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March 27, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
01:03:43
Why Easter Will Resurrect The Coronavirus

Donald Trump is proposing reopening the country on Easter and the market and evangelicals love it. Nick Hauselman and Jared Yates Sexton discuss this, the looming danger of the pandemic, and welcome human rights activist Charlotte Clymer on to talk about the danger of an authoritarian in a time of crisis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?
And if that's the exchange, I'm all in.
Easter's a very special day for me.
And you'll have packed churches all over our country.
I think it would be a beautiful time.
And it's just about the timeline that I think is right.
That would be a great American resurrection.
Two and a half plus weeks from now.
That's very good.
But I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they're going to be.
I don't believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.
You know, you go into a major hospital sometimes, they'll have two ventilators.
And now, all of a sudden, they're saying, can we order 30,000 ventilators?
Hi everybody.
It is March 26.
Thursday, I think.
I've lost track of days every now and then.
Every day is Thursday.
Every day is Thursday.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I am your co-host, Jared Yates.
Next time I'm here with my favorite co-host, Nick Halseman.
We are talking today on the day that America has topped the charts on coronavirus infections.
USA number one.
So we're going to talk about that at the end of the pod.
Please stick around.
A really special conversation with Charlotte Clymer, a human rights activist.
A really, really good conversation talking about the human rights vulnerabilities that we have, particularly in times of crisis.
In the meantime, Nick, we're number one.
How do you feel?
It's like my first number one hit I ever recorded on my last album.
It's amazing.
It's like driving down the road and hearing it on the radio, right?
Yes.
Now, here's the problem with that, though.
This is not the Eagles singing a beautiful multi-part harmony song.
Here's the thing.
Everyone wants to sort of put the stock in the fact that when we test more, that's sort of like this magic serum that's going to solve everything.
But all I hear about more testing is more sick people and more deaths.
And that's really what it's going to mean because that graph is not leveling off anytime soon.
Yeah, we're in this weird place now where... What was the analogy people were saying for a while?
Like, it's out of the barn, right?
This testing thing, what we're talking about right now, would have made a huge difference a while back when the Trump administration completely screwed the pooch on this thing.
And now we're in a place where, number one, our numbers are not accurate.
I mean, they're huge.
But we're actually getting more and more confirmed cases now from people who are going to the hospital because their lives are in danger.
And so we actually have a situation where people who could have gotten ahead of this thing or could have not gotten infected are now in a lot of really dire circumstances.
People are dying.
And again, we've talked about this.
It's not just senior citizens.
It's all ages.
It's all kinds of different people.
And it's a really scary, frightening thing and probably even more scary.
I know it is.
It's actually way more scary because we have a president who has no idea what he's doing and seems completely determined to pretend like this isn't a real issue and put more lives in risk.
Well, here's the other thing.
It's the number I want to keep my eye on isn't necessarily the number of people who are infected or even deaths.
The number I keep my eye on is number of hospital beds because that is the real issue here is once those beds are filled up in the ICU with only COVID and we saw there was an article in a New York ER doc who they don't see any other cases.
It's all COVID all the time every single day all day long.
So it's like you better not have an appendicitis.
You better not have a heart attack.
God forbid you get into a car accident.
Try and have a baby.
Yeah, where are you gonna supposed to be administered?
How are you supposed to get care that way when it's completely filled and here's the thing It's not like it's filled as if it's like a rash of car accidents happened.
God forbid It is the kind of thing where they have to be quarantined you can't be anywhere near those other people for fear of infection and that's that is really the most serious part of this whole thing is that we're not prepared to I'm not going to rake the administration over the coals for not having enough hospital beds.
We're not China, which we can build three hospitals in two days.
But at the very least, it is what it is.
We have a certain amount of space and a certain amount of beds.
And that's where it starts to get scary.
And that doesn't have to be anywhere.
We're not just talking about New York or Florida or California.
It's everywhere across the country because those hospitals are all designed to treat normal amounts of people who are sick, not this.
So we got a lot of new listeners.
So before people turn this off and lose their minds, we talk about what's actually happening.
We get down into the brass tacks of it.
We always try and have a moment of hope to end these things.
So we got to talk about the hard things right now.
And the hard things are this.
Capacity is being reached all around the country.
In all kinds of hospitals and medical facilities.
What people I don't think necessarily understand and it's one of those things where like obviously people are losing people all around the country.
