Armed militias, white supremacists, and separatists are marching through Richmond, Virginia, and co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman are here to discuss the threat of armed rebellion, building fascistic movements, provide a history of America's extremist militias, and get to the bottom of why this country's media is so incapable of capturing the full threat of this building crisis.
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Hey everybody, it's Jared Yates Sexton, co-host of the Muckrake Podcast.
We have got some exciting news.
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We don't want a war.
No one does.
But they keep pushing us.
It's just crazy.
You know, we know what happens in history.
Mao took the guns.
Pol Pot took the guns.
Stalin took the guns.
We want to be free people.
We just want to be left alone.
But this governor just wants to keep pushing us down.
And we're making our stand right here now in Virginia.
And just ahead of that critical final stretch this morning, the New York Times is out with a big announcement.
For the first time in 160 years, its editorial board is endorsing two Democratic candidates for president, Senator Amy Klobuchar and Senator Elizabeth Warren.
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-Sexton and Nick Hausselman will do.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
Hey Nick, any chance you want to grab your weapon and go take over a capital or overthrow the federal government?
You busy today?
Sure, let's do that.
That sounds like a gay old time.
I think it's pretty appropriate to have this conversation about, you know, overthrowing governments and going out and making terroristic exercises as neo-Nazis and militia members march on the capital of Virginia, which I believe is currently under a state of emergency.
Because a bunch of ne'er-do-wells who are insecure about their lives and angry at the world have decided to just pick up AR-15s and body armor and march into American streets.
I think it's pretty apt to have that conversation today, I think.
Yeah, I mean, it's so striking to me that it's making me quote the Flintstones theme, which is what I said at the beginning there.
So, you know, when you look at the footage, though, of this stuff, It is really striking.
It does look paramilitary, military.
We know that there are a number of veterans who do seem to gravitate, and they also, a lot of these groups will have outreach to veterans to try and bring them in, people who have had a lot of experience with guns and fighting.
And I get that.
I can see why, especially with a lot of the way the veterans are treated, even to this day, and how they don't get support that they might need from the Veterans Association and all those different things.
That like they find this kind of group and then it becomes a little bit more radicalized day by day And it's a little bit concerning only because I don't know about you But I just it's just uncomfortable when you see that much firepower all in one spot.
That's not It's not the government Especially when these are people who have been waiting and waiting and waiting for an opportunity to use that firepower.
I talk a lot on social media about my experience among my people.
My people are, a lot of them, militia types.
They are preppers who are getting ready for an end-of-the-world conflict.
They talk pretty openly about a coming race war.
They talk pretty openly about the New World Order and NATO and the UN and you name it.
Throw any acronym you want at the wall and that group will be invading America soon, necessitating a lot of these people using their arsenals to protect themselves and their families.
A lot of this is a fantasy and you brought up a lot of veterans who are parts of these groups and you're absolutely right.
But there are also other really, really want to be veterans, people who want to be a part of the military and fantasize about being put in a position where they can fight these wars.
And a lot of them, unfortunately, are looking for this conflict.
And, you know, if we were living in a society where, well, first of all, a sane society would not have, you know, angry men walking through the streets with, you know, semi-automatic assault rifles.
But if it was a sane society and people could do that without looking to, you know, touch off a race war, which, by the way, according to my notes, let me check them.
Oh, yeah.
Three of these people were arrested the other day because they had plans to overthrow the government and murder people and try and start a race war.
a lot of these people are looking for a touch point They're looking for an opportunity to set this thing off.
And the fact that we just kind of treat this as this weird abomination happening in this country is not just dishonest, but it's as dangerous as it gets.
Well, you spent a lot of time at Trump rallies, and I'm curious if you see a parallel between that experience and this in the sense that Is it fair to say that when you go to those rallies, you do see people itching to get into a fight, looking to provoke, looking to make these things happen, either just to get on the news or whatever, or just because that's how they're wired?
Trump rallies were full of militia people and preppers and white supremacist groups and neo-Nazis.
I mean, they made this a thing.
It was their night out to go to a Trump rally because whether or not Donald Trump, and this goes back to a lot of things, I don't even know if Donald Trump understands that he has become the patron saint of these movements, but he has.
And they see him, they don't necessarily agree with everything he does politically, but he is the best outlet and the best avatar that they have had, right?
Because he is a white supremacist who has authoritarian ideas and principles and leanings.
So you would always see these people at rallies, but you would also see a lot of people who, and I would have conversations with them, I'd overhear what they had to say, and a lot of Trump supporters had these fascistic authoritarian leanings where they would fantasize about A new civil war or they would fantasize about being able to take their anger out on liberals and minorities and and at the heart of this thing what's happening is
They truly believe there's a conspiracy between liberals and minorities and New World Order conspiracists and globalists, and they truly believe, and a lot of them are frustrated men who feel terrible about themselves and insecure about themselves, and the only way that they might be able to redeem themselves is through this fantasy of being able to wage this war.
So absolutely, I heard it at every single Trump rally I went to, and it was one of the dominant conversations of the day every time I would go into these rallies.
You know, if you're ever wondering what side of the fence, you know, Trump is on, the Republicans, even like versus Democrats, you know, we've never had a president who has been so intent on dividing people into their own groups, either if it's ethnically or politically.
And today he tweeted out, oh actually you know what?
I'm looking at an old tweet but I know he tweeted another one out where he continually tries to show that the Democrats are out there trying to steal your guns.
The funny thing is there are quite a number of Democrats who do not want to touch that issue and will never vote for any kind of gun control anyway.
