair where the parties actually own the apparatus of, of the presses and, and the newspapers. | |
| And it serves a specific point. | |
| And everyone knew that, right? | |
| Everyone knew when they picked up a paper, they were like, I am a Democrat. | |
| I'm going to read this democratic paper, right? | |
| That's how this starts. | |
| But eventually over the years, there's this wall that gets built between journalists and opinion makers. | |
| And it's supposed to keep both sides from each other. | |
| The problem is that journalism, which was seen as being part of a healthy discourse for society, it's not very profitable, right? | |
| Because it's not the thing that brings in the huge riches. | |
| It's not the things that really, really gets people's attention. | |
| And then all of a sudden, the opinion and the punditry starts being injected in with like really dangerous parts to it. | |
| There's all kinds of things you can look at to how we got to the point that we're at. | |
| One of the most dire, troubling things is someone like Joseph Goebbels, who you were talking about training viewers on YouTube. | |
| Goebbels would train the German public to be malleable based upon cues that were sent over the radio. | |
| A lot of people don't know that Nazi Germany was enabled by radios. | |
| That was like one of the big, giant things that they did. | |
| And so there would be these cues. | |
| There would be like an orchestra that would play and you would know that you were getting news from the war front, which is actually the precursor to things like breaking news alerts and the orchestral things that we hear on cable news. | |
| Like that's where this stuff comes from. | |
| And the honest truth is when that wall broke down between journalism and punditry, there were a lot of bad consequences. | |
| I think we're only starting to understand now When the country is in an actual crisis and they're doing such a piss poor job covering it. | |
| You know the other fear and having you know covered in NBA is that you fear that you don't get access. | |
| That they're going to restrict access to you if you have a certain opinion or you cover it a certain way. | |
| Now no administration has been more guilty of this than the Trump administration of doing that and revoking press passes. | |
| And that is an interesting thing, because it used to be tied, as far as political stuff goes, to the First Amendment, where you simply had to grant access to the press. | |
| That was what we prided ourselves on in the United States. | |
| So that erosion, and I think Obama is guilty of this as well. | |
| I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, he took Fox News' media credentials away at some point during his presidency. | |
| And then under public pressure, he had to give it back, because he had realized. | |
| Well, we're in that same thing now, where I have to imagine, because everyone's aware of the numbers, and they're aware that all those things are tied into their jobs, everyone is afraid that if they don't get enough page hits on an article, or if they do something that's too brutal against the administration, they lose their credentials, then they're going to lose their job, and that's not going to be good for them either, so that's the weird cycle I think we got stuck in. | |
| There's a really bizarre thing that has happened over the past few years with the news and particularly online. | |
| It's a lot of analytical stuff. | |
| They start to look at what stories are going to hit the most things. | |
| They're basically prescribed what issues right now are either going to go viral or are going to get the most hits or get shared the most. | |
| This is a science. | |
| So the moment that you get a story posted, if you were in that office, It's like a scoreboard. | |
| You can see it happening in real time. | |
| And they're trying all kinds of different search engine terms and methods to try and figure this stuff out, which is one of the big problems right now is you brought up Trump and the press. | |
| For instance, you have someone like Obama. | |
| Obama would go on Fox News. | |
| I don't know if most people remember this, but on I believe it was the day of the Super Bowl, he gave an interview to Bill O'Reilly that was like a really weird, disturbing kind disrespectful interview with Bill O'Reilly. | |
| And everyone's like, why would you go on Fox News? | |
| Now we have Trump, who, especially during the 2016 campaign, He would go on all of these outlets who, you know, and I would talk to these people in the media and they would tell you, oh, Trump's a buffoon. | |
| Oh, he's ridiculous. | |
| He's not serious. | |
| There's no chance he's ever going to win. | |
| Well, they gave him, and this is the estimate. | |
| This is the range. | |
| The conservative estimate is that he was given $2 billion worth of free advertising. | |
| The larger estimate is five to six billion dollars of free advertising by a press that learned to get addicted to Donald Trump. | |
| That's what happened in 2016, is all of these, the analytics showed everybody, the ratings showed everybody. | |
| I mean, you even saw people like Les Moonves, the disgraced former head of CBS, and Zucker at CNN, who would go out and they would say, you know what, we're making so much money right now because of Donald Trump. | |
| And they still are. | |
| I just want to throw that out there. | |
| He is the rising tide that rises all ships. | |
| And there's a reason why they like him. | |
| He's a spectacle maker. | |
| He creates instant news stories the moment that he tweets anything. | |
| I think it was today or yesterday. | |
| Man, it's so hard to keep track anymore. | |
| He was tweeting about Nancy Pelosi's teeth. | |
| And, you know, it was just like you could set your watch by it. | |
| Like the instant that he tweeted that, it was going to be a story, and they were going to talk about this, and they were going to do that, and there were going to be pundits coming on talking about this. | |
| But what they're not doing is they're not talking about the constitutional crisis that is taking place in the country. | |
| And they're not getting into the actual meat of it. | |
| They're not talking about what has happened. | |
| They're not talking about the fact that Republicans have all but abdicated their duty. | |
| And what's happening is instead we're seeing this weird transition where all of a sudden pundits are becoming cultural TV critics talking about whether or not the day's testimony is entertaining to them and whether Democrats are creating good optics the way they did with Robert Mueller. | |