And just because you haven't lost somebody doesn't mean that the numbers aren't increasing at an unbelievable rate.
And I was reading something this morning about New York City.
You have thousands of New York City cops right now who are coming down with this thing, who are coming, you know, calling in sick and other people are having to pick up the slack.
People are having to work.
I know personally people who are having to work like 16, 18 hour shifts in prisons.
You know, everything is under pressure right now.
And it's building and building and building on the next few days are going to get even worse.
And I'm with you.
It's not necessarily about building hospitals, I have to say, so open this podcast with the joke about USA being number one, we need to talk about American exceptionalism for a minute, and talk about the fact that so much of Trump's response to this and Americans response to this, is this idea, and talk about the fact that so much of Trump's response to this and Americans response to this, is this idea, this myth that America is the greatest country of all time, it's ordained by God, and that somehow or another is going to save us or it's going to reduce
We have doctors and nurses and medical practitioners wearing garbage bags.
Right.
Being told to come into work and wear bandanas over their face.
Yeah, it's an outdated system, right?
And what has happened is it has exposed, number one, the federal government has completely failed to give anything to the states.
And we're going to talk more about that later because I totally believe that Donald Trump is setting this, not only setting this thing up to fail, but he's setting up the blame for it on governors.
And state governments.
That's where this thing is eventually going to go.
And basically, he's going to tell everyone, you can drop dead, call your governor, don't bother to call me.
And that's coming.
But there's also the fact that the federal government has not even been providing gowns and masks and respirators and all the stuff they're supposed to be doing.
And you won't talk about America.
And people who are in the know have known about this for years.
Infant mortality rates are up, right?
Like in America, it's really more dangerous to have a kid than it is in a lot of so-called second and third world countries.
Why wasn't it true before this, right?
Oh, way before this.
All of our system has been decrepit and it's been decrepit for decades and it's been decrepit because every time that anyone has ever talked about updating it or giving it money or reforming it, the Republican Party and Republican media outlets have gone out and this has been a decision, a talking point, is to say there is no problem.
That's all that they have done for decades and it's about insurance and also medical care and they have created this system and that is bound to fail.
It's at their doorstep and they have a responsibility for all of this.
Well, they have figured out ways where they can sound like they're criticizing.
Sure.
It kind of seems like, yeah, but then in practice, you're right.
They don't want to have much reform.
And that's a real problem because we just had the most major reform we've ever had in Obamacare to begin that process.
And why that wasn't the beginning of the process where we can continue to refine it and make it better and make people, you know, it became like this sort of, you know, rallying cry to destroy it and remove it.
And then the worst part about it is just like these ventilators are on their way.
They don't have a plan.
They've never had a plan.
In fact... Oh man, this gets me riled up every time.
I'm so glad you said it the way that you did.
Whatever the Republican plan is that they seem to want to replace Obamacare with is sort of always forever on its way.
They don't have a plan.
They've never had a plan.
In fact, oh man, this gets me riled up every time.
I'm so glad you said it the way that you did.
Their plan was Obamacare.
Right.
That was the Republican plan.
For those of you who haven't heard me rant about this, and I'm happy to rant about this every couple of minutes, I'm totally fine because this is an indictment and a damnation.
Obamacare, as we know it, the Affordable Care Act, was cooked up and invented by the Heritage Foundation.
And if you want to talk about how conservative the Heritage Foundation is, it's the group that has more or less told every Republican how to govern and what to push and what to do for decades.
This was the group that controlled the Reagan presidency, if you want to know how far right they are.
Their first test case with Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, that reform was Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.
Thank God he's negative for coronavirus.
Oh my god.
And so you're exactly right.
They don't have a plan.
Their plan was used up.
But what happens is, and this is the history no one likes talking about, every time the Democrats, and Democrats are the only ones who bring this up, they're the only ones who say this is an actual reform.
And they always, and sometimes this is good, and sometimes this is problematic, they always make it more moderate than maybe they should.
Right?
Because they want to bring Republicans in.
They want to do a bipartisan thing.
They give Republicans things that they want and they're like trying to sweeten the deal.
Then Republicans meet and they're like, we cannot give them a political victory.
Right?
If you want to know anything about the Obama presidency and what happened, They knew that Obama was more or less a center-left, center, center-right president.
He was right in the middle of the American quote-unquote consensus, and they were terrified of him for that.