You have some of those kind of Democrats as well.
So this is really an interesting problem because you even have a guy like Jerry Falwell who recently called for if this law is going to be enacted in Virginia that will do just a little bit more gun control, maybe have to wait a little bit longer to get a gun, not a big deal, but also in line with a lot of other states that already not a big deal, but also in line with a lot of He said that he might call for disobedience, civil disobedience.
Now, when Martin Luther King, and we're recording this as Martin Luther King Day today, when Martin Luther King called for civil disobedience, these were always sort of peaceful rallies, sit-ins.
They were never supposed to, or would engage in violence.
And when you have a guy like Jerry Falwell talking about civil disobedience with guys who have guns that are loaded and ready to walk around in public like they are doing, it's a whole other thing, you know, a whole other, Well, you mentioned Martin Luther King Jr.
and Jerry Falwell Jr.
on the same day, which necessitates a mention that modern American evangelical white identity Christianity was founded on Jerry Falwell's specific widening of the gap and distance between
White identity, Christianity, and Martin Luther King's gospel, which basically tried to fight against segregation and discrimination by saying that it was unchristian, and Falwell took Christianity and turned it into the gospel of wealth, and what we've now seen, which is the gospel of American exceptionalism.
The idea, and it's very perverted, the idea that these people would say, if you try and take our guns, we will, you know, act in some sort of way.
And these are all signals.
I mean, Trump said today, I'm glad you brought that up.
He said, I will never allow our great Second Amendment to go unprotected, not even a little bit, which he tweeted out as neo-Nazi groups and separatist groups and terroristic groups and separationist soldiers in the streets were marching in Virginia, which was a tacit endorsement.
of what they were doing, telling them that he was with them because these people, and you got to bend your mind around this, these people who are anti-government are now supportive of a government that claims that it is fighting against anti-government, pro-government ideologies.
Right?
I mean that's really, if you really want to like get a headache and try to understand how these people work, I mean Alex Jones right now is cruising around Richmond, Virginia in a battle tank And probably just got done recording some propagandist rant for Donald Trump.
And at the heart of this thing is this bizarre right-wing ideology where they're trying to gain power by claiming that they're fighting people who have power who are trying to undermine their power.
And it twists itself into pretzels until the logic completely disappears, which is where we're at.
And I want to say one thing before I move forward.
I'm a gun-owning liberal.
I don't want to get rid of people's ability to own guns.
That is a fantasy that has been made up in these fevered, paranoid dreams of people who are afraid of minorities and people who Hold on to anti-semitic conspiracy theories.
To want to get rid of assault weapons and military-grade weapons and armor and all of that stuff out on our streets.
By the way, real fast if I can go on a quick rant.
If these people who claim that they are like Pro law enforcement and pro cops and all of these things if they were really pro law enforcement pro cops Wouldn't they want to get that stuff off the streets?
So cops weren't having to go out and have military style battles in the streets and and and that Again, it's all of this twisted logic that keeps going around in circles until it evaporates and what we're looking at here It's just it's it's sheer lunacy Well, I don't think it evaporates.
I think that that logic is so twisted.
There's so much torque involved in all these people's ideology or just psyche that this is what creates that tension that gets people on edge.
I think it's eating at people because you kind of feel like they don't, all these things do not fit together properly.
And yet, here we are, and they're constantly stoked that way, and they're also encouraged by, okay, the one thing you didn't mention in that tweet from Trump was that he says, this is what happens when Democrats are in charge.
And we've never had, this would have been the number one headline, you know, 25 years ago, how a president is completely lighting on fire the other side, and just fomenting this anger and hatred, especially because it's around guns.
It's not about, Heck, even around abortion, I don't even know if it's as serious as when you're talking about this issue.
And, you know, we look back now at Trent Lott and Tom Daschle coming together to do the Clinton impeachment rules, and I think even back then we would have been like, wow, look at this amazing moment where these two, you know, guys opposite sides of the aisle came together and had some consensus.
That's great, because remember, even back then it wasn't great.
But imagine that now!
So okay, here we are in 2020.
And you know, we're talking about another 20 years from now, that this is where we're excited.
We're not, this is where it's crazy.
We're not going to have a government in 20 years if it continues along that same line.
And what has changed, and let's go ahead and get this on the record, because, you know, when you look at it on the face, it is, again, just absolute lunacy.
It makes no sense whatsoever.
But what has happened is that the American right has sowed this narrative that, again, Democrats, liberals, minorities, and in the case of these conspiracy theories, it's the Jewish population.
It's Jewish overlords that are manipulating everything that's happening.
This goes back at least to the beginning of the 20th century.
If you want to get very, very specific, you can look at Joe McCarthy claiming that Democrats were undermining the country and were working with Soviets to undermine American efforts.
And it just goes and goes and goes and goes until we get into the 1990s.
And you brought up abortion and sort of compared it with the idea of the Second Amendment stuff.
It all goes together.
It's the exact same narrative.
And the narrative is this.
It's that the American left doesn't just disagree with the American right on issues.
Like, it's not just a good-natured, good-faith disagreement.
The idea is that the American left is inherently evil.
And that it is a group of people who don't actually believe what they're talking about and they're lying at all times.
And what they're trying to do is they're trying for their own profit and their own power to undermine America, destroy it from the inside out via moral rot, and give way to like a one world government.
I mean, it has been sowed and this all has to do with going back to Falwell and going back to the American right and how this thing has evolved.
They have told this story that America is God's chosen nation and that the only way it can ever be defeated is by the traitorous actions of people who are in league with not just, you know, the UN and one-world government people and these groups who are trying to undermine American sovereignty, but the devil itself.
