For the last Muckrake Podcast of 2019, analyst Jared Yates Sexton holds down the fort, breaks down the impeachment of Donald Trump, the growing schism in the white evangelical community, and the hopes and fears of a new year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey, everyone. | |
| Welcome to the last 2019 installment of the Muckrake podcast. | |
| I am your co-host, Jared Yates-Saxton, and unfortunately, my friend and co-host, the hardest working man in show business, Nick Haussman, is not with me today. | |
| With the holidays, it's always a hard time to make endeavors like this work, but we wanted to get a little something out there to get you through the long, hard discussions in your living rooms, and maybe give you something for your speakers on the ride home. | |
| And not to mention, as always, the news absolutely refuses to take a break. | |
| Of course, the major story in the political world right now is that Donald John Trump has become only the third American president to ever be impeached, following Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton in that dubious honor. | |
| And though Republicans did their best to puff out their chest and pretend it wasn't warranted, it could be argued that no president besides Richard Nixon has done more to earn the scorn of Congress. | |
| On Article 1, abuse of power, the vote was 230 to 197 and 1. | |
| 130 to 197 and 1. | |
| On Article 2, obstruction of Congress, it turned out to be 229 to 198 and 1. | |
| That 1, conspicuous of course, was Tulsi Gabbard, that legendary figure of courage and duty, announcing to the world on the historical existential crisis that is Donald Trump, she would neither vote aye or nay, but present. | |
| Present. | |
| Present. | |
| Cementing her place in history as a figure of necessary and warranted derision. | |
| Trump now stands impeached because, as everyone knows, he organized a shadow government and a shadow State Department to carry out an illegal shakedown operation of Ukraine, holding necessary and vital military aid. | |
| I might mention aid consisting of my tax dollars and your tax dollars. | |
| And using the threat of Russian military action to sway Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and thus helping Trump in his bid to be re-elected president. | |
| Every principal actor of the scheme who has not been ordered by Trump to stonewall Congress has confirmed this crime. | |
| The actual specifics have never even really been in question. | |
| It was an obvious crime, an obvious impeachable offense, and here we are. | |
| Trump has been impeached as president and the Republican Party can only muster a crazy as crazy gets, full-on assault of objective reality, scorched-earth offensive in his defense. | |
| The vote came Wednesday after hours and hours and hours and hours of so-called debate. | |
| It was actually more like Twitter or cable news came alive. | |
| Republicans took their granted time and like they do, they used it to continue spinning conspiracy theories. | |
| Lies, misinformation, much of it developed by Russian intelligence, and honestly, who can blame them? | |
| What Donald Trump did, what he was caught red-handed doing, was obviously a blatant crime and some of the worst corruption the United States has ever seen from a president. | |
| Republicans seem understandably hesitant to remind anyone of those facts and are more content to paint this all as an attempted coup. | |
| Going so far as to pretend that the impeachment of a president is unconstitutional, even though the Constitution actually prescribes how to impeach a president before it even defines what a president is. | |
| Other untruths included the idea that Trump wasn't allowed to defend himself, even though the inquiry actually invited him to do so, and he declined. | |
| In quite a moment of sacrilege and I'm gonna remember this for a long time and we're gonna discuss it a little more in a little bit more detail. | |
| Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, compare Trump to Jesus Christ, saying the martyred Christian Lord was given a fairer trial than the criminal president. | |
| Loudermilk would say Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus than the Democrats afforded this president. | |
| It is quite the political moment that we're living in. | |
| As always, our news media continues to get the story wrong. | |
| No surprise there. | |
| It's being presented as a partisan showdown between Democrats and Republicans who are equally concerned with power and advancement instead of the bipartisan crisis that has brought liberals and conservatives of all stripes together to say that Trumpism and this current iteration of the Republican Party are dangerous to the rule of law and the Constitution. | |
| That's one of the larger stories of our time, or any time, but we continue to hear that this is somehow political posturing, particularly as our media seems incapable of presenting nuanced coverage in an era where one party has refused to carry out their fundamental duties and traffics only in propaganda and misinformation to their own benefit. | |
| The media's inability to deal with that fact has The truth is that over half of this country agrees on impeachment and removal of office. | |
| picture of our political reality where they can carry out any strategy, no matter how craven or lawless, and still retain favorable and respectful treatment from a class of journalists and pundits who simply refuse to learn. | |
| The truth is that over half of this country agrees on impeachment and removal of office. | |
| Over half. | |
| In 2019, finding an issue that over half of this population agrees is next to impossible. | |