And they knew that if he governed like that, and they didn't stand in front of him, that he would not just win re-election, he would change the entire political dynamic.
All of this was about political positioning, and it always has been, and we're watching people die right now because of that.
Well, let's make sure we give blame to Senator Palpatine, a.k.a.
Joe Lieberman, for being the casting vote to get rid of single-payer because that would have gotten the boulder rolling down the mountain a lot faster to get further reforms for the Affordable Care Act.
So, we must pay attention to that too.
Yeah, this is just a continuation and it's kind of like the notion of, you know, how is it possible that we wouldn't get universal health care out of this whole epidemic?
Right?
How is it possible that we could possibly have the entire meltdown of the American economy and the American medical system and they're not going to change anything, Nick?
They're not going to change anything.
They're going to throw money at people, which, by the way, I'm waiting for that check, too, and everybody else is waiting for that check.
Everybody's going to have the same amount of money.
It's not going to do a whole lot of anything.
It's throwing a Band-Aid on a bleeding wound, and nobody can even have a real conversation about changing big things right now.
It's incredible to me.
Well, yeah, but no, what they are going to change is everyone can be out for Easter.
Can we talk about that?
Let's talk about the deal that they finally passed late last night in the Senate and how this is going to merge with what the House wants and all these different things because we've seen other countries like Canada just passed I think it's like six months there everyone's gonna get over 2,000 bucks each Like, to me, that's a pretty reasonable solution there to handle all the businesses that are going to go out of business and all the people who are going on unemployment.
You know, we're not doing that here.
I still can't quite put a finger on exactly how long this is supposed to last, how many months that people are going to get actual checks.
And by the way, if you don't have direct deposit hooked up to your IRS account, then if they're going to mail it to you, that could take four months before you see the first check.
And that's people are starving by then.
They're on the streets by then, even if they're going to try and make landlords not kick anybody out after X amount of months, probably only two or three months tops.
So it's really strange to me that that part of the response.
And then you top off.
Did you see Lindsey Graham talking about this the other night, last night, and how he freaking literally echoed welfare queen ideology again.
And I just don't understand how people in 2020 can, with a straight face, sort of pose this image of people willing to throw away their entire career just so they can collect a couple dollars an hour more in unemployment benefits for four months.
And that's what he really thinks is how people might react to that.
We know who he's talking about, but it's just disgusting.
And he's probably thinking he's being a good guy on that.
It just occurred to me and you know, I keep having these when you pay enough attention to politics, you start to recognize patterns and history repeating itself.
I had not considered until this very moment, and you can't see me because this is a podcast, but I am crestfallen and just demoralized.
I just thought about the fact that when these checks start coming out, Fox News is going to run one segment after another about what African Americans are spending their money on.
And it's just going to be round-the-clock, race-baiting bullshit.
Because you're exactly right with this welfare queen bullshit.
That's what they've always done.
And, you know, in the interview with Charlotte Clymer that's going to air in a little bit, she said something that kind of stopped me a little bit cold in my tracks because I've been angry about the fact that they're, you know, throwing checks at this thing and not really making any large scale changes.
And we can talk about what changes need to happen, which I think we should.
But Charlotte said, It reminded Charlotte of continuing resolutions in Congress, which is where Congress recognizes there's a large problem.
They can't do anything, and so they just kick the can down to another moment.
And so we're probably I would say probably every month that this goes on.
And it's going to go on.
By the way, we haven't even talked about the fact that jobless claims today hit 3.2 million.
3.2 million.
The previous historical rise was 600,000.
Are you trying to say that in one day?
And it's since this whole thing took place.
It's 3.2.
Yeah, this 3.2 million Americans filed for unemployment claims.
That's amazing.
If anybody doesn't know the history of that, that is like catastrophic.
And this is a thing that is going to continue for a very long time.
And if they continue resolutioning this, The battles that we're going to have and the cultural wars, oh my god, the white identity vilification of minorities is going to get bad.
And if you thought Obama bucks was bad, and it was, this is going to be a whole different ballgame, particularly when Trump realizes he can score political points on it.
That is going to be a really brutal thing.
Well, let's play some of these scenarios out because I found it interesting.
I teased Easter Sunday being a big outing for everybody if Trump has his way.
He wants to see the churches full of people, Nick.
Yeah, well, there's so... You're right, because he'll be there, and he's a big churchgoer.
