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March 13, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
51:26
🚨EMERGENCY POD🚨 AS THE PANDEMIC AND CRISIS GROWS

The coronavirus pandemic is spiraling out of control while Donald Trump continues to double-down on his ineffective and dangerous "leadership." This emergency episode addresses the history of how we got to this crisis, as well as the possibility that Trump might undermine democracy itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
We are all in this together.
We must put politics aside, stop the partisanship, and unify together as one nation and one family.
If you go back and look at the swine flu, you'll see how many people died and how actually nothing was done for such a long period of time as people were dying all over the place.
We're doing it the opposite.
We're very much ahead of everything.
Dr. Redfield, you don't need to do any work to operationalize.
You need to make a commitment to the American people so they come in to get tested.
You can operationalize the payment structure tomorrow.
I think you're an excellent questioner, so my answer is yes.
Hey everybody!
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
We have a bit of an emergency episode I suppose in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak and I hope you guys are all staying safe.
I'm Nick Hauselmann and joining me alongside is my co-host Jared Yates-Sexton.
Jared, how are you doing today?
I think I'm feeling the existential crisis that I think most Americans are, probably most citizens of the world are right now.
But I'm also...
It's really frustrating right now to watch what's happening and to sort of see, you know, and we can talk about this today, like these mistakes from the past that have led to this moment, why we're in this situation in the first place.
And there are reasons.
It's not just something that has happened.
There are clear cut mistakes that have been made, not just by Donald Trump as president, and there are many of them.
But by one person after another and one system after another and one business after another that has created this environment that we're now in that could, you know, topple society as we know it.
But I also want to put it out there, and this is one of the reasons I thought it was really important we do an emergency pod today, is because I don't think most people understand The ramifications not just of like the virus that we're dealing with but the political and power moves that could happen from it.
We have Donald Trump who is a terminally insecure narcissist and authoritarian.
And what they do in these situations is they fail and they make the situations worse and then they scapegoat anyone that they possibly can to hide their mistakes and then they inevitably seize power.
Trump today in his meeting with the leader of Ireland made numerous mentions about how he has been studying his emergency powers.
Trump doesn't just say things.
Trump previews things.
He tells you what's on his mind.
And we need right now to get very serious about saving the vestiges of society and democratic society before it's too late.
And that is, unfortunately, the road that we're on right now.
Well, I will also throw this out there, because hey, let's just get right into conspiracy theories and all sorts of craziness right away.
Let our audience know where we're coming from.
But, I do know that when they asked him about the economy, and obviously if you haven't been paying attention, the Dow is now down, oh my goodness, is it 30%?
It's bad.
It's bad.
And, you know, I looked it up, we talked about it I think before, where
Within a week it fell 20% in 28 when they had the stock market crash and this is now beyond that but we have bigger volume and the banks are sort of solvent so that's not the issue but they did ask Trump about that and he had this weird cryptic thing where he says it's gonna be well it's not cryptic because he always tries to put paint everything in a positive light but he said it will bounce back bigger than ever at the right time or something like that and my antenna went up right away because now I'm starting to think well what would he manipulate
To somehow get the stock market to suddenly go on a big run in like October of this year, just before the election.
And I'm not exactly sure what the instruments he could use to do that are, but there's no question that they're probably looking about at these kind of things, because we do know the market will eventually rebound.
These things usually go back up at some point.
And so if they can manipulate this somehow politically to make it go up again, I mean, it's just like it's almost like time to keep an eye on impeaching him again.
We have to look in the eye the fact that Donald Trump is not going to do anything to help anybody but himself.
Anything that he does to curb the coronavirus pandemic is going to be in order to help his own political fate and he won't be able to do it because terminally insecure authoritarian narcissist by definition That's number one.
put together efforts.
They can't work with other people.
They don't listen to experts.
They make every situation worse, and they will absolutely destroy any coalition to make things better.
That's number one.
Number two, we have to understand, and this is to presage part of what we're going to talk about today, economies are not democratic.
They are not inherently interested in civil liberties.
They're not interested at all in human dignity.
Quite frankly, businesses often tend towards autocrats because they provide quote-unquote stability, which is not true, right?
But it's the idea of stability because actually autocrats are incredibly chaotic.
But they love the idea of not having people interfering with what they're doing, right?
Which is part of the system that we're dealing with here that we're going to talk about more today.
Yeah, absolutely.
These people love when Trump troubles democratic institutions.
There's a reason why they've been so confident, which is all the economy is.
The stock market is a game of confidence.
It's, oh, I think things are going to be fine.
I'm going to flood money.
And, oh, things are bad.
I'm going to take my money out.
That's all it is.
It just shows where the rich and powerful are in terms of confidence.
That's all.
So yeah, there's all kinds of stuff that could happen here that is undemocratic by nature and would actually threaten democratic society and individual civil liberties.
That businesses would stand up and applaud.
I mean, you know, these are a lot of people.
A lot of the Fortune 500 companies are people who have not only worked with authoritarians around the world and despots around the world, they're the ones who are just like, yeah, you know, that leader over there is actually killing a lot of people.
You know, he pays the bills on time, so that's great.
Like, this is the cycle that we're in.
We have a lot of people who are not interested in maintaining free and fair societies or elections, which we have to talk about in a minute.
And you're absolutely right.