| That seems noteworthy. | |
| I mean, to me anyway, it seems like that is the story that needs to be told. | |
| But the stories we keep getting on social media and on cable news continually focus on all of this as if it's some sort of ploy, and as if its success depends on whether it can entertain the gatekeepers. | |
| For whatever reason, the impeachment continues to be a matter of entertainment. | |
| Of course, the big question looming over all of us right now is whether the Senate will acquit Trump and whether Mitch McConnell and his cohort Lindsey Graham will even give the impeachment affair trial. | |
| This is a pretty regular doubt considering they've gone on live television on Fox News and said they weren't interested in upholding their sworn oaths. | |
| They just came out and said it. | |
| Didn't even bother to hide it. | |
| It's a problematic moment, and I understand that everyone is concerned about whether Trump will be convicted or acquitted, but let's just focus on the fact that this was the right thing to do. | |
| I keep getting asked by people whether it was the right strategic move for Democrats to do this, considering he'll probably just be acquitted. | |
| Is it the right movement in a larger game? | |
| But let's remember that for years, Trump has committed one impeachable offense after another. | |
| And Democratic leaders have fretted over whether to impeach him. | |
| Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously saying that he wasn't worth it. | |
| The truth is that you do what's right in politics and good things happen. | |
| Strategizing is a problem and it certainly hasn't served the Democratic Party well. | |
| Playing chess with politics is a problem. | |
| Getting bogged down in game theory. | |
| Doing this because this could happen and doing this and this because this and this could happen Leads to corrupted sham governments based on winning. | |
| The Republican Party and the threat they pose to law and democracy have been steeped in this kind of thinking for decades now. | |
| And when you play this game, you wake up one morning and you realize you have nothing left. | |
| No principles, no vision, no existence besides trying to figure out what the next move is. | |
| It hurts people. | |
| It destroys lives. | |
| It represents a soulless, lawless existence. | |
| The mistake that everyone continues to make is thinking that tomorrow will look a lot like today. | |
| But things happen. | |
| By the time the Senate trial gets here, we may see something very different than what we're all expecting. | |
| Trump, after all, has a way of self-destructing. | |
| And who knows what he'll do in all of this. | |
| His tweets feeding his incessant need for attention and his inability to maintain discipline or focus I mean, Trump may stride into the Senate and incriminate himself. | |
| I mean, how many times has he incriminated himself already? | |
| best suggestion that his cronies testify and reveal the whole plan. | |
| There are already leaks out there that say that he wants a full trial that will fully exonerate him. | |
| He doesn't want there to be an asterisk there. | |
| I mean, Trump may stride into the Senate and incriminate himself. | |
| I mean, how many times has he incriminated himself already? | |
| And he might do it all because he wants his time in the limelight. | |
| After all, that's what he got into this for. | |
| He He got into it for the attention. | |
| He got into it so the country would pay singular focus on him. | |
| And now that he's got the white hot spotlight, why would he want to let it go? | |
| That's what makes him live. | |
| That's what maybe gives him joy. | |
| I don't know if he feels joy. | |
| Or, maybe, with all of this happening, Americans will realize there's an existential crisis and show up in the streets. | |
| We've already seen very large protests that haven't garnered that much attention, but if they continue to grow and maintain their size and power, they're going to have to pay attention to that. | |
| So maybe Americans will show up in the streets. | |
| And the question isn't whether tomorrow will look like today, it's whether we can make tomorrow look like tomorrow. | |
| The news and media and politicians themselves do a great job of making politics feel like an observable spectacle we can't influence. | |
| But in truth, that's so far from being the case. | |
| The only way Republicans continue behaving like this is if they believe they won't suffer electoral losses. | |
| There's a reality out there, somewhere in the deep universe, where the GOP comes to understand that continuing to tether themselves to Donald Trump, people like Donald Trump, people in the employ of Donald Trump, people who even think like Donald Trump, is not in their best interest. | |
| Right now, the data and polls tell them otherwise. | |
| But if anything changes, if the dial moves, that could change. | |
| It bears repeating, and this is something that we don't hear enough of, but it bears repeating that public opinion for impeachment is already ahead of where it was before Richard Nixon read the writing on the wall and was convinced to resign. | |
| If more people decide Trump has to go, if the numbers keep mounting, if the narrative shifts from just expecting Republicans to carry his water to wondering how they could even think of acquitting him, how they could show their faces after voting to allow this deep, deep corruption, that's when the future will change. | |
| And I can tell you from the Republicans and Republican staffs I've talked to, there is an understanding in D.C. | |
| that Trump did something wrong here. | |
| They know that he committed crimes. | |