| And basically they're sitting there saying, I want to be entertained. | |
| Why am I not being entertained? | |
| Why is this constitutional crisis not more entertaining? | |
| Well, you know, the other thing we've done is the structure of news, the way it's being reported and aired now is fundamentally different than it used to be. | |
| When you got home at 6 o'clock, you know, after dinner at 6 o'clock or 7 o'clock, you'd watch Walter Cronkite. | |
| We kind of see that kind of stuff happen more like in the mornings now. | |
| Generally, when people are at work. | |
| And what we get in the prime time now are the Rachel Maddows and Bill O'Reilly's and the Hannity's, right? | |
| So we're not even getting news at the end of the day when all the news had happened. | |
| That's the wrap-up. | |
| That's probably what you argue when we should be getting this straight news without any influence of opinion. | |
| And yet all we have at that hour now His opinion, Chris Cuomo, Rachel Maddow, they're all at the prime time right there. | |
| So the whole fundamental way that we are delivered, or the way the news is delivered, is now changed, and irreparably. | |
| Now again, why did it change? | |
| Because what you said, the ratings went up. | |
| People liked it more. | |
| In fact, I'm not even sure, we're kind of criticizing the media, we're talking about the media for, you know, 10 minutes. | |
| Like, I don't know how interesting that is to people, honestly. | |
| I think, almost in the same respect that people are getting bored by watching straight news, You know, I don't know if they want to even hear the analysis of the straight news or the not straight news. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| I don't even know if it's about entertainment. | |
| I think it's about crippling anxiety. | |
| Like, what you're saying is absolutely true. | |
| It's not like we're waiting until 6 p.m. | |
| to find out what's going on with the nation's business, right? | |
| I mean, I'm sitting here with my phone over here to my right, which is basically a constant pump of information. | |
| What they do is they tap into a really powerful anxiety that we have. | |
| I mean, that's what powers Twitter, right? | |
| You have to constantly be on top of Twitter to understand what's happening now, what's happening now. | |
| And that's why it feels so chaotic and it feels like you're trying to drink out of a fire hose. | |
| So Trump hits that. | |
| He hits that anxiety button really, really well. | |
| And that's what they work on. | |
| Like if you think about how cable news works, cable news is a lot of quiet where you talk about the latest movie and then you talk about the next crisis. | |
| and what they've done is they've started to condense and I don't know if anybody remembers this but it used to be again like with movie openings you would turn on MSNBC and it'd be like oh we've got Tom Cruise on to talk about his new film and everyone's so excited about the new Mission Impossible and it used to be a little bit like the Today Show and then occasionally you'd have a war or a shooting or a natural disaster they've shrunk that so it's now just constant | |
| Terror at all times, and these cues that get us addicted to constant terror, because that's why we turn on news. | |
| I, for one, I finally, I had to say, you know what, I'm not going to be watching cable news anymore. | |
| I'm not going to watch the Sunday morning shows anymore, because all it is, it's just like eating cotton candy all the time. | |
| You're not actually getting the explanations behind what's happening. | |
| You're getting what's happened in a sensationalized package. | |
| And meanwhile, you're missing the point. | |
| Well, here's the thing, though, about that. | |
| So, the Firehose is on all day, and we're on Twitter, and it's a chaotic mess of information. | |
| So, I think what we've turned to is Rachel Maddow, or Sean Hannity, to explain it. | |
| Like, slow down a little bit. | |
| You know, certainly Maddow will repeat it twice or three times. | |
| He'll get it. | |
| And, Rachel, you tell me what this all means. | |
| I will assimilate it into my brain, and then I have the information. | |
| Now, That people on the other side consider, okay, whatever you might consider Sean Hannity as a scourge of cultural society. | |
| Well, the other side feels the same way about Rachel Maddow. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I'm sure you're aware of this. | |
| Rachel Maddow is like Goebbels in some weird way to them. | |
| So you kind of are stuck in this impasse as well, where, you know, both sides feel it's ridiculous. | |
| Now, you know, we can watch Chris Wallace and say, God, there's a measured reason guy, just like we used to have with Cronkite. | |
| But, I don't even know, do you have your finger on the pulse of how tenuous his position is at Fox News? | |
| I think he is there as long as he wants to be there. | |
| I think Fox News needs those people who are going out and they're, like they needed Shep Smith for a long time. | |
| And Shep Smith would go out and he would sort of like push against the moment in the Fox News message. | |
| And I think they need like one or two people at all times who are able to push against a little bit. | |
| Fair enough. | |
| The funny thing is that the president, sorry, Trump, I don't like to even use that term, but Trump watches, it sounds like he watches CNN as much as he watches Fox. | |
| Yeah, he does. | |
| And let's talk about that. | |
| Let's talk about the fact that, and this is bizarre, so let's all put on our postmodern theory hats, right? | |
| Think about this. | |
| This is terrifying. | |
| We have a president who is so addicted to cable news, That he is constantly trying to have a conversation with cable news and cable news is answering back to him. | |
| And then he's responding to what cable news is saying and they're responding to him. | |
| It's this cyclical loop. | |
| I mean, this is this is really far down the slippery slope. | |
| I mean, this is like dystopic nightmare stuff. | |
| And that's where this thing gets, because you're exactly right. | |
| There are people who are giving this curatorial sort of idea at the end of the day. | |
| And actually, I would step in and I critique a lot of cable news, but I'll tell you, I think Rachel Maddow is actually an excellent journalist. | |
| If people haven't read the book Blowout, I think they should. | |