Who knows what's going to happen?
Who knows what Trump is talking about?
But I can tell you what he's talking about.
In particular in spirit.
And that is how to maintain his power.
It's not about how to get tests out there.
It's not about how to make people safer.
It's how to maintain power.
And we have to understand and view everything through that lens.
Sure.
And every delay that they did and everything they ignored tends to be through the prism of how much money is going to cost me or how much is going to cost us to do this.
Which is also galling because all of a sudden now that they were in this mess, They're approving a $1.7 trillion aid package, which is almost like, and I know the outrage on Twitter was like, don't ever say we can't afford to pay for anything ever again when you just drop this and they want to cut income tax, payroll taxes, they want to cut those, which is going to cause even a huger, bigger shortfall of revenue to the government.
And then this deficit's going to become, it's going to be just, Silly, how horrible it is, especially when they've built this, when they being the Republicans, have built this whole aura about fiscal responsibility, and we never had a business position in the first place.
So it's really just kind of disgusting in all those different levels.
You could have wiped out all the student debt in the country with that money.
I'm not even sure how much it is, but it's not even 1.7 trillion, I'll tell you that.
So it's like you can wipe out so many problems that people have right now in the blink of an eye with that kind of money.
And meanwhile, they're going to try and throw to things like some of their great ideas.
Let's just do a travel ban and we'll stop people from coming in the country, even though we already have it in the country and that's where the focus needs to be.
Oh, but by the way, we're going to let people from England be able to come back to this country.
Even though they have way more cases of coronavirus than Poland, for instance.
Yeah, and Trump's already said that he's considering restricting travel within the United States.
So that's a start, right?
And real fast, before we veer off into a lot of different things, we have to establish this, first and foremost.
These decisions that have led to this crisis were not done by people in smoky rooms, rubbing their hands together, talking about population control and Calling the herd, right?
This is not an Alex Jones podcast.
We're talking about how actual decisions are made and how we actually end up in these places.
Here's how it happens.
Is there a financial advantage?
I'm going to weigh that against potential risk.
Right?
And I'm going to go to sleep at night because, well, I can kind of make that work.
What has happened right here is decades and decades of Republican legislation and political efforts have come together to create an economic system.
And you just brought up student debt, right?
There's a reason they don't want to wipe out student debt.
It makes people stay in their jobs for lower wages.
It makes people less mobile.
It means that they're not going to just say, that benefits package isn't good.
I'm going to go over here.
It keeps the playing field low where you don't have to offer a lot of benefits and you don't have to offer a lot of wages.
And in their minds, that makes sense because it's a top-down economy.
And that top-down economy goes out and it says human dignity isn't important or...
What's important is that the rich and the wealthy don't have to pay a lot and can, you know, raise up their profits.
And they believe that that is how a successful economy works.
But that economy is inherently unstable.
That's how you get pandemics.
That's how you get the economy crashing right now.
Because it's fake.
It's never been real.
And it's never been meant to work.
And it's always been this decision about, oh, here's an advantage.
Here's this over here.
And that's what it is.
It's about privilege and advantage.
And it's gotten us to a place where people are going to die.
And the economy is in real trouble.
And it's all because we don't want to look at human dignity over profits.
Well, let's also take that one step further.
Because why is the economy in trouble?
Why is the Dow continually plummeting and plummeting day every day?
It's because a guy like Donald Trump can't seem to assuage any of our fears.
He can't present even, even if it's not real, he cannot present any type of facade that he is in control and knows what he is doing.
Now, Pence comes out there a couple days ago.
He's got the scientists next to him.
He speaks measured.
He lets the scientists speak and let them actually say their expertise in front of the cameras.
I'm so glad you're saying this.
I'm so glad you're saying this because this is a really important thing.
Right.
Now, and so it's almost to the point where, and I can't remember anything I said in the last pod, but they screwed this up so badly.
They would have just impeached Trump.
They could have had Pence, the guy that looks like the president and speaks like a president and actually has some, isn't, you know, his mind isn't so corroded at this point.
So this is, and as a result, It seems likely that Trump is going to lose the election off of this, of all things, if it manages to sustain itself long enough.
So not only did the Republicans defend this guy, Trump, for so long, but now they're going to completely... This is the guy in Hunt for Red October who kills the whole sub because he doesn't realize that the He pointed this up in the wrong direction in the, in the, um, God, the people are going to kill me for the wrong description of the plot.
But nonetheless, uh, you know, the, the, the guy, the Russian guy goes, you, you stupid idiot, you killed us.
And that's what the Republicans just did to their own party.
It is.
Okay, so a couple things, and we're going to talk about this before the pod's over, so people who are listening, stick around because this is really, really vital that we touch on this.
Free and fair elections in November, I think it is really important that we do not take them for granted.
Yes, this could sink Donald Trump's re-election.
It should.
He shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the levers of power in this country and he's shown he's incapable of even being in the same room as the gears of power.
But we cannot take for granted that those things are simply going to happen because they are in danger right now and that's what we're going to talk about in a minute.
But there is a point that you just brought up which is extremely important.
Donald Trump can't perform The act of being president.
That's the problem in a bunch of this.
There's on one hand, which is, like, they should have got the test out, and he didn't want to get the test out because he didn't want the numbers to go up and for it to look bad for him.
That's what came out today.