| They know that he deserves to be impeached and removed from office. | |
| The question is whether those Republicans who know that will engage this task and honor their oaths with clear eyes and meet the call of history. | |
| That's the question here. | |
| In related news, we're seeing a small crack in Trump's support in a key, key demographic, white evangelicals. | |
| In what may constitute the first shot in a developing evangelical civil war, Christianity Today, the former publication of famed Reverend Billy Graham, infamous in some cases, if you want to take a look at what he's done to our culture, Christianity Today published an editorial calling for Trump to be removed from office. | |
| Here's an excerpt from the editorial. | |
| The facts in this instance are unambiguous. | |
| The President of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the President's political opponents. | |
| That is not only a violation of the Constitution, more importantly, it is profoundly immoral. | |
| The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. | |
| He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. | |
| He, himself, has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. | |
| His Twitter feed alone, with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders, is a near-perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused. | |
| I have to say that that's a really striking thing. | |
| A human being who is morally lost and confused. | |
| I don't know about the rest of you, but that hits to the very core of who Donald Trump is and why we're in this situation in the first place. | |
| This editorial is a heartening sign, but it's not necessarily proof that something very large and profound might be happening in the white evangelical world. | |
| I personally grew up in that world. | |
| I was steeped in evangelical teachings, and I didn't know until later that it had functioned as a white identity movement and cult of American nationalism. | |
| A lot of people are still lost in that fog. | |
| Many, and this is very disturbing, but we have to talk about it, have come to see Trump as a messiah of sorts. | |
| I mean, this was hinted at with Loudermilk's statement during the impeachment debate. | |
| The history here is bizarre, and on its face it sounds crazy, but it functions as a roadmap of how we got in this situation in the first place. | |
| The religion I grew up in and the religion that has led to so much abuse of both people and power is a result of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. | |
| Men like Jerry Falwell saw leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. | |
| and others using Christianity to promote equality, dignity, and charity And in order to combat that they took Christianity in a completely different direction that emphasized wealth and power and by extension the continuation of white supremacy. | |
| That has had profound consequences for America and has continued unabated into many communities that honestly have no idea why they worship the way they do. | |
| I certainly didn't. | |
| Of course, those communities, through a bizarre set of circumstances, have come to believe in conspiracy theories of demons and Democrats, believing that liberals are evil Satan worshippers, Engaging in child trafficking and nefarious schemes. | |
| They know their numbers are dwindling, the demographics are changing, and Republicans and evangelical leaders have done a hell of a job convincing them that minorities and liberals are conspiring within Conspiracies like the New World Order and the Deep State and that they want to put them in camps and prison them, take away their guns and institute, you know, a hell on earth. | |
| When you believe that story, like so many people I know believe that story, You get people like Donald Trump who are willing to fight like crazy while betraying every principle and every commandment, and they get lifted up to the status of savior. | |
| It is nuts, honestly, and I have had such a hard time watching it happen. | |
| The Christianity Today editorial was a brief respite, and it gave me hope for a moment. | |
| But we're probably going to see a civil war within the evangelical community. | |
| And before it's all over, a lot of them are going to go even deeper in support of Trump. | |
| What we are dealing with, after all, and a lot of people dance around this and they don't want to admit it and they are really, really trying hard not to see it this way, but the truth is we're dealing with a fully operational death cult that looks more like Jonestown and Waco than it does the political moment it professes to be. | |
| Trump is at the head of that cult. | |
| He has already positioned himself, even referenced himself and has been referenced to their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. | |
| And anyone who has studied cults and their trajectory knows that once the cult leaders begin to assume the mantle of Messiah, that this slippery slope turns into a freefall. | |
| The leader begins to develop a self-serving, corrupt, bastardized gospel that has no relationship to the original faith or abject reality. | |
| That believers are isolated from their loved ones, from sources of information that don't suit the leader. | |
| And the more that they fall into the black hole of the cult, the more they and their identities become dependent on the leader for direction. | |
| And that doesn't lead anywhere good. | |
| Unfortunately, I'm seeing that freefall here, back home, where I am currently watching my hometown suffer. | |
| I am continually heartbroken by how my own family is suffering. | |
| They've got health problems. | |
| They lose their jobs. | |