Here's the thing, though, is, you know, there seems to be the slightest bit of evidence that the social distancing... Well, A, we know that it works.
And, in fact, I'm not even sure why anybody's putting faith in testing.
Like, at Cedars-Sinai right now, in LA, they're not really testing anybody.
They're just assuming, with certain criteria, that you have it.
Because it takes too long... We are swimming in it.
Yes, so it's like the test is not the test anymore.
Now they're just worrying about mitigating those issues and also, you know, social distancing.
So why don't we all just pretend that we have it, do extreme social distancing, and let's just be a little bit more cautious than normal and go an extra couple weeks than what we would think we would normally have to do.
Just make it, like, you know, into May.
It makes no sense why we'd be screwing around with this at all.
But it's sort of like the same argument we would make with, like, climate change.
Why would we screw around with, like, arguing over details about how much this is affecting us or how little?
Let's just kind of go a little extra cautious and, like, stop polluting as much as we are.
Same thing here.
Why not just social distance a little bit longer?
But here's what's going to happen.
If people listen to Trump, and by the way, people listen to Trump in blue states, too.
If they listen to him and they start congregating and we get a rebound and another spike, now you're talking about unemployment getting to 20%, maybe higher.
Then you're talking about a huge run because the money that this bailout package has given us a nice run in the stock market the last three days, some big gains, some gains.
You're talking about it could go down to $12,000.
And I can say this, if it ever got down that low that quickly, it'll never get back to $29,000 again in our lifetimes.
I'm supposed to be hopeful, but I'm sorry.
No, we'll get there.
Believe me, we'll get there somehow, in some way.
I was watching Trump's virtual town hall on Fox News, which was really incredible and just made things so obvious and so clear what's happening there.
When he announced this Easter thing, and I wrote about this, just a personal plug, and the New Republic has my article up.
Oh well.
As he was announcing the Easter thing, Over on the side of the screen was like a list of the infections and deaths and it was just going up and guess what else was going up as he said that?
The stock market.
They love the idea that we're going to open up on Easter and it's just momentary gains.
It's momentary confidence but it's all about this idea that The economy sucks and is unstable, and it's not built to work.
Like, I want people to think about an individual, like the people who right now who aren't able to go to work.
Like, all of us suffer if we can't go to work, right?
All of us, you know, none of us are ready to just lose our jobs and just have our income completely dry up.
We should live in a country, though, where outside of a pandemic, just in regular life, let's say you get pneumonia, right?
If you're up and about and trying to do your job with pneumonia, you can die, right?
We should live in a world where if you get pneumonia, you rest until you're healthy and then you go back to work.
Guess what?
That's how the economy should work, too.
We should have an economy that can change and morph into something different.
I brought up this analogy on Twitter, I think, today.
It's like in California.
They build buildings that can withstand earthquakes.
Right?
You engineer something based upon what threats might come along or what disruptions might come along.
We should, like a person who gets sick, we should have an economy that can go and rest for a few days or a couple of weeks and handle a month or two of social isolation because this thing isn't just going to magically go away.
If you talk to experts, we're going to be dealing with this for at least a year.
We're probably going to have multiple shutdowns, and what are they going to do?
They're going to get together and shut us down for a week, but everyone gets antsy and stir crazy, and all of a sudden we just go back outside and kill millions?
Is that how this thing's going to work?
Because that's not sustainable.
Right, well let's not forget that there is some indication, there is some notion, that in warmer weather it doesn't carry as much and might die down too, sort of like in the flu.
But we don't know if that's really the case or not.
We have no idea.
So the only hope we have is that they get a vaccine.
And again, they had a breakthrough recently.
But again, even though that part went as fast as ever has gone in the history of the world of vaccines, The rest of the process that goes along with that, it takes forever, and it'll be at least a year still.
It's not going to go any faster than that.
So yeah, it can come back again in full force anyway, just by matter of course, in the fall when it gets cold anyway.
But you're right.
The way they print money and the way they're talking about a $2 trillion stimulus or relief package, it's almost like how could they have ever with a straight face told us that, oh, we don't have money for these different programs ever at any time?
So disgusting.
And by the way, you're talking, well, we're talking about the coronavirus.
Scientists will tell you we are statistically, it's a certainty we're going to have other things besides the coronavirus.
Yeah.