That was just in a report that there were problems in the room with telling him to get tests out there because he didn't want the numbers to go up.
He wanted them to stay at, like, 15.
He didn't want them to balloon up.
So that was a problem.
But the other problem with Donald Trump is that he can't go out and speak the presidential language.
He can't play the performance, which is actually all that Wall Street wants out of him.
Wall Street wants him in front of a camera being measured and saying the type of things that Ronald Reagan would say.
And that's what everybody is looking for.
They're not actually looking for something to happen behind the scenes because what's actually happening now?
And this is the reason why everyone is scared shitless.
And that is this.
There has been a facade in this country that the people who are in power are capable.
And they've got this thing.
At all times.
Even when they actually don't.
And when that facade starts to fall down, It's when the economy starts to fall apart because it's a confidence game.
It's when Americans start to get afraid.
And we're afraid right now because we have a person who is not just up to the job, he's so far below it that he can't even see it.
And it's that performance.
You're exactly right.
And everyone around him who, I don't know if I'd call them competent, But they're terrified of him.
They're terrified of making this despot angry at them.
And so we're just in the thrall of this dangerous, dangerous man.
Right.
Such a great point you just made about how they're afraid of him because, like, Dr. Fauci, for instance, has been doing this for a long time and is an expert who I would feel comfortable listening to, but I just, you know, if you're out there and you're listening to Dr. Fauci, just blink twice and let us know that, like, you're under, you're being held captive here and hostage.
And I feel like he's willing to do this and capitulate as much as he can to the administration because he worries if they fire him because he speaks the complete truth, then they don't have anybody at the helm that really is competent.
And I feel like we've seen this in every other facet of the government for a long time until finally a lot of these people will just eventually quit.
But I guess that whole... By the way, you were the one who wanted to come in hot.
I'm the guy who's just like... Oh, I haven't even gotten started.
I am so angry.
Yeah, but people who would stay in the government longer just because they're so worried about what would happen if they have to leave, it completely will fall apart and turn into an autocratic government.
So we have so many problems, and at the very least, You know, maybe if the people who wanted to poo-poo this whole coronavirus thing and say it wasn't such a big deal and all you snowflakes are overreacting and hysterical, maybe now they'll be able to see in front of them what's going on.
And by the way, what really could speak to them in another weird way is like the NBA season, for instance.
All of a sudden, now you have two players in Utah Jazz who were tested positive and The NBA season's suspended for, I would say, at least 60 days is what I'm hearing.
At least 60.
And I don't even know how they'd ever finish the season at that point.
It's too late in the year to do it.
But that might finally have some sort of effect on the people who didn't want to believe this was serious, and maybe even have some self-reflection.
Yeah, so here's where I talk about why I'm pissed off.
And we should all be pissed off.
We really should.
This is torches and pitchforks stuff.
This is violating the social contract.
My mother is in her 60s and has a debilitating lung problem.
She is the perfect victim for a thing like this.
You know what I mean?
And I have to worry about my mother going out into a society And catching this thing that should have been strangled in its crib.
That's what the government's supposed to do.
It's supposed to protect people.
It's supposed to serve people.
Instead, we've got this idiot who is in office who has no idea what he's doing, but he's also so insecure that he can't go into the CDC and listen.
He has to tell the scientists that he is as smart as them and he knows as good as them.
And I want to put this out there, and this is the message I need people to hear.
He fits the authoritarian mold because there is an authoritarian mold.
That's what he is.
These are insecure, fragile men who gain power by appealing to other insecure, fragile men and pretending to be stronger than they are, and they build by scapegoating minorities and vulnerable populations.
They get in power, and then they fuck things up.
They just fuck it right up.
Every time.
They do everything wrong.
And when they do everything wrong, they're so insecure and fragile that they can't even begin to tell people what they did.
So they've got to find other people to blame it on.
This is the reason why Trump, and it was not by accident, called it a foreign virus last night.
This is why Tom Cotton is beating down every studio door that he can to go in and claim that this is a Chinese biological weapon.
Wait, did you hear what he said today?
No, Nick, I didn't.
He released this, quote, we will emerge stronger from this challenge, comma, we will hold accountable those who inflicted it on the world, period, end quote.
He thinks, okay, he could go try and kill some bats in China, I suppose that's what he wants to do.
This guy, I gotta check it again real quickly, I think this guy went to Princeton.
To quote the immortal Woody Allen, although in a different context, Harvard makes mistakes too.
Oh God.
Oh, Tom Cotton.
So dangerous.
Oh, so here's the thing.
And, and, and here's the other part of why I'm angry.
And it's not just Trump.
And it's not just the fact that he's screwed up because it's like, it's like one of those things where, you know, you, what do you expect from him?
It's who he is.
It's what he is.
Um, I'm, I'm pissed off that we have had decades and decades of Republicans who have made it a strategy that every time somebody talks about reforming healthcare, And every time someone talks about getting people born treatment, and every time that there's even a Republican plan, and that's what Obamacare was by the way.
It was made by the Heritage Foundation, which is a conservative think tank, and it was carried out by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.
That's what Obamacare was.
And by the way, in the 1990s, and I still can't for the life of me understand why Bill Kristol follows me on Twitter, so I hope he's listening to this.
Because here's a little muckrig take for you, okay?