| I think she's pretty dead on with most of this stuff. | |
| But what cable news does most of the time is it reduces politics down to a spectacle and it turns it into a passive pastime. | |
| All of a sudden we're viewing the world as if it's a television show. | |
| And I don't know if people around, you know, listening to us are the Game of Thrones crowd, But people can remember like when Game of Thrones ended people were really upset about how the end of the show happened, right? | |
| And that's the society we've turned into is we comment on the things that we experience without ever really planning or hoping to change the things that we experience because it's on the TV or the Internet. | |
| That's how we treat news now. | |
| And all of a sudden it creates a really passive base of voters who just sort of watch the world pass by and they're told how things happen. | |
| Right now, the problem is, and I want you to think about two different types of coverage. | |
| One coverage tells you, we have been shown that the president has committed impeachable crimes. | |
| Here are those crimes. | |
| The evidence is overwhelming. | |
| That's it, right? | |
| That tells a citizenry that they need to do something, that they need to call their Congress people, that they need to get in the streets, that they need to take a hard stand or else their democracy is in trouble. | |
| The other says, you're not going to believe it, tomorrow we have a star witness and you need to be here at 10 a.m., you know, with your coffee and your anxiety and then you need to pick up something like a Twitter to talk about how angry you are about it. | |
| Those seem, on the surface, like they're related, but they're completely different experiences. | |
| Those are completely different realities. | |
| Yes. | |
| I'm not even sure how I can add to that, but yeah. | |
| It's the notion of, because it reminds me of what I do on the basketball side, where, at a smaller scale to Trump, certainly, but the notion of needing to have a conversation. | |
| And needing to talk to people and express your opinion. | |
| Like that's what the nefariousness of Twitter ends up being. | |
| And why it's a cesspool, right? | |
| It's like you have to sort of be able to voice who you are. | |
| That's how we've all been raised now and that's what we want to be able to do. | |
| But I guess the problem I have with all of this, especially we're talking about the news and where you get it, is that sometimes, you know, and I know that people listen to Fox News would think that I'm ridiculous, but There's just a simple lack of reliability to the information. | |
| It's not credible a lot of the time when you're watching Fox News. | |
| Yet, people have solidified their entire being based on what they're hearing from that. | |
| So there's no going back. | |
| These people that watch Fox News all day long, I don't think they'll ever be able to, no matter how many times you show them Yeah, I think we have a couple things going on. | |
| they've already assimilated it into their consciousness. | |
| It's there. | |
| I don't know if you're ever going to be able to turn them back from that. | |
| And that's what's so frustrating about this whole thing. | |
| And then we have Trump who just stokes that and continues to do that and has no notion of being a unifier at all. | |
| Yeah, I think we have a couple of things going on. | |
| I think first before we jump into Fox News and talk about the history of how that happened and how dangerous it is, we have to also talk about the fact that things like CNN, MSNBC, they sort of operate in their own alternate reality. | |
| They sort of are powered by the myth of American exceptionalism. | |
| There is the, you know, made for TV movie version of America that, you know, it's like we beat the Nazis and we've been making the world better and everything's fine. | |
| It's just we have to get past Trump. | |
| And that's not true. | |
| That's its own myth. | |
| But it's not Actually intentional myth. | |
| That's sort of a myth that everybody gets sort of stuck inside of. | |
| So as a result, people will watch these and maybe they'll be informed, but they don't have the deeper understanding of what has happened to lead to the moment that we're at, which I would argue is one of the reasons why we started this podcast, why I wanted to do this and why you wanted to do this. | |
| And then once you get into Fox News, that is intentional misconception. | |
| And that was started by and everyone knows this name at this point, Roger Ailes, and everyone understands he's like this big giant creep who who has had all of this power over conservative politics. | |
| He goes way back. | |
| He was an old, I believe it was the Mike Douglas Show he was a producer for, and he ended up working for Richard Nixon. | |
| Everyone always, this is another part of the myth, everyone is always like, well, Richard Nixon was undone by TV and JFK. | |
| That's not true. | |
| Richard Nixon was one of the first people to understand the power of television. | |
| I mean, this is a person who saved his VP run with the Checkers speech, which was all about TV manipulation. | |
| So, Roger Ailes comes in, and Roger Ailes basically tells him, Politics don't matter. | |
| It doesn't matter what you say or what you're actually for. | |
| What matters is the spectacle and the visual and how you make people feel emotionally. | |
| So we start seeing like a divide between the real and the fake. | |
| And Ailes powers Nixon through that. | |
| And Ailes then becomes a mainstay in the Republican Party from Nixon to Reagan to Bush. | |
| eventually the latter Bush and now Trump. | |
| And he forms Fox News, which is an intentional reframing of news and reality. | |
| And that's a really dangerous thing. | |
| And that's one of the reasons why it has sort of outdone CNN and MSNBC in a lot of ways. | |
| Those are unintentional alternate realities and not everybody's on the same page. | |
| Fox News doesn't create a lot of cognitive dissonance. | |
| You turn it on and you're basically told you are right. | |
| And go back to networking. | |
| That's what it is You're watching it to believe that you are right and that you are the hero and that you don't have to question Yourself so much and you can feel empowered by it. | |
| It's a dangerous thing I mean I and again going back into the idea of postmodern theory. | |
| I mean like That's the TV talking to you, right? | |
| And they figured that out. | |