We're going to have other infections and super diseases because of climate change and because of deforestation and because humans infringing on the territory of animals and just the way that this economy makes us live
is going to bring these things on like this is a if you think about the way the world is organized through neoliberal globalism it's set up for this it's set it's set up to to bring them into the population and to spread them we're going to have more of this well i mean you look at we have it every year the flu The primary driver of the flu being spread is because people are so afraid of losing their jobs that they go into work when they're sick.
And it's the same thing here, but only 0.1% of people die from that.
So suddenly it's not like, oh, it's acceptable to do that.
But imagine that.
The pressure of having to not lose your job if you have the flu is so great that they'll go in and they'll spread it across the country every freaking year.
And that's where we are now with this thing.
And I want to put it in the most base human terms imaginable.
This economy sucks.
Like, it's not even really a good, effective economy.
It's really good at funneling money.
It's really good at moving wealth around, particularly to the wealthy, right?
It's like the equivalent of, you know, it's like those old, like, things you put on your nightstand that move with water and it moves things around, only this one's stuck.
And it's just the silt is just going down onto one end.
It's not good for anyone.
Everyone is miserable.
And this is one of those things that I actually hope people during this quarantining period, I really hope they're taking a notice of this, which is The economy isn't just a thing that happens and affects how much you get paid.
It changes your clock.
It changes the way that you function as a person.
And we've all been moving so fast and we've been so concerned with the accumulation of wealth and property and quote unquote power, which none of the power really exists outside of this down here.
We lose track of living.
You know what I mean?
Like it sucks to be stuck in a place and you miss people and you want to go outside and you want to do things.
But it also makes you appreciate human connection, right?
The economy makes us not do that.
It makes all of us miserable.
And so right now we're being told, well, we are going to have to sacrifice your grandparents for this to make this economy keep going.
Well, do you want to lose this economy?
It's like, no, this is a failure of imagination.
When people, and by the way, these ghouls, these disgusting assholes who go on TV and they're like, well, I think grandparents have a duty to die so their grandkids can have an economy.
Like, go away.
You, you should never be on TV anymore or have a soapbox or a platform.
You need to go away.
You're a ghoul.
And by the way, Rudy Giuliani, speaking of ghouls, I don't know if you saw this today.
He was like, oh, a few thousand people might die.
That's not a real tragedy.
It's like you were the mayor.
of New York City on September 11th, my man.
And these people who keep saying that, it's not the deal.
Why do we want to sacrifice for this economy that sucks and treats everyone terribly and lowers our lives, makes them more miserable?
And quite frankly, it's just a really miserable system.
Create something new.
Figure it out.
And if you can't come up with ideas, get out of the way.
Right.
Let somebody else take a crack at it.
Clearly they have the ability to help cover this downturn.
They can pay people and give people money and force employers to keep people on the payrolls and cover that too.
They can also delay paying taxes on April 15th.
There's a lot of things they do here that they are kind of doing that would help this economy that they didn't do during the Great Depression.
And by the way, so what?
We've had a Great Depression and we came out of that, of course, We need the freaking World War to come out of it.
But I just can't understand how, you know, and even people who are not Trump supporters will sort of point to those, you know, as if these numbers aren't real people and just sort of say, yeah, again, it's just not that many people are going to die.
What's the big deal?
We have to be able to save the economy as if saving the economy is also saving like the Republic.
Right.
And by the way, and I want to point out how stupid all of this is, and how nearsighted it is, and we've talked about this on the program, so let's say 1.5 trillion, 2 trillion dollars, which just appeared out of nowhere, Nick!
All of a sudden they needed it, and it's just there!
Amazingly, we never have money to pay for Anything.
Right.
It's complete austerity, but suddenly over here.
Oh, I forgot.
It's in a sock in a drawer.
Hold on a second.
Let me get this $1.5 trillion.
So like, let's say instead of taking $1.5 trillion or $2 trillion in a time of, and by the way, they're just throwing it into a hole.
Like it's not really fixing anything.
They're hoping it can like, I don't know, make people feel better for a hot minute, but it's not really fixing anything.
I have a question for you really quickly on that one.
Yeah.
The Trump administration, Trump organization gets none of that money.
Do you believe that?
I don't believe that for a moment.
And by the way, they've made a mint off insider trading.
Like, let's just be real.
And I know they always need more money, but I don't believe that for a second.
And then do you believe that it was accidentally left out of the language at the last minute and the Democrats luckily caught it and put it back in?
Yeah, that's not unintentional.