Bill Kristol wrote a memo to Republicans in the 1990s that said, yeah, we do have a health care crisis, but we can't let Bill Clinton pass a health care bill, because Democrats will gain from that, and people will want to vote for them.
So go out and say there is no healthcare crisis.
These people went on Fox News.
They claimed Obamacare was a New World Order takeover tyrannical plot.
And they've done this for years.
Every time anyone brings it up they talk about socialism and communism.
All that stuff.
And they thought that the Czech was never going to come due while they built this system.
And blood is on their hands.
I mean of course when Romney came up with Romneycare, it's a Republican thing because you know why?
hyperbole it is truth and people don't want to go on TV and say that but it's true right they have put people in the position to die I mean of course when Romney came up with Romney care it's a Republican thing because you know why it actually saves money it was a it is a better way to have health care I I can see why these like the fiscal responsible people would say okay.
Let's do something like that where we can clean this up get everybody involved.
So we're all you know, the only thing that's interesting about it is though is that it's predicated on the notion that we're all in the same community together and we can all help each other which is so antithetical.
to anything that the Republicans had stood for since, at least since Trump got in.
I mean, obviously earlier, but now the one thing about Trump getting the power was it really just exposed where these people are coming from and how little they really even care about hiding their corruption at this point.
So it really is, you know, everybody is ripe to be criticized.
And there's lots of issues.
Now, by the way, it's worth noting that Trump, in his speech, in his Thorazine-laced speech, whatever you want to call it, he was on, because it was something, spent a lot of time talking about closing the borders and not letting anybody in.
Hardly anything about the testing and how we're supposed to ramp that up, which is absolutely insane.
But then spent a big chunk talking about Obama's reaction to swine flu, H1N1.
Again, lying about it because he was watching Hannity the night before who was really lying about it and spreading all the misinformation.
And meanwhile you have Fox News for the whole week has been trying again minimizing the severity of this virus as it is.
So, by the way, if I'm wondering why the Republicans are taking it more seriously, it's because they're watching Fox News, but at least maybe now it's being more and more exposed and it feels like, even though it's going to be a horrific result, ultimately it might lead to more people, can we use the term, getting woke?
Well, can we talk about the fact that Fox News' population is the population that is going to die from this disease?
It is the old and the infirm who are going to die from this, which is Fox.
It's Fox News' main demographic.
And these people, these leeches, these vultures, are going into their New York studios every day and calling this a hoax.
They know full and well it's not a hoax.
They know that this is a political propaganda operation to help Donald Trump's numbers and try and keep his base in line.
Hannity, well, Hannity might not know.
Hannity is a stone-cold moron.
So there's that.
Rush Limbaugh knows better.
Rush Limbaugh is actually an intelligent person who has made the most out of his ability to lie to people with a straight face.
He is going on, and by the way, do you know who's listening to Rush Limbaugh?
The old.
The old population is listening to Rush Limbaugh and he's literally to help Donald Trump and to sell his stupid books and his stupid iced tea.
He's lying to his listeners and telling them to go out into the world and expose themselves To a virus that is perfect for killing them.
And if you can think of a more irresponsible and sadistic act, I really have a hard time.
It is unthinkable that somebody can live with themselves doing this.
I mean, it is truly awful.
Sure.
And then you have one of these super PACs or whatever that has these email chains.
They were promoting it on Twitter saying how earlier in the day they're talking about how it's a hoax and the Democrats are trying to engineer this to make Trump lose the election.
And then a few hours later they actually start pushing a book that you need to buy that will help them avoid getting the coronavirus because now they can make money off of this.
They owe some of the blame for this.
They do.
what they had said earlier about how it's a hoax.
Now they're admitting it within a few hours.
But now, hey, buy this book and we'll make money off of you.
It is all part of that.
And, you know, listen, the Democratic Party has had horrible issues and certainly been incompetent over lots of years as well.
But they owe some of the blame for this.
Yeah, they do.
But you have to you have to admit and you have to.
It seems clear to me when you even take stock and look back a little bit of this, that they've always sort of cared about the constituents.
And And when there's been gross incompetence and complete screw-ups and all those things, at least the notion that they were trying to do something good for the people of the country is generally where it's rooted in.
And that's what separates the kind of criticism you might want to give to the Republicans versus the Democrats.
In a sane world, and I've talked about it before on this show, so for anybody who's a new listener to this, you know, just to give you a quick update on how this works.
In a sane world, the United States political spectrum, the two-party system, which it shouldn't be a two-party system, but that's a different thing altogether.
In a sane world, we would call, like, moderate Democrats Republicans.
That's what's happened.
Starting in the 1990s, the Democratic Party moved right towards Republicanism.
After they looked at Ronald Reagan, they said, we're not going to beat Ronald Reagan and the people like him in elections.
We have to become more like them.
And they moved right.
The DLC started this.
That is what happened in the Democratic Party so far in this primary.
The battle between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, because I don't want to not mention her name because a crime was done against her campaign.
That battle was actually how American politics should look.
That's actually what we should be doing.
Where both parties actually care about human beings, right?
It's just an argument about how to best serve them and how to best make the apparatus work.
That's not what happens.
The Republican Party is not interested in helping humans.
It's interested in helping itself, its white base, and its corporate base.
Let me throw this out there as a question for you.
Does Bernie get the nomination if he's running against an incumbent like Romney?