They truly are telling people that, like, and this is why you see all these conspiracy theories that every liberal is involved in human trafficking.
And it's all a bunch of pedophiles and they're traitors and they're treasonous.
It's because it's truly a madness that these people are picking up guns and fighting because they literally believe that they're fighting the forces of Satan here.
Well, let me ask you this.
Is that method, and again, it's not like completely mainstream, but certainly there's a loud, you know, section of people who advocate that and are able to get other people under their spell, but how much different is that then radical Muslim extremism.
It's not.
It's a different side of the exact same coin.
Right?
And this is how they get, yeah, young Muslims to join their groups as they say the same exact or, you know, in a very similar manipulative way.
And they also use religion, you know, that's Satan or they're going to hell.
They use the same, they remove all the virtuous parts of what religion is supposed to be about to manipulate people.
And again, you're right, I don't think it's that much different than what we see on the, quote unquote, we're not supposed to use that term, right?
We can't use radicalized Muslim terrorism extremists, whatever that term is.
But I don't think there's any difference between those two things.
And it's really frustrating because, again, we're constantly being reminded that we don't live in the country that we, I think, imagined we lived in even as recently as three years ago.
I don't want to ruin everyone's day, but just to give people an idea of how similar this movement is to terrorist organizations and movements around the world, they study them.
Like, that's where they get their ideas on how to radicalize and how to recruit.
They saw that Al Qaeda and ISIS were using new media to recruit and radicalize asymmetrical terrorists.
Right.
A large part of this is not just getting together groups that train and plan, and some of them do.
They have big giant plans that they're going to set off a race war.
One group is the base, which we should talk about before this podcast is over.
Other parts are asymmetrical terrorism, and they have looked at what Al Qaeda and ISIS was able to do via their recruitment, and really what's happening with this.
And I talked to, I was doing research for my last book, and I talked to all these experts of these neo-nazi groups and these extremist groups, people who had been in these groups, and what they told me to a person was, this is all based on white male insecurity in the exact same way that it's based on male insecurity around the world.
And it's a bunch of people who are frustrated with their lives and they feel powerless These groups come along and they tell them you will be powerful when you pick up a gun and you pick up a cause and you're willing to kill yourself and to hurt society.
And so this is a big giant fantasy of insecure men.
I'm sorry, but like if you're secure in your manhood, you're not walking around a city.
In, you know, paramilitary garb in armor carrying a gun.
It's a big expression of fake overcompensation.
And that's exactly what powers terrorist groups, and it's what is powering the terrorist groups here in this country.
And I hate to ruin days, but that's what's happening.
Well, let's unpack that a little bit because I wanted to bring this up earlier about what it is that is motivating the people here who are, you know, carrying their guns in this gun march.
And, you know, you're looking at all the different quotes.
One of them was from a guy who was there who said, the quote, the sheer numbers here speaks for itself.
He said, I hope our legislators will back off.
Today was the civil rights march of my life.
So what he's trying to say, you know, I remember voting for Equal Rights Amendment or, you know, not voting for, I remember marching as a nine year old, my mom, Equal Rights Amendment.
That was like a real seminal moment in my life of like, we were marching.
It was the early 80s, but it almost felt like, you know, sort of 60s radicalism.
We were like standing up to the government.
Did you carry semi-automatic assault rifles to that march?
We had our signs, that was about it.
And we sang, and it was an amazing moment.
That's the civil rights march of my life.
Here's a guy who's equating that to the same thing, where this is his moment.
You know, fade the music in, the lights, and the crazy dramatic camera angle of the, you know, crane shot.
That is what is really frustrating to me, but we also need to understand what this is about because it seems like the first answer, the very beginning of the answer when you ask them why, is security.
They want to feel secure in case somebody comes up to them, you know, or they'll point to like the church attack recently where the guy was stopped in about, you know, seven seconds by a trained, you know, gun guy.
But They also then say they need to protect themselves against a tyrannical government, or potentially a tyrannical government.
Now you want to put all that idea together with what Trump is saying about Democrats taking away your guns.
I can easily see those two things becoming connected.
Democrats getting control, tyrannical government, I have to have my guns so I can fight back.
This is the Civil War that you've been talking about that I've kind of sort of dismissed and not really felt like you really had a great point.
But when you read those quotes and you study this, you suddenly start to realize, yes, there are some very direct connections, especially with what Trump is saying and how they're fanning this and what the ideology behind all these guys are.
Well, here's what marches are about.
Marches are about reminding government and powerful people that there are people who disagree with them.
It's about giving them consequences.
In the case of, like, a march where a bunch of people go in the streets and hold up signs and sing songs, it's supposed to show popular opinion, right?
This march is not to show popular opinion.
It's a show of force.
It says, if you do what we don't want you to do, there's a real possibility that people could die.
And I want to remind everybody, fascism emerges in places where dominant power groups feel their power slipping.
And they understand that democratic means aren't going to serve them anymore, and only undemocratic means are going to serve their power.
That's what guns are about.
That's what militias are about.
They're about turning over democratic processes that they feel have been ruined for them either by demographic changes or what they believe is manipulation or unlawful means of other power groups.
In this case, they are letting people know, if this country doesn't do what I want it to do, we'll tear it down.
We'll burn it down.
And that's, you know, a lot of these people, and they're very odd.
They're disparate in this.
Some of them consider themselves ultra patriots, right?
They're super patriots who want to take back America for what they believe in.
Others just want to burn America to the ground because they don't believe in democratic principles in general.