But I will say this, so like let's say, and by the way we live in this weird time period, we've talked about this before, CEOs are really incompetent and really untalented, like they're better at accruing power than they are wielding power.
So you have all these people now who are like, they're making mistakes but they never lose their jobs.
These people right now, the Republican Party, crafted this economy that failed.
Right?
And they set it up to fail.
They 100% did.
By lack of health care, by lack of infrastructure, by making sure that people had pre-existing conditions that would make them available for this, and that they'd come into work sick and insecure about their job security.
Okay?
So let's say instead of that $1.5 trillion or that $2 trillion, let's say that we go back in time with it, right?
We take that sock and we go back in time and we set up a healthcare system that actually is ready for something like this and actually provides people medical care and doesn't, by the way, vilify experts to make sure that people don't disbelieve experts in times of crisis.
So like, let's say we go back and do all that.
This would be a different situation.
Do you know what I mean?
Like it's one of those things where it's like, oh, we got to take care of this disaster.
No.
No!
Be preventative.
Do smart things.
Be proactive.
But they're incapable of it.
Completely incapable.
Let's just go back in time to when, before they got rid of the part of the National Security Council that was supposed to be in charge of these things.
And here's the thing that might be, you know, it's waste, it's whatever, they just sit around on their hands all day.
But no, the real key here is, these are the people that would have helped facilitate all of the supplies needed across the board.
So instead of having states bidding against each other for these things, and bidding against the federal government for these things, for masks and ventilators and stuff, they would be able to get them right away.
It's frightening.
Now, we also, in that town hall that Trump had on Fox News, because he comes on before he speaks to the world, he goes, wow, busy day.
Yeah, busy day.
He was on Fox, two different Fox TV shows, and he was tweeting, like, a bunch of tweets.
That's busy day.
Sure.
But he basically intimated that, it's like, if you're gonna speak out against the slow federal response to getting, you know, supplies, they're not going to then help you.
That's right.
He basically said that.
He's like, it's a shakedown quid pro quo of you better do the fearless leader stuff publicly or else we're not going to give you any stuff.
Think about that.
That's complicit to murder.
Oh no, it totally is.
And that's what, of course, that's who he is and what he does.
And imagine right now, being a governor, right?
And you're watching your state, like a New York governor, or a Washington governor, or now it's gonna be Florida, and basically every state's gonna have their moment with this.
And the federal government is not only not helping you, but you can't even admit that they're not helping you, because the toddler president We'll get his feelings hurt and could possibly make sure that tens of thousands of your state's residents could die.
Oh, and by the way, while it's happening, he would accuse you because you weren't nice to him.
Like, I know that that sounds reductive and I know that that sounds like one of those things where it's like, well, he's orange and he's gross and blah, blah, blah.
No, that is the literal condition of America right now.
We have a president who is a child.
A literal child.
Well, I will say this.
The people that want to separate that from the reality of what they think is happening would probably argue that the president doesn't really have the power.
Like, could he actually say, alright, hey, don't send those things to Cuomo right now.
He said some asshole stuff to me earlier today.
I mean, I wonder if he has the power to do that.
You know, or is he just sort of so chaotic and so, you know, disorganized in the way they run it that it just sort of fell apart?
There's nobody smart enough to manage this stuff.
When government works the way it's supposed to work, I want people to think about a detachable drive.
Do you know what I mean?
Like a hard drive, right?
And you can put it into your computer.
Yeah, a thumb drive, whatever you want to call it.
And you can put it in your computer and it stores things that you don't have to store on your computer, okay?
When the federal government works the way it's supposed to work, it's like a detachable drive.
Governor Cuomo does not need to be on the phone calling Arizona or New Mexico and negotiating the prices of ventilators and masks and gowns.
There's supposed to be a federal apparatus that's like, hey, we're on this thing.
Take care of it.
But Donald Trump was not elected to solve problems.
He wasn't elected to govern.
He was elected to go in and destroy the government.
That's exactly what he was supposed to do, because he is a post-political politician.
That is what he's supposed to go in and do.
He's supposed to ruin it, make sure it doesn't help anybody, and it just serves the whims of the powerful and wealthy.
And that's what he's done.
He's not there to solve problems.
Ever.
Okay.
Well, let me ask you this.
Let's walk through some of the scenarios because this whole Easter thing is weighing in my mind.
And he's even gotten Fauci sort of, you know, giving us the code saying like, you know, it's fluid.