And the context being that this is a singular election that we can't lose.
Now, in 2004, I feel like we almost had a similar situation where we had a horribly incompetent president.
Anybody but Kerry wins.
Like, if you had done a vote anybody but Kerry, that got more votes than Kerry would have gotten, it seemed like, in those polls.
And Kerry was just one of the worst, you know, Candidates we've ever sent up to go against an incumbent president.
So my question here is it's like it were we motivated to completely Attacked, you know to the center or even right simply because it's Trump and that I know we talked about electability ad nauseum But I do wonder if you know Absent him we would be much more willing to like let's do this Yeah, I think that played a big role in a lot of this.
I mean, because the other thing about it is, and if you watch this play out in discussions and in debate, the question was always who could appeal to more Americans.
It wasn't on the substance, right?
And now that it's becoming clear that Biden's going to win the nomination, the question is whether or not the Bernie Sanders crowd can make him start to adopt some of his policy and to take on some of his economic reform.
I will say that today, and we're taping this on Thursday, March 12th, after Trump's Oval Office speech last night, I wouldn't even call it a speech, it was a dirge.
It was so disgusting and disappointing.
And we should have all known, it's like Lucy holding the football.
But today, after all this chaos, and after Trump giving out so much information and screwing so much up, Biden gave a speech?
And Sanders gave a speech.
And I had forgotten what it was like to see a leader out in front of a crisis.
Both of them gave amazing speeches.
Biden was more presidential.
Like, you know, let's call it what it is.
Biden was, you know, standing up on a stage in front of flags and suited up and had the tenor and tone of a president.
That's what it was.
And he was talking about selfless leadership.
He was saying Democrats and Republicans are equally affected by this thing, which is a message that Donald Trump should have been giving from the beginning, but is incapable of.
And Bernie Sanders brought up the points that needed brought up, which is...
You know, it's not enough to go and give out bailouts to companies and businesses and corporations that are in trouble.
People are going to be thrown out of their homes.
People are going to be living in their cars.
People aren't going to have money for drugs.
They're not going to have money for medication.
They're not going to have money for food and housing.
Like, there's a ripple effect.
And again, this is one of the reasons why this is a big cumulative problem.
The government right now is most concerned with the economy because the government is always just instantly concerned with the economy.
We have to start talking about the human effect here because we're going to look up in a few weeks and society is not going to be recognizable.
It's going to be really ugly and really sad and it's going to happen like that.
Well, how about this?
Like, maybe an hour after Donald Trump has this speech, or whatever you want to call it, and he's also mentioned how we need to come together and not be, you know, partisan about this, he's throwing Nancy Pelosi flame all over the place because she doesn't want to support the payroll tax cut.
In an instant, he's already doing that.
What does non-partisan mean?
And then, a few hours later, he starts to bring up the FISA bill and how there's an illegal attempted coup of, you know, the president and stuff.
It's like, Here's the thing.
He's got his chance.
He had his chance to do this.
It really went horribly wrong.
He was impeached.
This is as big of a failure of a presidency as you ever could have.
And I honestly feel like if you were to tell it to someone who's a Republican, they might be like, what are you talking about?
It's not a failure.
They still wouldn't even be able to feel that.
And maybe now, maybe today, or maybe tomorrow, as this thing becomes worse, they'll maybe start to feel that way.
Or just enough of those people in Pennsylvania or Michigan might finally feel a little bit differently and vote for Biden.
But I don't even know.
Here's my problem.
I'm now turning this terrible crisis into a political spectacle of who's going to get elected.
And I feel terrible about that.
Well, we can't take our eye off that ball.
And I want to put this out there.
I want to go on the record saying this.
I wish so badly that Donald Trump wasn't a failure.
I wish that he wasn't.
I wish so, so badly.
I wish I had been wrong about him in 2015 and 2016 when I was going to the rallies, when I was talking about growing fascism, when I was yelling about what he was going to be as president.
I wish, Nick, that I was wrong.
I wish so badly that I was wrong.
And the problem is, It's obvious.
It's just right there.
Everybody knows who this person is, and he's incapable.
And that's the terrifying thing, is he's just, he's incapable.
And it's obvious who he is and what he is.
But we can't take our eye off the political ball.
And this is the thing that we have to talk about in this podcast.
His instincts, again, are authoritarian.
And I can tell you from looking at history, and studying the history of authoritarianism, when they get an office, they don't leave.
They don't leave, Nick.
They don't leave willingly, and they don't leave unless something momentous happens.
It's like bedbugs.
It's almost impossible to get rid of them.
And when they get in office, because what ends up happening, going back to what I was saying, they are incompetent, and they are disasters.
And when they are incompetent, and when they are a disaster, and they screw everything up, there's inevitably a crisis that they made.
And when they're dealing with that, they will blame everyone else.
And then it always presents an opportunity to do away with civil liberties and free and fair elections.
And I can tell you right now, because the Republican Party is already testing this.
Limbaugh was saying this today.
They have been talking about it.
Actually, they've been talking about it for the entirety of Donald Trump's election.
Or, of his presidency.
Trump, I think, said this within a month of being inaugurated.
He's like, well, maybe we just won't have elections.
Ah, just joking.
They're not joking.
They're not joking.
We have to make it a priority not only to deal with this coronavirus thing, we have to make it a priority to say we have to have free and fair elections.