But all of it has one general thing at the heart of it, and the heart of it is, I want things the way that I want it, and if it doesn't end up that way, then there's going to be consequences.
And that's what's happening with white supremacy right now.
White supremacy feels like it is embattled by demographic changes and democratic shifts and the way the world is changing.
And they're willing to burn the world down in order to maintain some sort of shred of power.
And that's, I mean, that's a really bleak thing, but, I mean, they'll tell you if you talk to them that that's what's happening here.
Well, to make this specific, and so we can make this less abstract, okay, when we did a march at LAX against the Muslim ban, we disrupted LAX, there's no question.
Traffic got snarled, I'm sure maybe planes got delayed because people couldn't get into the thing.
That's what, and we kind of acknowledged that, it made a little sense because it's a travel ban, Muslim ban.
What would that equivalent be on these guns rights guys?
What would happen?
You're talking about guns being fired, aren't you?
Absolutely, I am.
Yeah, it's men volunteering, and this has already happened, men volunteering to stand watch at the border of the United States of America and shoot anybody who tries to come across it.
I mean, that's where this thing has gone.
I mean, every time that they have these marches, it is a show of force that says, hey, guess what?
There's a group of people out here who have been collecting guns, who have been prepping for this situation.
Don't Push us.
There are consequences to changes, and there are consequences to you challenging our dominance and supremacy.
I mean, that's what's been at the heart of the Donald Trump movement all along, which is, we're angry, we're going to express our anger, and if you do not give way to our anger, and if you continue to challenge us, there's going to be blood in the streets.
And I mean, it's not like this hasn't happened.
I mean, people have been murdered.
You know, if you have a few minutes and you really want to feel bad about things, go look at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
They've looked at the alt-right for years now, where there has been one murder after another, one intimidation after another.
You know, it happened a while back, and no one wants to talk about it, but I mean, one of Donald Trump's supporters tried to carry out a systematic assassination of Democratic leaders and members of the media.
This isn't a political movement.
It's a fascistic movement that pretends to be a political movement.
Now, if they get their way, and they keep winning, and they aren't challenged anymore, and all the people who challenged them are silenced and go back into subjugation the way they were in the 1950s, 1940s, 1930s, if we have an established American white supremacist dominance that isn't challenged anymore, Maybe they'll go back to waving the flag and pretending like everything's fine, but that's not going to happen.
And these people aren't just going to go quiet into the good night.
And we have to call it what it is.
We have to start looking at this thing and the way that it works instead of turning the other way, which our media, unfortunately, is in the business of.
They'll show them in the streets, they'll shake their heads, they'll wring their hands, but they won't call this what it is.
These people are shock troops, they are street fighters, and in every instance of fascism in the history of the world, you have demagogues who have the support of shock troops and street fighters because it's extra-legal and it's paramilitary organizations that enforce the things that the law won't enforce.
What's interesting, though, is that the media is driven by eyeballs, and views, and listens, and everywhere they can get engagement.
You would think that if they described it like you were doing in a very provocative headline, they would increase readership that way.
People would be drawn to want to read about the potential race war that is happening right now in Charlottesville.
But they don't do that, I think, right?
That's sort of your criticism.
Well, I'm not going on MSNBC or CNN tonight and saying the words white supremacy, because they don't want to talk about that.
That is the last thing that any of these people want to talk about.
And one of the things we have to understand about the media, and we're going to talk in a little bit about this preposterous New York Times endorsement and what it means and what the problem is.
And here in the next couple weeks, I think we're going to have a Basically a declaration of what the problems are in this country and possible solutions.
I think we're going to do that in the next couple weeks.
Nick and I are going to put together plans for that.
And one of the problems is that we have a media, and in order to understand what's going on in our country, how we got here, and where we are, and why we're having such a hard time, you have to understand that it isn't left and right.
And that's, you know, that's the thesis of a lot of these podcasts that we're doing.
It's not as simple as that.
It's not black and white in that way.
Our corporate media is really good at examining some of the bleaker elements of our society, the really, really stark things, right?
They'll go out and they'll be like, Donald Trump troubles the Constitution.
Yes, he does.
But they're not good at questioning the order of things.
The things that have made people money, the things that have put people in power, the things that have privileged the anchors and the pundits and the people who have, you know, go to these fancy parties and talk about Ronald Reagan and get all misty about him up on a horse.
And they don't want to have a conversation about white supremacy.
They don't want to talk about differences in privilege.
They don't want to talk about income inequality or education or any of these things.
And so they will show you the people out in the streets with the guns, and they'll be like, this is very concerning.
But they won't talk about the fact that there is a broad, powerful organization of domestic terrorism in this country, and that it is growing by the year, and that it has a long history because they want to treat them like lone nuts.
Right?
Lone Nuts who wandered out in the street and they just happened to find each other.
Lone Nuts who blew up the Alfred P. Mora building.
And Lone Nuts who were in Waco who did this.
And Lone Nuts who were in Ruby Ridge who did this.
They don't want to talk about the fact that mass shootings are part of this.
They don't want to talk about the fact that there is a giant sickness in this country because they're part of it.
And they don't understand how to talk about that and they don't believe it's real because it also indicts them.
The religious part we mentioned earlier, it's indoctrination using the basis of what we believe in, the Bible, usually to manipulate people, the opiate of the masses.
However, with this group, it's not the Bible, it's the Constitution.
And it's the Second Amendment, which is everyone seems to want to hang their hat on and use it for whatever they wanted.
Many people might not be really aware of what the what this kind of comes down to.