We can't like be, you know, we have to wait and see before it happens before we do this.
But here's what it sounds like they want to do.
They want to look at the country as a whole and see, okay, look at this pocket.
There's no real coronavirus there.
There's no coronavirus there.
So we'll be able to open it up there.
We can start business as usual all these different little places here and keep you know The big places where everyone's on top of each other that have to continue being socially, you know distant from each other however What my take on that would be, and by the way, this is their way of rationalizing how the economy can start going again.
I have a feeling that when you have the top, what, 10 cities in America still shut down because there's so much testing going on and coronavirus there, the economy will never come back when rural America is trying to give it a jump start.
That's the biggest issue I see.
Oh, I mean, by the way, you just reminded me that, you know, Jerry Falwell Jr.
just had Liberty University.
They're gonna go back to school.
And despite this issue of the coronavirus being a really serious thing.
And again, I think they really feel like God will protect them.
I suppose it's the same idea about the whole Easter thing.
Like, you can't get coronavirus in a house of worship, can you?
That doesn't seem possible.
You know, I think that that's right.
Would you agree that that's sort of where they're coming from?
For me, it reminds me of snake handling.
So, because I grew up in a very weird, evangelical, supernatural, kind of cultish environment, we spent a lot of time in, like, Pentecostal churches.
And, you know, occasionally they'd bring in a guy who'd bring in snakes.
And people would hand snakes and walk around with them and tempt— I know, you're looking at me!
People can't see it obviously, but Nick is in California looking at me and seeing the Hoosier in me right now.
And it's like one of those things where you pass around venomous snakes because that idea is that if you believe in God enough, and if you are righteous enough, God will protect you from danger.
And there is a certain thing that is happening, and maybe people have seen it, and maybe they're not around these people, and maybe they're not in these circles.
There's a lot of stuff right now that is like, yeah, coronavirus is real, but so is God's will.
And so it's becoming a thing where it's like they're embracing this and they're seeing it because they've been told about book of revelations and plagues and, you know, vials being poured out over the earth and their share.
Oh God, Nick, you wouldn't believe it.
It's like, Swarms of locusts.
There was a bunch of bats who died in Israel.
That is apparently part of some prophecy.
There was a river that turned red because ink fell in it.
And all of a sudden everybody is, they've been taught to look for this stuff.
And so they look at something like coronavirus and particularly hitting blue states.
And a lot of them are trained, they're indoctrinated to automatically see that as, oh, this is God's will.
This is God taking over around the country.
Right.
Well, I mean, I think they're trained for every single thing in their lives to be God's will.
And, you know, so it's like this isn't one more thing.
I just wonder, like, at some point, it doesn't erode the confidence when time after time, these end time things that keep happening aren't the end times.
Yeah, it doesn't seem to shake their faith, which I guess is the whole definition of faith as it is.
And believe me, there's a lot of opportunities for faith to help your life, right?
And to really have to believe in something like that can be helpful to some degree to deal with certain things.
But certainly, this is the kind of thing, let me guess, it's sort of like, The people who are dying, it's like this is the God's will to kind of purge the sinners and whatever.
It's really frustrating because we know that Trump not only is as far away from believing any of that as he possibly can be, but he knows how to manipulate that.
So I was just writing about this.
Trump actually was active in a church.
I know this is shocking to people, but here's the church.
There's a guy named Norman Vincent Peale.
And Norman Vincent Peale, some people might know him, came up with the gospel of positive thinking, right?
Which is, if you had a positive attitude, a can-do, conquering attitude, and you really believed in God, God would shower you with riches and power, right?
That's prosperity gospel stuff.
Trump was very active in that church, and actually, Norman Vincent Peale officiated his first wedding.
So Trump is actually quote-unquote religious, but it's the religion of the self, right?
And that has everything to do with everything from prosperity gospel to how evangelicalism works now.
It's the idea that God is not just active in everything, but God is making a decision about every death at every moment and when it happens.
And so this right now, it's like one of those things where it's like, If you are actually sheltering in place, right?
If you are actually practicing social distancing, because these people believe in the power of the market.
They've been raised up to think that the market is godly, right?
You get rich if you're good and God loves you.
The idea of social distancing or sheltering in place to these people, it's actually an affront to God.
You know?
It's like, oh, you don't have faith?
So you are the God in this situation and you have power?