| They suffer terribly through every economic downturn, every depression, and every recession. | |
| They suffer from depression. | |
| They suffer from anxiety. | |
| All of it. | |
| Looking around at my formerly idyllic hometown, I see a place that's just trying to hold on. | |
| And to be honest with you, it enrages me that people like Trump and the Republicans have tapped into their understandable frustration and anger and used it To establish rising fascism by appealing to their worst suspicions. | |
| Everywhere you look is just a reminder that those appeals are working and that something very, very dangerous is growing. | |
| The men around here define themselves by fantasies of armed rebellion. | |
| Their trucks all have Punisher skulls on the back. | |
| They're constantly sharing white supremacist appeals, sporting American flag graphics made out of hand grenades and assault rifles. | |
| There's a thriving gun and prepper culture that sells a fantasy of taking down government oppressors and minority invaders. | |
| They talk openly about wanting to harm Democrats and liberals and upend the rule of law. | |
| They're absolutely steeped in a culture of consumerism and a culture of killing. | |
| It's so sad and so frustrating to watch all of it turn into its own religion and it just, it really just breaks my heart in two. | |
| You know, with a new decade coming, it is difficult to express what this past decade was. | |
| The 2010s, I think for a lot of people, started as a moment of hope, especially with watching Barack Obama as president and believing that things could change. | |
| But the 2010s, for all of that hope, have devolved into a Really faith-shaking time. | |
| The principles and foundations that many of us have been sold on, that we choke on with commercials and movies and popular culture and cliched speeches by politicians, they've all been revealed as jaw-droppingly false. | |
| It's becoming increasingly obvious our economy is and was designed to help the wealthy and the powerful. | |
| The technology that was supposed to light the way to the future has literally nothing to do with us or the maintenance of a human society and it has betrayed us time and time again. | |
| It has been so hard watching as Donald Trump has shown us that a demagogue can gain power by acting upon the ignorance and worst instincts of the human character, actually bending the arc of history backward and delivering us into a crisis from which it seems at its worst moments like there might be no escape. | |
| The fascism and bigotry that of course through America since its beginnings and has been intentionally concealed have moved to the surface and they're not even hidden anymore. | |
| Moving into 2020, the question of the moment will be the question of humanity. | |
| There is so much more in the balance, and we have to find a better, kinder, more real means of powering this country and the world. | |
| We have found that neoliberalism doesn't work. | |
| We have found that the parties don't work. | |
| We have found that all of the old ideas were largely illusions. | |
| Donald Trump is a threat and his continued power is depressing and terrifying. | |
| But I can only hope that his transparent incompetence and spiteful cruelty will give us an opportunity to sort myth from fact. | |
| And begin the necessary process of healing that has evaded us for generations. | |
| It's a trying time, for sure. | |
| But like I was saying, the biggest mistake is to continue thinking that tomorrow looks like today and that we can't keep making that mistake. | |
| A new decade and a new election offers an opportunity to learn from that mistake and correct it. | |
| So hopefully in the next decade, after some soul searching, some hard, long looks in the mirror, some real self-reflection, we can begin to dig our way out and finally find some truth. | |
| And I like to think that that's what we're doing here on the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| When Nick and I decided to do this show, we wanted to find a way to add to the discussion, but also do it in a constructive, informational way that didn't insult your intelligence or treat this political moment like it's anything but the crisis that it actually is. | |
| We're tired of that and we wanted something better. | |
| We had hoped that we would find an audience. | |
| I think that that's pretty self-explanatory. | |
| But we have just been overwhelmed with joy and happiness that we have found our audience. | |
| Those of you listening right now, you mean the world to us. | |
| We're so incredibly thankful and I think I can speak for my co-host Nick Haussleman in saying we're extremely thankful for all of the support and kindness, the messages we've been receiving, the notes of support. | |
| And kindness have just been really overwhelming. | |
| It has been a rough year in so many ways, but starting on this journey together has been incredibly rewarding. | |
| We hope you and yours have a fantastic holiday. | |
| We will be back in 2020. | |
| We're going to be covering the presidential race. | |
| The impeachment trial of Donald Trump and we're going to continue to supply context and order in chaotic times. | |
| That's what we're here for. | |
| Please be sure to like, subscribe, and share The Muckrake Podcast. | |
| Maybe mention it in your conversations with friends and family. | |
| Let them know that we're doing something different here. | |
| Maybe we can bridge some divides by talking some actual sense and not just sticking to talking points and headlines. | |
| Every like, every share, every rating, every comment makes a world of difference. | |
| You can follow me at JY Sexton and my dear co-host Nick at CanYouHearMeSMH. |