It really comes down to a comma in the Second Amendment, which makes the interpretation of it a little bit harder to make.
And we've had the Supreme Court have to weigh in.
And, you know, because then you have to realize that, you know, when they wrote the Constitution back then, people use a lot more commas.
And there was a little bit of a subtle difference between what they mean now and then.
But, you know, really quickly, the Second Amendment does read a well-regulated militia, comma, being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, comma, shall not be infringed.
So now that shall not be infringed has to, and you're the English professor, we need to diagram this sentence and figure out what that part of the sentence applies to, because without that second comma, it kind of should sound like it only applies to The Army and the Navy and the Air Force and the Marines.
Our armed forces are the ones that should not be infringed about having their weapons.
At the very least, and we've heard ad nauseum about this, is when these things happen, when these crazies will build these militias and they have these guns and they're stockpiling ready to take on the government, it's just they get destroyed and massacred.
There's no way you're going to take on the government now anyway.
That's the biggest issue.
That's not the way you're ever going to affect change as it is.
What if you're on the side of the sitting government, but somehow or another still anti-government?
Does that make a difference?
Oh.
Does that make a difference to these people?
Well, it makes a difference in what ends up happening.
So you're saying that Hillary being in charge would be the thing, right?
Or whatever.
You're saying, like, this totally ultra-liberal president, an ultra-liberal Senate starts changing the laws.
That's the one step too far for them, right?
That's a big part of it.
And, you know, again going back to the pretzel logic of this whole thing.
So let's go back to the Constitution.
Let's actually talk about how we got to the Second Amendment.
Let's talk about how we ended up in the Philadelphia Convention, which in and of itself was not an authorized drafting.
It was supposed to take care of the Articles of Confederation.
Hamilton Madison gets in there and decides he's just going to rewrite the whole thing under no authority, but that's fine.
One of the reasons why they needed to amend the Articles of the Confederation, and part of the reason why we got the Constitution, is because the founding fathers of America were terrified of further revolution in this country.
They couldn't sleep at night because there were these moments of rebellion.
For instance, Shays' Rebellion, which just, you know, went across New England for forever, just shutting down courthouses and Even George Washington would write to people and be like, this is kind of scary.
And by the way, George Washington, who is the richest man in America, was really afraid of class warfare and class revolution and the idea that people would rise up and take over the government and, you know, depose of people like George Washington.
So they decided that they needed to have a stronger federal government that could put down rebellions.
Guess what they weren't thinking about when they wrote that?
They weren't thinking about individuals having enough military-grade weaponry to take on the government.
They were talking about having militias that could protect the government.
So no, the entire argument for the Second Amendment was completely made up, and for a little bit more historical context.
This stuff wasn't always like this.
In the 1970s, following Nixon's removal and the Republican panic of thinking that the party might be done, a lot of different things started coming together.
And one of them is a thing called the Cincinnati Revolt, which is where the National Rifle Association, which was totally for regulation of guns, They worked alongside regulators.
They were like, you know what?
And by the way, as a gun owner, I can tell you, as a gun owner who is for gun regulation, people who are serious about guns and gun safety are all about regulation.
Because that's one of the first things about owning a gun, is being safe with a gun.
I wasn't ever able to hold a gun before I was taught gun safety.
Well, the NRA was all for gun regulation and gun safety until the Cincinnati Revolt, which is where diehards and hardliners took over the NRA.
Well, guess what?
The Republican Party, which was in trouble and was looking for partners, saw what happened with the NRA and brought them in under the same umbrella, and they became a symbiotic group.
They ended up actually taking on Democrats and trying to turn them into Nazi shock troops and saying that they were evil because it was good fundraising for both groups.
And guess who they welcomed?
The Patriot Movement of the 1990s, which was a group that has splintered off into all of these neo-Nazi extremist paramilitary groups.
So there's a long line of this and they have twisted the Constitution and they have twisted the meaning of it in order to make it say and mean what they want.
Because the argument we're having isn't actually about regulation.
They don't want everyone to have guns.
They want guns, right?
Because they want power, and they want dominance, and they want to be able to inflict danger and fear on people they don't agree with.
And it goes back to everything we keep talking about.
It's about keeping power on one side and power away from the other side.
Right.
And the argument always is, well, those bad guys are going to get the guns anyway, even if you do enact the laws, which is also slightly nonsense, which is why I feel like this would get all the guns gone and make it like England.
But here's the other thing.
More historical context is, when they were writing the Constitution and the Second Amendment, It was a hundred years until semi-automatic weapons were even invented, much less mass-produced.
So, they had no conception.
By the way, it was right after the Civil War.
So, can you imagine how many more casualties we would have had if semi-automatic weapons were invented for the Civil War?
I can't even imagine the order of magnitude that would have increased just mowing down these people in the fields as they're charging like they had done all these other years in war.
So this is the other problem.
When you're talking about muskets, that's a whole other argument.
That's why that Constitution seems to work, but that doesn't really apply.
It doesn't seem to even shift the conversation even a little bit.
Meanwhile, when Clinton puts in an assault weapons ban for several years during his term, The number of mass killings goes down so greatly that there's no other way to interpret those two things except for them being completely correlated.
And let's correlate them, and let's talk about the narrative that developed from it.
So Bill Clinton's presidency is this moment of great generational change, and also the genesis of so much of this trouble.
So Bill Clinton gets elected based on the DLC and the New Democratic Party, and the New Democratic Party looked at Ronald Reagan and said, we're not going to beat that, and we basically need to offer our own version of it.
So the Democrats come out and they start offering a very, very Republican-based ideology.