Because if we don't, this thing's gonna slip out of our hands, and you and I, Nick, I mean, we're not old, but we're getting up there.
Like, we're not gonna see another one.
If we let this thing go, if we let that that horse out of the barn, there's no putting it back.
Yeah, and I said this before, you know, you get into eight years of this, and then you're going to have, you know, imagine if you were, I don't know, eight years old when in 2016 or 20, you know, January 2017, you're now going to have your entire formative years, you know, formed under this administration.
And that's a surefire way to create a generation of people who are simply like resigned to that.
That's what life is like what's supposed to be.
That's what happens.
Yeah.
And you know it's funny because someone was talking about like millennials most of them have sort of lived in this world like a post 9-11 world where all they've ever had was an endless series of like recessions and war and all sorts of you know and no jobs coming out of college and you know that's why they like Bernie that's what they want to have change and I get it you know and the reason why we're not as so passionate about us because we might remember a time in the 90s when things were really good you know there wasn't war we were on the brink of like
World peace for a long time with great economy and all things you know people helping each other that we were on the verge of that and certainly it felt that way and again remember the government is not real it's only how we feel it is but that's what Clinton had done even amidst the impeachment that he went through and you know it didn't take long and the irony that Trump is yelling about the FISA stuff well that was out of 9-11 stuff where they were able to radically change our civil liberties under the guise of fighting a war on terror that would never end.
Yeah, if we didn't have that war on terror that never ended that cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, maybe we could have created a healthcare system where people could get treated and people could be treated like, I don't know, humans.
And all of a sudden we could help stave off a pandemic.
Oh, and by the way, these are the same people!
Who, by the way, one of the reasons why we're dealing with a pandemic more than likely is because of global climate change and deforestation and, you know, the constant attack on other species around the world.
These are the same people who do that.
These are the same people who have created this entire problem and are now in charge of trying to fix it.
And they're not going to fix it.
They're not going to fix it.
And they are terrified.
And this is the problem with Donald Trump.
Donald Trump can't fix the problem, right?
Donald Trump is terrified because he knows deep down he can't fix the problem.
Well, I'll tell you what happens instinctually, and this is why our elections are in trouble.
Immediately, and the next poll that comes out is going to be...
If there is a poll, by the way.
If we can still poll Americans to find out what they think, you know.
But the next poll that comes out is going to be bad.
Because everyone's aware.
Even Republicans know that this is bad.
It's going to start creeping into his brain.
And he's not going to recognize that he's doing it, but he's talking all over the place about his emergency powers, what he can do.
I guarantee somebody explained to him the Stafford Act, and he understands that he can use FEMA and emergency powers to really do away with everything in America, you know, and tune it to his liking.
And what happens with authoritarians, the idea gets in their head, and their own personal interests start mixing together with their opinions about what should happen, and they will kill us all.
They will kill everybody else to save themselves, and they'll kill everything that is good and decent in this world to save themselves.
And that's where we're going, because this is not going to get better.
He's not capable, and he's not going to face up to what he's done.
We're looking at some bad things.
I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that he's not thinking of it in terms of, I will kill everybody to save myself.
I think what he's thinking is simply, I must save myself.
I must enrich myself.
I must save myself.
Because remember, if he loses the election and the Democrats take over or keep the House, maybe they get the Senate, I would imagine they're going to charge him With obstruction of justice and all the things that that Mueller felt like he couldn't charge him when he was in the office.
So remember, he's got that, you know, so this is all about him.
So, you know, but either way, I feel like he's he has zero empathy.
He's a monster, but I do feel like it doesn't he doesn't get out of the box of I must save myself and my family and that is it.
And I don't even think he gets to the point where it's like and anybody who dies or who suffers horribly is part of that equation.
No, it's not.
It's totally unconscious, save for maybe a moment of recognition that thing goes unconscious.
But let me throw this out there for any listener who is hearing this and maybe saying, I don't know about all this.
Let me take us down a road.
Can I do that really quickly?
Sure.
And I'm going to ask you some questions, Nick.
Okay.
How did the majority of Americans vote?
Democratic.
That's the best joke!
Actually, physically, how do they vote?
Well, the majority, I think they still go in the darn thing and pull the levers and fill in the little bubbles.
So, they touch a lever, or they use a touchscreen, or they fill it out, they hand it to a poll worker.
You have to go through a place, right?
In a line.
You have to wait in line for hours, among other people.
By the way, have you ever had to do that?
Have you ever had to wait in line for hours?
I've had to wait in line for about an hour, hour and a half, give or take.
Wow, never have.
It's garbage.
And by the way, that's all the design of Republicans.
You want to keep going with the theme of the show, which is that Republicans have created this entire mess and now they're in charge of it.
So wait in line hours with other people who could be possibly infected with a highly contagious disease.
Then you go in and you use stuff that might transmit a disease which by the way the coronavirus my understanding is lives on surfaces sometimes up to three days which you know bodes well for all these ways in order to vote elections by definition are when people come together so those are you know mass gatherings that could spread coronavirus
Me telling you as an authoritarian who's facing electoral consequences, gee I don't know Mr. President, this could be a situation that could actually spread the coronavirus.
That's, in your head, if you know you're going to lose that election, that's not hard.
You know what I mean?