| They figured out that if you tell people everything's alright and you're alright and we're on your side, that people become loyal. | |
| It becomes a part of their identity. | |
| You know what's funny is that, to almost reference Joker again, I've seen the movie twice now, That whole thing actually plays out where he feels like the TV is talking to him and that this whole other alternate reality that he wishes he could have. | |
| It's very powerful though, especially for people who have been conditioned to do that. | |
| Now, Ailes is important because there's no doubt that he understood had Nixon had Fox News in the 70s, he would not have been impeached. | |
| And I think that that's what they're realizing now was that, you know, Trump is not going to be impeached. | |
| And I would say the big primary reason for that is because of Fox News. | |
| And he has this daily network that goes on the offensive for him and beats down any possible, you know, mass wave of popularity to have him impeached. | |
| impeached. | |
| That said, even Fox News polls have him at 50% or 51% of people who want him impeached and thrown out of office. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And, you know, let's take the basketball thing an extra step. | |
| And this is a different way to sort of think about this. | |
| Think about watching a basketball game on a national stage, right, where the announcers are impartial and they're trying to call the game as it is as the game meets them. | |
| Right. | |
| That That is one experience. | |
| Then there's the team-owned network coverage, right? | |
| And think about Fox News like that. | |
| Like, this is the thing where after the game, whoever wins on the national stage gets the interview on the national stage. | |
| Even if the home team loses on the regional stage, they're still the ones who are talking afterwards. | |
| And it's like, what did we do? | |
| How did we do wrong? | |
| How did we win today? | |
| Fox News has provided such a biased, partisan view of the world. | |
| And you and I were DMing about this. | |
| Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham went on Fox News and had no problem whatsoever saying aloud in front of a national television audience, particularly Fox News viewers, that they had no intention of carrying out a fair impeachment trial. | |
| They had no, and by the way, I don't know if people know this, but like the senators going into an impeachment trial have to | |
| Have to recite an oath to be impartial They went on national television and said we have no desire whatsoever to carry out the oath We're actually gonna violate the oath and you will watch us do that and they've created a reality that is safe enough and secure enough and behind them enough that it doesn't matter and meanwhile over here with like CNN and MSNBC and New York Times and Washington Post who are still trying to call the game down the middle and | |
| That other part of the game is so far off the radar that they actually have to grant them good faith. | |
| They actually have to pretend like this isn't some sort of bizarre play by Republicans that is completely in bad faith and, on top of that, incredibly dangerous. | |
| Well, we've got to dig into the impeachment then because this is an interesting thing where I keep saying this, how it's almost refreshing that the Republicans are just going to be way out in the open now with the corruption and with their impartialness and with all these things that you never should have been able to or you couldn't have said back, you know, 20 years ago for fear of political blowback at the very least. | |
| You know, one could argue, and I think Lawrence Tribe wants to argue, that you can bring these guys up on ethnic charges for not being unbiased, for not upholding their position as senators, as a jurist in this trial. | |
| So, I mean, listen, if you were to say, if they were doing the voir dire before a trial, and you're a potential juror, and you say, yeah, I already think that that guy is completely guilty because he's wearing red shoes, you're out of there. | |
| You're not a jurist anymore. | |
| In fact, and you know, there's hilarious ways you can get out if you don't want to be a jurist. | |
| So how is it possible? | |
| Because they've been railing against the process and want it fair. | |
| They want, they keep describing a trial that they want, you know, even though it's not a trial in the in the Congress. | |
| And yet here we are where, yeah, they should easily just be dismissed as jurors. | |
| You should have, there should be 10 or 12 less jurors right now based on what we've heard from some of these Republican senators. | |
| Well, what you just described is the split between real life application of rule of law and this fictional world that that politics now resides in. | |
| Right. | |
| So Mitch McConnell has become a fictional version of himself. | |
| We all know that he is devious. | |
| He's not afraid to break the rules in order to gain an advantage. | |
| We've seen it time again. | |
| And actually, when he was on Fox News, he it seemed like he relished in it. | |
| You know, he was sitting there talking to Hannity and it was quite obvious that he was like, I'm very proud that I've gotten to this point and I'm going to turn the villain knob up a couple of degrees. | |
| Right. | |
| Lindsey Graham's the exact same way. | |
| Nobody loves performing on camera more than Lindsey Graham and being Lindsey Graham turned up a couple of knobs, you know, and basically you have two characters who can go out and say this stuff and. | |
| And what ends up happening? | |
| And it's like Donald Trump, right? | |
| Donald Trump's character is that he lies all the time. | |
| So when he lies, we're not surprised. | |
| That's who he is. | |
| That's his character. | |
| And when Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell say that they're going to rig this impeachment hearing, it's like watching the TV. | |
| It's like, yeah, villains are gonna villain. | |
| And that's what ends up happening. | |
| But Jared, why can't they just lie and say they'll be impartial? | |
| This is what I don't understand. | |
| If Trump would stop tweeting, and if these guys would stop doing this, they would have a 30 point lead. | |
| We would all be completely in the dark about this, and we wouldn't have anything to rail against, and then the other side would be really excited because it sounds right. | |
| I just don't understand. | |
| It's almost like we criticize the Democrats for being so bad at presidential elections. | |
| And they are. | |