They basically reach a consensus on economics and law enforcement, all these different things.
Clinton signs NAFTA, which is a holdover.
It was originally thought up by Ronald Reagan when he announced his original presidential candidacy.
George H.W.
Bush puts it together, Bill Clinton gets it, and because there's a new economic consensus, he signs it, pushes it forward.
What we're talking about today, this movement with the militias and the paramilitaries and the patriot movement, all of that is because of globalism.
It's this changing type of economics.
That has left a lot of people behind.
That is completely true.
But it's also really hard to understand.
Neoliberalism is really complicated.
Even for people who study economics and are involved in it, it's really hard to wrap your head around.
You know what's easier to talk about?
New World Order conspiracy theories.
It's a lot easier to say, well, the people are doing this because they're evil.
And it's not, you know, it's not economic incentives.
It's not Adam Smith and the wealth of nations.
It's not, you know, Alan Greenspan sitting there talking about this and that and derivatives and you go nuts on all this stuff, right?
They give them an easier narrative that is much easier for people to understand and it tells them that they are the only resistance against an evil international conspiracy against them and their children.
And that's a whole lot easier to understand and it gives a whole lot more hope because it tells them that all they have to do is pick up a gun and make something happen.
And that is the heart of this thing and why it's so hard to work against it.
And the people who are doing it, Republicans, NRA people, the American right, Trumpists, the people who are doing it are playing a really dangerous game.
If we get out of this rally today in Virginia, the same way that we got out of this rally and this rally, you know, except for like Charlottesville, where unfortunately we had people, a person killed and people injured.
If we get out of this rally today without anyone dying, we're extremely lucky.
We're not always going to be lucky.
This thing is going to catch up with us.
And we keep getting mass shootings and mass killings.
And we're just going to keep seeing those happen until somehow or another the fever breaks.
And how that happens is your guess as it goes by.
Well, I think it's a DNA.
It's deep-seated in the Americans' DNA.
And when I say that, I mean white American DNA.
Because again, you just don't see anybody of color Really, as far as I've seen in these images of these groups.
So, what I think is happening is, anybody who's read, you know, Born on the Fourth of July, or seen the movie, or just sort of, you know, tapped into that whole, there's decades, sorry, there's centuries of, you know, kids and, you know, young boys playing war games, right?
They had their guns, and they're shooting, and they're usually fighting the Germans, or they're fighting, you know, I guess you want to say the Vietnamese, and you can go, whatever, whoever we had, you know, I'm sure they do.
armed conflicts with in the national stage, that's who we pretend that we're fighting against.
And in a period where the wars, there aren't any great wars anymore, it suddenly becomes the game without really a clear enemy when you're young playing it, developing it.
And so they have no place to put thisire and this anger and this energy that they have.
Sure they do.
Zombies.
I mean, if you want to get into how this thing works, look at the phenomenon of zombies in popular culture.
It's the idea that you're fighting people who never question anything and don't think for themselves, and they're coming to kill you and your family without any ideas behind them.
They're just coming and coming and coming, and there's more of them than there are us.
That's where zombie popular culture comes from.
And it's been, you know, it's been blossoming for years now.
I mean, you know, that's one of the reasons we have superhero culture.
It's the idea of, I'm strong enough to change the world the way that I want and everything else down here.
And there's a reason why in these movies the law doesn't work, you know, the police don't work.
There are, right, there are these threats that I have to take on because I'm strong enough and I'm armed and capable.
And so we have all these fantasies that have been making money left and right And they're fantasies that play upon the insecurity and the futileness of what a lot of people feel.
Now, the way that you fix this is you have a better economy and you move away from something that creates vast divides, right?
Because you don't have stuff like this happening whenever people feel like their lives are worth living and like they're treated well.
Like this is a response to things that are going wrong.
It's the wrong response.
It's the absolute wrong response, right?
The better response is to organize and come together and understand that our differences aren't as numerous as what binds us, right?
And what we can accomplish when we come together.
And now with this white nationalism, white supremacist movement, it is an intentional divide that is fighting a phantom.
It's not real.
They're not fighting anything that's actually real.
All they're trying to do is reinforce a system that victimizes them and keeps them oppressed as well, but they don't understand that because it's been peddled to them for so long.
So wait, so the zombies are people of color?
Oh, it's everybody from people of color to liberals who work with them and people who are stuck in echo chambers.
I mean, it's been going on for forever.
I mean, the idea, and this goes with, you know, and actually Joe Biden said today, said something along the lines of video games train people to kill.
We don't have to get into that idea.
But there's a lot of popular culture now that is based upon the idea of it's me versus the world, and if I kill people and if I hurt people, it doesn't matter.
And that's fascism.
It's pure and simple.
It's fascism.
And it finds its way through these things, and that's where these people are getting recruited.
They're being primed for this stuff by accepting this culture that promotes this stuff, and then the indoctrination and the radicalization just follows behind it.
You know, I've been involved in literally like a four-day conversation on Twitter, on my Twitter account, with a guy who, you know, I can't even describe where he is or where he exists on the political spectrum, but what I discover, and it happens all the time when you talk to people, you know, in certain sects or certain political movements, is that their ideology is so hardened
And solidified based on either completely wrong facts or such a severe lack of information that it's frightening.
And that's where it's like, what are you supposed to do about that?
Where you have this idea about, you know, Lev Parnas, for instance, where you might, but you don't know about this and you don't know that the fact that like all of his, you know, all of his The evidence he's presenting, like, no one's disputing it, you know?