That's like a real quick job.
So you're saying they'll postpone it or get rid of the election altogether?
Well, it always starts that way.
It always starts with postponements, and I promise that we're going to hold it as soon as it's humanly possible.
And that's what authoritarians do.
And then all of a sudden, there's fallout from that.
Because if you postpone the elections, you're not going to win the next election!
Because you postponed the election!
It shows that you're not in control of the situation.
People like this, they are an archetype.
They are a single-minded entity.
And you can go throughout history and look at what they've done, and it happens every time.
They promise they'll uphold democratic institutions, and then they never do.
And he is so obvious about it, that you can tell just by his actions alone what he's going to do.
And this thing is not going to get better, and it's only going to get worse.
I can follow that line of reasoning for absolutely.
I only can hope that as these kind of viruses tend to wax and wane and into the summer that it will be minimized you know in that November area before it will come back.
Do you want to do you want to bring it back Mr. President?
We just went through so much do you want to bring back the virus that killed so many of us?
Exactly!
There's always a way, particularly with these people, on how to control and keep power.
There's always a reason.
They don't wake up thinking, I'm gonna be Mussolini.
They wake up as Mussolini!
That's the problem!
And Mussolini never in his life thought he was doing the wrong thing.
That's who these people are.
They are completely convinced that they're doing it for other people when all they're doing is serving their own interest and ego.
And that's who Donald Trump is.
That's who he's always been.
I mean, yes.
I can't add to that.
I'm sorry.
What you said is right.
And maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe I'm wrong.
I haven't been wrong about this guy so far.
But maybe I'm wrong about this.
Maybe this is the line he won't cross.
Well, I'll tell you what.
Speaking of washing your hands, putting on hand sanitizer, all that stuff.
Staying away from groups.
Maybe you wouldn't get coronavirus if you didn't do all those things.
But you should prepare.
And we should prepare as a country for the worst case scenario with this guy because he's already shown he's capable of the worst case scenario.
He's broken every law.
He's challenged every institution.
He's broken every norm.
He's ruined our political system.
And we have to understand that it's not hyperbole and it's not paranoid to look at this guy and look at history and understand that this is a thing that could happen.
Oh, and he's dodging bullets left and right.
He's hanging out with Bolsonaro at Mar-a-Lago, who's now in quarantine and might have it, where his press secretary, I believe, does have it, for sure.
And he was taking pictures next to him.
So, you know, the idea that Trump is not going to get it, I don't know how it's possible.
I don't wish anybody that kind of ill, but I tell you, it's going to be shocking to me if he doesn't get it the way this is coming out.
Gates almost had it, and I think they tested him.
Oh, we can talk about that for a second.
So nobody can get the test, right?
It's really hard to get, even if you have symptoms.
There's way too many checkboxes that you have to click up, and primarily because they're hoarding it because they don't have enough.
So, you know, Matt Gates, you know, I was hanging out with somebody, don't have any symptoms, but I'm going to get the test, and I'm going to get the results back in less than a day.
Like, what's that about?
Why is that okay?
You know what it's about.
I mean, I know what it's about.
It's about money and power.
I mean, the tests are out there in order.
I mean, the tests are there.
They've been readily available, and they haven't been distributed, and the protocol's been stupid, and it's been because we have a baby president who doesn't want bad things associated with him.
South Korea has tested more people in one day yesterday, for instance, than we've tested in total.
How many did the CDC test yesterday?
Did you see that figure?
No. 80.
I mean, it's frightening.
And meanwhile, South Korea is testing 10,000 people a day.
Drive-thru.
80.
80.
By the way, do you know that we have drive-thru?
They have the capability to do this in a couple different cities.
Yeah, and they've decided that they don't want to do it because they, quote-unquote, don't want to interfere in the relationship between a patient and their doctor.
Right.
Well, I think some of those local people are going to still do some version of it anyway.
But yes, that was what they were trying to say.
And I like how the question at that point was, are you trying to say that you don't want to interrupt the cash flow here, you know, between what they're going to bill?
They tried to walk back from that, but it really wasn't much of an explanation.
So, yes, why... And by the way, going to labs and getting tested is how everybody does it.
I don't, like, go to my doctor who then walks me over to the lab personally and then administers the test.
You know, I go there, they do the test, and my doctor calls me later.
This is exactly what should be happening now.
Frightening.
And again, these are lifelong professionals who know this stuff.
And we don't know whether there's a gun to their head and they are forced to be having to say certain things because the administration is dictating it.
I mean, we already know what the CDC was doing.
They had to take themselves off of the press release when they flew people back to the mainland from China because it was such a stupid idea that directly led to the spread.
Yeah, and you know, not to get too Twelve Monkeys on us here, and not to get too apocalyptic, but I want people to think about this like a tower.
Right.
The institutions and the systems of the world are built from the bottom up, like it starts very, very local and very, very, you know, isolated.
And then it grows and grows and grows.
And as it goes up, it gets wider and wider and wider, which is not the way it's supposed to work.
Right.
It's not you know, it's not sound.
And what we've seen now and you know, this goes to Like myself, for instance.
We were talking before we started taping.
I'm very bummed that the NCAA tournament isn't being held.
Like, it's one of the highlights of my year.
It's the right thing to do.
It should not be held.
The NCAA waited way too long to cancel the tournament, and actually only canceled the tournaments after the major conferences.