| They make the dumbest mistakes we've seen. | |
| But it almost feels to me like this will blow up in the Republicans' face if they do it this way. | |
| Now, I know that they're emboldened and because of the president and what the environment is, but it doesn't make any sense to me that he wouldn't simply say, yeah, we're going to be totally impartial. | |
| And then meanwhile, have a one day trial, not call any witnesses and then get let them off. | |
| Like, you know what I mean? | |
| They don't have to lie because they don't have to lie. | |
| You know, it's one of those things like I would almost guarantee that if I had a readout right now of their donations, I bet their donations spiked after they went on Fox News and said they weren't going to be impartial. | |
| Because that's what Fox News viewers expect from them. | |
| They want them to be brutal and duplicitous, and they want them to behave in this way. | |
| It's the same way with Trump. | |
| That's why they don't care if he lies. | |
| That's why they don't care if he's, I don't know, carried out felonies and one crime after another. | |
| This incentive structure overwhelms duty and honor and it leads to a point where it's better if I'm playing this role and it's better if I'm being obvious about how craven I am. | |
| And I guarantee that they made a ton of money by going on Fox and doing that because that's what the people want out of them because it feels like they're watching a TV show that represents them. - Yeah, I mean, you're getting it back to money, which is what it seems to always be about. | |
| It's they're raising money. | |
| And by the way, again, Trump comes on and says, oh, I have a new 95% approval rating in the Republican Party, or whatever. | |
| And it's like, not true. | |
| And it's like, it feels like the Manchurian candidate. | |
| You just keep making this up. | |
| Hey, Jared, I just saw a poll where it said 65% of the country want him impeached and convicted. | |
| And I just saw, and this poll is really in-depth, and it's 74% of the people who really want him impeached, and then 80% of them, you know what I mean, he just keeps raising the number. | |
| And the only thing I can think about, by the way, on that end, is that, and back to the money thing, is raising the money, and I've asked this before in the DMs, is that, I wonder if that's even real. | |
| Like, they could easily be lying about how much money they're taking in. | |
| There's no verification process for that. | |
| There's no verification process for any of this. | |
| This is like the whole thing. | |
| We're living in some weird matrix where, you know, hey, do we even know if the sanctions on Russia are even being enforced at this point? | |
| And what you're talking about right now is the most dangerous part about all of this, is we can get frustrated and we can get demoralized. | |
| And I don't know about everyone else, but like what happened in Britain with the most recent election was really, really demoralizing. | |
| And immediately, and to go back around to the media, they were immediately like, oh yeah, Donald Trump's going to win this next election. | |
| Like it's completely, you know, baked now. | |
| That's done. | |
| He's going to win it. | |
| When they are constantly lying to you, when they're constantly flaunting how much they do not care about their oaths and their duties and about us and their cruelty is the point, What ends up happening is, even though we're outraged, eventually there is a possibility that it could overwhelm you and it could lead to apathy. | |
| Because if you're just like, okay, you can just go out and do this in the open and there are no ramifications, well, why do I even care anymore? | |
| And that's what they worry about. | |
| Because, again, in a world that isn't about spectacle, it's about engaged, enlightened democracy, these people would be run out of town. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| They wouldn't even just be beaten in elections. | |
| Like they would just become scoundrels with no homes. | |
| I will tell you Lindsey Graham right now is in real trouble in his race for reelection. | |
| And one of the reasons why he would go on TV and say this stuff is in order to drive his voters to the polls. | |
| But what should be happening is – and that's sort of the loop, right? | |
| If democracy worked the way it was supposed to in this country, they would not be in the positions that they're at. | |
| There would have been repercussions so far to what they had done. | |
| But if it worked now, they would suffer the consequences of behaving this way. | |
| But as long as it's a TV show – and by the way, not just a TV show. | |
| It's a TV show that a lot of people have grown so tired of and so disillusioned by that they don't even watch the TV show anymore. | |
| That's the other part of it, right? | |
| Is like when Republicans drive down votes, they win elections. | |
| And so when they make it feel so ugly and awful and unwinnable, people check out and they're like, well, I don't care about politics. | |
| It's too gross. | |
| And that's one of the things that we've seen. | |
| That's how all of a sudden you get to a point where only like half of the country who's eligible to vote shows up to vote. | |
| And that, That's the big toxic stew of it. | |
| It feels like a passive thing and it feels like a disgusting passive thing. | |
| Well, 20 or 30 years ago, that apathy that you're describing would describe mostly, I would say, minorities. | |
| I would say that huge swaths of this country knew how unfair it was and would throw up their hands and be like, what's the difference? | |
| It doesn't matter anymore. | |
| That's why I don't vote. | |
| And I have a feeling that like that's now morphed into the mainstream of people. | |
| And now that apathy is sort of spread across different areas of the country now. | |
| But that said, we had more people, I believe, vote in the last presidential election than we had in a long time. | |
| So, there was an increase in that, and I believe the 2018 as well, the midterm elections, amazingly enough, also had, I'm speaking a little bit out of turn, but a lot more votes than normal for a midterm. | |
| So, there does seem to be something that's stirring people up a little bit here, and I have no doubt we'll probably have the most votes ever cast in 2020. | |
| Would you say that's fair? | |
| I would say that's a possibility, but I would, you know, I would have to sit down and look at disenfranchisement movements. | |