You can say that he's a liar, he's whatever, but like, no one's disputing what he's saying, and that usually is a pretty good tell that it's verified or it's true.
So the point being that you realize that, and this must go back to the time that he was, you know, 20 or 18 or 15.
where so much of the ideology is based on such an incredible lack of information that it's almost like, and I like to think, oh, I'm just going to fill it up.
I'm going to give him the information he's missing.
That's just going to change everything.
He's going to be like, oh, I didn't realize that.
But that doesn't happen.
Why?
So part of the reason why I'm even able to have this conversation and offer the mindset of the people involved in it is because it's what I grew up in, right?
When I grew up, and I grew up in this small Indiana town to a really, really poor family and steeped in a lot of these...
White identity, nationalistic, paranoid, conspiracy theories.
And I didn't realize it.
That's the difference, is people who are steeped in this stuff and brought up in this stuff don't understand that there's something outside of it.
Right?
When you're, you know, if you're locked in a basement and you were born in that basement and you've never seen anything but that basement, you don't understand that there's something outside of that basement.
And I had no clue.
I just thought America was a country where everybody was Christian, and everybody was coming to get us, and they were in league with Satan.
I mean, that was the stuff that we talked about.
Like, every day, whether we were in church, or reading books, or watching movies, it was through the lens that there was this conspiracy out there, and my family had to be wary of it.
And that's one of the reasons why my family suffered is because people are trying to take what we have because either they're in league with Satan or they don't know they're in league with Satan.
And we keep going through that because once you get older, if you don't question it, if you don't have that awakening, if you don't come out of the basement and see there's a world out there, which I had to do, I had to figure things out for myself.
And I'm, you know, even now looking back, I'm like, my God, I can't believe I grew up like that.
But if you don't get out of there, like, everything just reinforces it.
And Trump is the person who says, you don't have to do that, right?
You don't have to question yourself.
You don't have to question who you are.
You don't have to question what the world is.
And these people, it's like they're standing in that basement and someone's like, come on out of the basement.
There's good things outside.
And they pick up a gun.
They're like, you can't make me.
Right, they're saying you I will kill you rather than be taken out of this world even as it collapses in on them because there's nothing for them that the idea that the white supremacy they're trying to control is a white supremacy that has
Not just use them to continue itself, but is actually disadvantaged them and and worked against them Which is the thing most people don't understand is even though and they're gaining white supremacy the privilege of just being of a race the the the economic system and the political system is also waged against them even as it tells it that it's on its side and And so these people are just defending their ignorance with weapons, which we have to call it that.
We have to understand that.
And if we're going to address it, which is the unfortunate thing, is our culture seems incapable of calling it what it is.
Well, we also have an issue of our media being incapable of calling it what it is as well.
And I feel like this is not a bad time to get into it quickly, at least, about what the New York Times just did by their op-ed basically endorsing two candidates.
Which, you might as well just burn the piece of paper and just say, forget it, I don't even want a recommendation at this point, because last I checked, Jared, if I'm not mistaken, you only have one option on that ballot.
Last night, in order to promote their new television show, and I'm sitting here with Nick Hausman of NBA fame, who might appreciate this, it was LeBron's decision, you know, version 2.0.
Like, it hit all of the same notes, which I'm sure anybody who's listening who has watched reality television is very familiar with this, right?
It's the American Idol model, which is The results show where tonight we're gonna tell you this and just tune in and it's every break it's like oh we're gonna tell you this in a minute and then they make you watch the whole show and then you know it and because they treat everything like a reality show now because you know that's how you get a reality television show president and America operates like a reality television show
And then they come out and they endorse Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Amy Klobuchar, and they said in their announcement, and this is just stupefying, they said that they were choosing a realistic candidate and a radical candidate.
Well, according to who?
Right?
The New York Times.
The New York Times is saying, you know what, like, Amy Klobuchar is the most standard kind of choice that we could possibly make, and here's an option for our readers who are radical.
They're trying to serve everybody while serving nobody, and showing that they have absolutely no understanding of the political moment or the importance of it.
We have a demagogue authoritarian president who is troubling every norm and every democratic institution.
And instead of coming out and saying, this is what we're going to do, they give us two candidates?
Which if you mark two candidates on a ballot, it would invalidate your ballot?
That's their answer?
I don't know.
I mean, listen, here's the other thing is Khloé Bouchard, you know, and I love the hit piece they did on her on how she manages her, the people that work for her and all that stuff, which is probably true.
And she's acknowledged.
She's a she sounds awful, by the way, to work for.
But, you know, she's polling, you know, in Iowa, 11 percent, which is, you know, Biden's 24, Sanders is 14, actually 14, Warren's 18.
So she's like never really You know, has it ever been in the solid top three or four anyway during this entire process?
So she's not really, you know, I hate to say it because you might be a Klobuchar fan, you know, listening to this, but like, she's not really a legitimate, serious candidate to win any of these things anyway.
And isn't that sort of the point of helping us winnow this stuff down with the New York Times by like, you know, giving us their endorsement of someone who actually might even come out of this whole thing?
So, you know, that's that's one thing that I just find kind of head scratching why they would they would pick her because it's not practical at all.
The gross thing is that as a profit strategy, this has worked.
Right.
The New York Times endorsement is, I mean, I just, I shook my head listening to this and looking at this last night.
I mean, history is going to show that they did this.
You know what I mean?
Like, this is the newspaper of record.
And you can go and look in the archives and see who they've endorsed and who they've pushed and where they've been wrong and where they've been right.
And they've been wrong a lot and they've been right a lot.