The Big Ten, the Big Twelve, the ACC canceled their conference championships, and then when schools like Duke and Kansas said, we will not send our teams.
Those people underneath the NCAA forced the NCAA's hands.
That's also what's happening with coronavirus.
If you listen to any interviews with governors right now, they're like, the states, and we forget that in America.
We forget that this is actually the United States of America and the federal government is supposed to be up here and answering to the states and the states answering the federal government.
We just think about the federal government now.
Governors are out there saying the federal government has failed.
Donald Trump is incapable.
We're doing stuff on our own now.
Because this apparatus, this giant thing that has been created, is not working.
So the lower floors have to start taking responsibility.
And I keep telling people this.
The answer right now is local organization.
We have to depend on ourselves and stop depending on the top because the top sucks.
Well, guess what?
That tower, when you build it up so far, when our systems continue and grow and that administration and bureaucracy grow and grow and grow, towers fall.
Yeah.
They just fall.
Because they are instable and they are incapable of continuing.
And unfortunately, that is where we are.
We're in a tower.
All of us are in a tower that we didn't build, that was built around us.
And that tower is swaying.
And it's perilously close to falling.
And if people think that this thing can't get really bad, look around you right now.
Society is very, very thin and fragile.
And we have to keep an eye on that because, again, it could get really bad.
Right.
Well, the tower is going to fall because it's a controlled demolition.
But the first call the NCAA made, and by the way, there's people out there who know what I'm talking about, nonetheless.
The first call the NCAA made, which is why it took so long, was probably the CBS.
And CBS didn't answer the phone right away.
So that's why they had to wait and figure out whether they were going to cancel.
Why didn't they answer the phone right away?
Because I'm sure CBS doesn't want to deal with the fact that they're not going to pay anybody any money because there's no tournament.
How much money is wrapped up in the NCAA Tournament?
It's like a couple billion maybe each year?
It's a couple of billion, and I want to put everybody who's listening, because again, this is the problem.
When we think about these things, we think about evil, right?
We think about Snidely Whiplash or, you know, like a 1920s villain in a silent movie twirling a mustache and doing evil deeds.
These are people who are in a boardroom surrounded by lawyers and advisors.
And on one hand, it's like, oh, here are human lives.
On the other hand, here are billions of dollars.
And the fact that they weigh them the way they do is the essence of evil in this country.
They don't realize they're evil.
They think they're making a decision based on two equal things when they're not.
One is made up and one is real and sacred.
And they just don't.
Get it.
And that's what's going on here.
It's that move between human lives and money.
And it's been the problem for decades.
And that contract, by the way, between CBS and TBS and TNT is $1.1 billion per year.
It averages out to the colleges.
None of which ever gets to the actual people who are making the money for them on the court.
I mean, you can argue that's like in the facilities and all.
We can have another podcast about that.
But the bottom line is, It's just another version of what you just stated and how these things are structured.
And it's, you know, hey, capitalism!
I guess that's what we're going to get, you know, when you have a capitalistic society.
But what happens when you get into the crises like this and you're not prepared because you fire 80% of the response team that was designed to handle this?
But it's not capitalism.
Because capitalism is actually about allowing markets to play out for themselves.
And I've got my problems with capitalism.
This is hyper-capitalism.
This is syndicate capitalism.
What happened today with these bailout packages is actually a modified version, which is just like the Republican Party, like you brought up, Nick.
They have all these quote-unquote principles that don't really matter.
They don't really believe them except for themselves.
They don't want other people to have help.
They don't want other people to have dignity.
They want the power and they want the money to themselves.
It's a malleable principle, right?
That's what's happening with our economy is you have a group of people who are powerful and have made all the laws and they own Congress and they own the presidency and so they get bailed out all the time.
They're actually picking winners and losers.
They're not actually allowing the market to play out, because that's how this system is designed.
And you just put your finger exactly on it.
It's that top-down structure, that trickle-down structure.
And if you want to talk about American workers, you can talk about the exploitation of them, and you can talk about the exploitation of athletes who aren't paid their due.
It all works the same way, and that is the power structure of the world, unfortunately.
And that is why we're now facing a really deadly pandemic that threatens myself, and you, and our families.
You know, it's a great way to come back all the way around to what we're doing, dealing with this age package and how the money works and how money affects everybody.
And hopefully, as we go through our history, every once in a while, there's these moments that peak up, that show, that adjust for those things.
And somebody gets some justice for a minute and it moves us forward.
We have progress, which is what we're always looking for.
We want progress.
We don't want to keep going backwards.
We want to be able to continue to progress and help people and do things that lead to those things versus what Make America Great Again stands for.
So it's a really, really challenging time that we are in right now to figure out how to get to those ends and get back on this path of progress.
Yeah, I hope we can learn from this, and I hope there's lessons right now that are just laid bare.
They're obvious for anyone who wants to actually look at it, and there's no arguing anymore what this economy does and what this power structure does.
We want to thank you, though, for hanging out with us for a few minutes.
We know these are anxious times.
We're trying to do our best to get information to you and give you context that you're not getting elsewhere.
You know, we don't want to just hype up the fear of coronavirus.
And I've seen some stuff on TV today that just made me shake my head and reminded me why Nick and I put our time in this.
So we really, really appreciate you.
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