| I mean, whatever happens in 2020 is going to be really, really complicated to try and figure out whether or not it's turnout or suppression. | |
| If I had to guess right now, I would say that's probably true. | |
| But I mean, who even knows what it's going to look like? | |
| Fair enough. | |
| Well, what we also need to understand is how this impeachment is going to affect the election, because now we have this issue where, and I've been saying this for the whole time, that if this goes too quickly and they clear his name in the Senate, that's a win for Trump no matter what you say. | |
| And I was trying to rationalize saying, well, get those Senators on the record with their vote. | |
| You can run against them as well because there will be a number of them who are in seats like Graham's seat that you can run against that with. | |
| But I don't think that it has enough weight anymore at this point. | |
| So that is another question is should they – and it's being suggested by some of these people that are out there in the media that they should just sort of table this impeachment and not let it get to the Senate? | |
| I have no idea. | |
| You know, 2016 sort of put me in a position where I decided that I was going to not strategize out what I would do or what I would recommend or, you know, a prediction of what's coming next. | |
| I personally right now, I think the Democrats have shown that he should be impeached and removed from office. | |
| I mean, not just me, but, you know, over 50 percent of America believes that, which is the big story, by the way, that is not being covered. | |
| It's being covered as why can't Democrats convince more people? | |
| They've already convinced a majority of the country. | |
| And on top of that, every reasonable person who doesn't have a political stake in the fire for Trump remaining in office believes he should be removed from office. | |
| So that's the bigger story. | |
| But whenever you frame it again, that goes back to people who are like, well, this has been kind of boring. | |
| Are we there yet? | |
| I don't know. | |
| I think there are any number of things that you could bring up as crimes against Trump. | |
| I believe today it was announced that They had said he had committed a handful of felonies. | |
| I think there are plenty of high crimes that have been there. | |
| I think that you make people go on the record and say they're okay with this thing. | |
| And I'll tell you this, if the Senate acquits, which I think is also in the balance, I know I've talked to a lot of Republicans and a lot of Republican staffs who tell me they believe he should be removed from office, but they're not sure how they're going to vote, which I think is an act of cowardice and a dereliction of duty. | |
| I don't know. | |
| If you're just going to go out and say that all this is okay, maybe it's going to enliven your base. | |
| But man, I would really like to see those people pay for their votes by being removed from office and losing elections. | |
| I think you should make them go on record saying that. | |
| I don't have a problem with that either. | |
| I just feel like if you let this thing fester and be a cloud over his head the whole time, and it gives you opportunities to continue investigating, you know he's going to do more. | |
| There's going to be more stupid stuff. | |
| He's doing it right now. | |
| He's doing it right now. | |
| Rudy Giuliani is probably committing a crime right now with some European nation. | |
| Yes. | |
| Oh, and Lindsey Graham is going to invite him to speak in front of the Senate as if he is... I mean, here's the biggest problem, because there's a few things that people who might even be reasonable on the other side would question. | |
| And one of them is, well, you know, of course, Rudy Giuliani might actually have evidence. | |
| But the problem is, is when you have a private lawyer going and doing this kind of research, whatever you want to call it, there's a conflict of interest. | |
| We have no idea whether this is actually going to be, you know, real evidence or just made up. | |
| In fact, it sounds like now that they, now he's been so out in the open with what he's trying to do, they're going to give him all the propaganda they can. | |
| So that is why when you do these kind of things you're supposed to have a very official government inspectors who are you know quote-unquote impartial but certainly it's their job to know how to methodically do this. | |
| Now again they have Rudy's got the experience as a prosecutor he supposedly knows how to do investigations but this is the problem you cannot have him of all people over there doing this investigation. | |
| And then when he comes back from doing those illegal investigations, he is booked immediately on cable news, whichever show that he wants to go on. | |
| And then immediately gets really confused about what he's talking about and then begins admitting to crimes on live television. | |
| And you know what happens? | |
| His phone rings and the next person wants to book him. | |
| And then the next person wants to book him. | |
| And so what's actually ended up happening is that Rudy Giuliani, by becoming a grenade of corruption that has probably, well not probably, has led to impeachable crimes that should remove a president from office. | |
| Has turned that entire act into a roving show. | |
| He gets to go on TV, he gets to gain notoriety, and he loves nothing more than a camera being focused on him. | |
| And he goes on there and he's like, oh, am I going to get booked more if I admit to crimes? | |
| If I admit to felonies? | |
| Absolutely, I'll admit to crimes and admit to felonies. | |
| I'll be, you know, I'll be a live wire who does all this stuff. | |
| Now, to go back to what we were talking about, that's where we're going. | |
| You know, if you want to talk about like network and you want to talk about what's going to happen on TV, like this corruption, if it goes by and it isn't and it isn't punished by his removal from office and people putting their foot down and saying this is not just wrong, it's wrong in a bipartisan nature. | |
| It's only going to get worse and worse and worse. | |
| Trump has shown that spectacle is what gets people power now. | |
| We're going to see people who are going to take more and more outrageous chances, not just with the law, but with our safety and with our culture. | |
| And that doesn't lead anywhere good, Nick. | |
| It's amazing how Network, again, comes full circle because, you know, you're not going to give it away because it's not like a cliffhanger, but he basically wants to kill himself on air. | |