And it's going to show that they picked two candidates, but profit-wise, that's all people are talking about right now is their decision, which in the newspaper business and the media business at this point, and people need to understand this, and part of the reason why Donald Trump became president is because of spectacle, which we're getting ready to move into the impeachment this week, and this is one of the reasons I think this is important.
This is a profit-making time for these people.
They're making so much money.
Ratings are through the roof for these networks.
Circulation and subscriptions are through the roof for these newspapers.
Even if they just piss people off and disappoint people, people are talking about it.
Right?
It's a point of conversation.
And that's exactly what's happening with this impeachment too.
I mean, it's going to be treated like a show and people need to put on their seatbelts.
Because the way that this works is it's up and down, zigging and zagging.
It's up.
It's down.
Who won today?
Who lost today?
And the way that they treat this is the exact same way they treat an election.
You're going to lose your mind over the next few weeks.
It's going to be, oh, I think Republicans won this today.
Yes, they lied!
They're arguments not even based in fact.
But I think they won.
The optics today were great for them.
The Democrats are in real trouble.
And then zigs and then zags.
But it's a mindset that has nothing to do with reality.
It has nothing to do with the crisis that this country is in.
But it makes money.
I mean, that's the sad truth.
It makes money.
Yeah.
I mean, all those things are true.
And you know what?
Sometimes you want to say, OK, we want to appeal to what gets the most views because that is the direction that people want to go.
But that's the other problem is that is now you are being pulled in different directions and you lose the journalistic integrity that you're supposed to have as the paper of record.
I have to say, it doesn't feel like it's any longer that position in our life.
In fact, I don't know if anybody has that distinction anymore.
Is it the Washington Post?
Who knows?
The point for me is also that when we're talking about how to pick, you know, at this point, you know, we keep saying, well, A, it doesn't matter because so many people are going to simply vote for whoever the Democrat is, right?
So you kind of have that going for them as well.
But the frustrating thing about this process of picking whoever is going to represent the Democrats is that it just keeps taking the shine off of whoever is going to make it.
It's kind of like in the NBA playoffs when you have to go through three straight seven game series just to make the finals.
And you finally make it, you're really excited, you might be able to win or not, but you've been beat up so bloody that you're not anywhere near what the team you were when you started the whole thing.
And we can't afford to have that going against Trump.
And they're going to be able to capitalize on that.
Trump will.
They're actually giving them the playbook for however they want to run.
And that's why it feels like the Democrats just don't know, they don't know how to do this right.
This primary so far, and we're going to be covering it.
You know, you might have heard we talked about this special coverage we're going to have in the next few weeks and being on the road and the campaign trail.
We're going to cover this thing, but it has been brutal.
It has been a slog.
There are so many things that could have made this better, but America needs to take a long look in the mirror.
It needs to address its addiction to politics as spectacle.
It needs to address its addiction to politics as entertainment.
It needs to, I mean, it starts with us.
There's no reason it needs to be this long.
There's no reason it needs to work this way.
And, you know, these publications and these institutions, I mean, the Washington Post started putting everywhere, democracy dies in the darkness.
Is that objective?
No, it's saying we are here against a threat.
Right?
I mean, that's branding.
And that's how they've branded themselves.
And you can't then go out and be like, well, no, we're non-partial.
There's no non-partial in this America right now.
You can't be.
I think it was Howard Zinn that said you can't be neutral on a moving train.
That's what we're on right now.
We're on a runaway train.
And if you go out, and this has been the problem because this This this media doesn't understand Donald Trump.
It doesn't understand that they are addicted to Donald Trump and that they and Donald Trump are involved in in a synchronistic relationship.
They don't understand what they've done to create him and where they've gone wrong and they They have not understood how media affects this stuff.
They want to pretend like they're nonpartisan, but reporting the news right now is to say that we have a despot, a dangerous, dangerous man in the Oval Office.
That's the truth.
If you're reporting anything else, you're actually being partisan.
You're actually helping him.
You are not neutral on a moving train.
You're moving with the train.
And right now, this is a time where we need serious people who are serious about the world because if this keeps going the way that it is, there are going to be some serious consequences.
Okay.
The train metaphor is really good.
I like that.
Especially because it reminds me of a notion of even just like, you know, fate and how we're, you know, you can move on the train as much as you like.
You feel like you're in control of everything, but you're still going to go where the train is taking you.
Can't control that and that's that's the sort of the problem here and the perspective that you have when you're on the train.
So I agree.
I feel like we need to have this this this podcast coming up soon where we do our homework in this present our 10 things that we need to have to happen to repair the country and it sure doesn't happen again.
And there's no question that something about the media and how it's covered and how it's accessed needs to be taken care of now.
Remember there also is the fear of having their access revoked.
And that also puts a lot of pressure on the people covering this to not do certain things or say certain things that might, even if it's temporary, you cannot do your job.
You are worthless.
And if you become one of those guys like Acosta for CNN, he probably was very dangerously close to losing his job because they're going to say, well, they're not going to give you access, man.
If you can't get access, why can't we pay you?
And that's a real problem.
And that means he stops being a guy who's a muckraker and trying to get the truth.
So there's a lot of things we need to deal with and certainly the media would be on the very top of that list.
Absolutely.
I mean, it's going to take up a chunk of that list.
I like, though, that you just went ahead and made it 10 things, which makes it really round.
I like that.
I think our viewers are going to like that.
Or listeners.
Viewers.
I think people are going to enjoy that.
So we're going to have that put together in the next few weeks, as well as our special coverage of the 2020 caucuses and primaries.
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