| And no one's going to stop him. | |
| This is going to be the most amazing night of ratings we'll ever have. | |
| And Joker has a similar kind of feel to that, too, which is why they bring the guy on the show to begin with. | |
| So you are right. | |
| It's the spectacle. | |
| That matters. | |
| And the people that end up getting caught in that crossfire are the actual American people who could be benefiting from the government and are not. | |
| Even though the government doesn't work great, and I know there's a lot of inefficiencies and all sorts of corruption and whatnot, it has lurched forward for over 200 years For a reason. | |
| And held together. | |
| And now, I just don't know if that's ever going to be able to get repaired. | |
| You know? | |
| We have to almost wait for a whole generation of people to pass away before we can kind of rebuild a whole other thing. | |
| And it's also frustrating because from my era of growing up, you know, we were indoctrinated to protect the environment. | |
| And treating everybody equally. | |
| And an equal rights amendment for women. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| We were raised on that. | |
| And it's just been destroyed. | |
| Well, how do you take the environmental looming disaster and how do you take equal rights amendments and make those entertainment, right? | |
| You don't take those and make them entertainment because they don't want to run a segment about those things. | |
| What they'll do is they'll make a spectacle out of the aftermaths of those problems. | |
| Right, they'll do like a crisis on how women are treated based upon victimhood instead of talking about like all this legislation and history. | |
| They won't talk about climate change, but they will go to a town that has been wiped out by floods or hurricanes, right? | |
| They'll go there and guess what? | |
| They'll just sort of show these Gauzy, like, lensed depictions of, like, towns coming together and they're gonna be fine or whatever. | |
| They'll go to a town after there's been a mass shooting, but they won't talk about toxic masculinity or the grip of weapons in a country with, you know, racial prejudices. | |
| They won't do that. | |
| And that is the issue. | |
| We have to turn our backs on this and we have to make it – we have to draw a line in the sand and say we're not going to participate in this anymore. | |
| We want nuanced actual conversation. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| I know politics right now is like chaotic and some people will say it's exciting, which I think is crazy. | |
| This is about people's lives. | |
| Like people are dying every day because of boring things like healthcare and or utilities or infrastructure problems. | |
| And we have a looming climate crisis that's coming that's going to kill so many unbelievable people. | |
| If you want to see what the Republican Party and people like Trump are capable of, watch what happens with that refugee crisis, right? | |
| These are things that we need to talk about and we need to address. | |
| And just because they don't make great TV doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk about them. | |
| Do you know what's going to break my back? | |
| Do you have any idea? | |
| There's one thing that could happen out of all these things that might end up making me really move out of the country. | |
| And rather than put you on the spot, I'm going to answer the question. | |
| I think it's the Supreme Court decision on his taxes. | |
| For some reason to me, this is the one that should be a complete no-brainer. | |
| We've already had two courts agree that the law is the law, but we also know that it's stacked to some degree in Trump's favor. | |
| If that Supreme Court decision goes down where he does not have to release his taxes, I think that might be devastating to me. | |
| I don't know if I can recover from that. | |
| We've been so desensitized that it actually wasn't even that much of a blip on the radar. | |
| I don't even actually think cable news talked about it. | |
| He openly lobbied Brett Kavanaugh on Twitter. | |
| For that decision, which I mean, if that would have happened in any other presidency, there would have been talks of impeachment and removal from office. | |
| That would have been the headline for forever. | |
| Now it's just a Thursday. | |
| That's insane that we've gotten to that point where a sitting president, I mean, the things that he does every day are disgusting to the point where, I mean, he could literally do anything and I don't think it would shock anyone. | |
| And it would barely be a blip on the radar of these new shows because you just keep ratcheting up. | |
| You're exactly right though. | |
| Whenever that Supreme Court ruling comes out on those taxes, which I think is going to be the canary in the coal mine, if they come out and it's on partisan lines and it's obvious that it's a political decision as opposed to a constitutional decision, I mean, that tells you right there that we have seen all three branches of government fail in their duties. | |
| I mean, that's a real significant moment there if that happens. | |
| The tweet, just to give everyone the context, was, quote, after watching the disgraceful way that a wonderful man, Brett Kavanaugh, was treated by the Democrats, and now seeing firsthand how these same radical left do-nothing Dems are treating the whole impeachment hoax, I understand why so many Dems are voting Republican. | |
| Now again, remember, he just lies. | |
| It's all projection. | |
| It's the actual opposite. | |
| And I believe the Republican Party is shrinking. | |
| So I know he can actually argue, and he might even actually be closer than not to what that number is, because the percentage of Republicans that still approve of him, only because the total number is dwindling. | |
| He's losing Republicans. | |
| So that's the only thing I can kind of think about here that again the polls are sort of treating these things as similar entities right as if the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are the same size and that also makes people wring their hands and they get anxiety and it makes you maybe more scared than you should be but This is where we're at. | |
| And I agree. | |
| I think that it's a dangerous situation we're in right now because once the third lever of government fails, then that's where the hope really starts to go. | |
| Now, you'll have people who will insist that the Supreme Court has always been political. | |
| And it's that same cynicism that exists. | |
| All politicians lie. | |
| And it does a great job to sort of eliminate the conversation. | |
| Where do you go from there when someone throws that in your face? | |
| It's hard to argue that. | |
| Yeah, and just a note on that, you know what's really not sexy for television audiences? | |
| Gerrymandering and voter laws and voter restriction laws and the electoral college. | |
| And these are all tools. | |
| And this is why it's such a dangerous moment. | |
| The Republican Party is shrinking. | |
| And that's one of the reasons why we got to this point, why we got to Trump, is because they made a conscious decision that they had to bring in white nationalism and white supremacy as one of the planks of the party. | |
| They've been tinkering around with it for a while and tried to keep it on the outside where they could, you know, pretend to control it. | |
| And now it's taken over the entire party. | |
| But you're right. | |
| It is shrinking. | |
| And to continue treating this situation. | |
| I mean, there's been a mass defection of Republicans. | |
| There have been. | |
| And, you know, I bring this up all the time. | |
| I just have to shake my head sometimes. | |
| Will Crystal left the Republican Party? | |
| Like, the standard bearer of Republican ideology left the party. | |
| We have people who are saying, I can't be a part of this. | |
| Even today, Carly Fiorina came out and said that Trump should be impeached, said that she might vote for him. | |
| But we have a Republican Party that is starting to come apart at the seams, and in a very, very obvious way. | |
| They're losing voters, but they are taking more and more control over the apparatus that will make Democracy not matter. | |
| This gerrymandering, the voter suppression, you know, the electoral college, they can continue with power as long as they're playing a fascist game, which is how fascism works. | |
| It's when a dominant group starts to believe that they're losing power and an authoritarian tells them, I know how to keep power. | |
| This group's trying to take power from you. | |
| We can consolidate power based upon becoming our own group and subverting democracy. | |
| So it's a very very dangerous situation and the Republican Party the fact that they are shrinking and they're still being treated as an Equal party to the Democrats or independence or whatever you want to call them It's not true and in the way that these papers and media frame it is it's actually incredibly misleading because that's not what's happening and they're very afraid to say fascism and They're very afraid to talk about crises. | |
| Like, this is actually what's going on, because they try and be the arbiters of status quo, and that things are going to be fine and America will heal. | |
| But we're actually at a really dangerous crossroads, and their inability or hesitation to call it what it is actually lends it more credence that it could happen. | |
| And that's a sad state of affairs. | |
| And it's startling to me that I would have to say that there's a majority, a huge swatch of the Republican base who are 65, 70 years old and older, who would say that you're just being alarmist, you're being ridiculous. | |
| But what's interesting about that is they've lived long enough to know better. | |
| They've seen this happen across the world. | |
| They've seen all sorts of different things that our country has gone through as well. | |
| And that's what's even crazier. | |
| I would almost think that the younger people who haven't been around that long would think, oh, that's not going to happen. | |
| That can't be. | |
| They're young. | |
| They're idealists. | |
| They haven't been around this country that long. | |
| But that's the torque that exists in the Republican base that it's hard to unwind. | |
| Yeah, but that's all part of the myth that fascism is something that happened in Europe in the 20th century, right? | |
| That it was like this momentary blip on a historical radar, and we took care of it because we were the heroes, and America is the arbiter of a moral universe. | |
| The fact that we rid the world of Nazis means there are no more Nazis, and we could never possibly do anything like that. | |
| The problem is, Nazism was just an expression of a human problem. | |
| Fascism is something that has existed forever. | |
| Fascism has existed in America. | |
| I'm sorry, but people like to go ahead and paper over things like slavery and subjugation of women and the genocide of Native Americans and even the crimes that have been committed in the name of capitalism to other nations. | |
| We can very easily fall into those things. | |
| We have an authoritarian president right now who, I don't think if you asked him to define fascism, he could, but he naturally emotes and acts within the components of fascism. | |
| And we have a party right now that should be in a death spiral. | |
| But is instead like creating a fascist situation where they can control power even as their numbers dwindle. | |
| There have to be people who call it what it is and we have to face up what it is before we can fix it. | |
| As long as we continue to pretend like Trump is an aberration and that fascism is something that existed in Europe in the 20th century, we can't address the problem. | |
| I agree. | |
| All right, good. | |
| I'm glad we got there. | |
| I'm looking for new countries to move to. | |
| Well, we can pick up an atlas here soon and we can, you know, turn through the pages. | |
| But it's going to be okay because we have people who are active. | |
| People ask me all the time for hope and what I think is hopeful. | |
| I'll tell you what's hopeful. | |
| What's hopeful is that people are more involved than ever. | |
| They're organizing. | |
| I believe tomorrow there are going to be marches with the stated express purpose that no person is above the law. | |
| I'll be there. | |
| This is a good thing that people are getting involved, and thank God they're recognizing that there's a reason. | |
| We thank you for getting involved. | |
| Again, I'm speaking for Nick here. | |
| I've really, really appreciated the messages and people talking about the podcast and sharing it. | |
| Please continue to do that. | |
| Rate it, subscribe, tell people, talk about it on social media. | |
| We appreciate it like you wouldn't believe. | |
| I am at J.Y. | |
| Sexton. | |
| Nick is at Can You Hear Me? | |
| SMH. | |
| We will be back next week. |