And it's actually sort of an offensive thing to some of these people.
And so when Trump wants to open up on Easter, They hear him, and they're like, oh, he's been talking to God.
Because Trump is the embodiment of that religion.
It's a really bizarre thing, and it's hard to explain unless you lived in it, but that's how this shit works.
It makes sense.
I wonder if the movie Somewhere in Time is Trump's favorite movie, because if you haven't seen it, it's about Christopher Reeves, who convinces himself, literally, he puts on all the garb, he goes to an old hotel, and he convinces himself he's in 1920, and he suddenly is in 1920.
It's like the most crazy thing.
And he is, I'm going to fucking ruin it for everybody, but he's foiled when he forgets that he left a penny from 1985 in his pocket.
And as he's talking to the lady he falls in love with, whatever, he pulls it out and he sees it.
And all of a sudden he's pulled back into 1985 again.
All things just destroyed.
And you know what?
It's a parable for where we are right now.
I just didn't even realize that.
I have to tell you, number one, I love your movie cuts.
Number two, I suddenly had this weird memory of being in a video store, and God, I miss video stores, and seeing a copy of that movie on a shelf and thinking to myself, who watches that movie?
And the answer, dear listener, is Nick Haussleben.
So that he, in 2020, he could use that to explain the political moment in 2020.
That's amazing.
Not only did I watch that, every year at that hotel where it was filmed at, they still have a, I want to go, they have a somewhere in time, you know, convention.
So, it was powerful.
But by the way, I mean, listen, I might have didn't believe that you could do that.
That's almost like the force in Star Wars or whatever, but still, you know, so I could kind of recognize that belief if you really wanted to get into that, but it doesn't certainly help anybody from not dying right now from this horrible virus.
It does when you don't believe in science.
That's the whole point.
Because we've talked about this before, spin and propaganda don't exist on the microscopic level, right?
A virus is a virus.
It does what it does, and it works the way that it works.
You can't talk it away.
That's why Donald Trump is failing every single day right now.
Yeah.
It's evolution.
they have worked for years to make people believe that scientists are evil.
I mean, there's an entire oh my god, Nick, you would not believe it.
It's evolution, that's really where the root of their...
Well, it's evolution is a big chunk of it, for sure, but then it got radicalized by the Republican Party is what ended up happening.
And then you have everything from fossil fuel companies wanting to hide global climate change, even while they knew it.
And that brings it all around because they...
They know that it's wrong.
You know, Republicans knew that holding back the reform of the medical system wasn't good.
They knew it.
They knew that it would lead to people dying.
They knew that maybe someday the check would come due.
They just hoped that they weren't standing there holding the bag when the check came due.
And they're not.
It's us.
And that's where we are right now.
That's why we're in this situation.
I am speechless, yes.
I don't know what else to do because I am just... I now demand that you go to this somewhere out of time.
Somewhere in time.
Somewhere in time movie festival.
That a movie that I bet, I bet five people right now are listening to this podcast and are just like, they're putting their hands up as they drive and endangering people because they are the only five people who have seen this movie.
I'm gonna go watch it right now actually.
That's wonderful.
We would love to hear from people who have seen this.
You know, I...
I think this is only the natural transition that we could possibly have to talk to Charlotte Clymer about human rights.
So when we come back, we're going to talk to Charlotte Clymer about human rights in the time of coronavirus and pandemic and America's history of infringing on civil liberties and human rights.
All right.
Be right back.
I am here with Charlotte Clymer, who works for the Human Rights Campaign and is a veteran communications expert.
And we are very, very lucky to have Charlotte on the podcast.
In case you didn't know, and I assume everybody does, Charlotte is easily one of the best follows on TheTwitter.com.
Lots of interesting, intelligent things to say right now in this moment, which is why I was so excited to have Charlotte on.
So Charlotte, I'll go ahead and I'll start here.
We are in a historical moment of crisis and chaos and anxiety.
There's a lot of stuff to go over, but I would just like to start this conversation asking where your head is in all of this.
As you're watching this thing unfold, what are your main takeaways from this current pandemic crisis?
So first of all, you are so flattering.
And thank you, Jared, for that very kind introduction.
I think we're at an intersection right now where the dials have been turned up on both, you know, the fact that this political era of ours is completely unpredictable and it has been unpredictable since 2016, obviously.
And the other dial being that we are in an entirely unprecedented situation.
You know, the stimulus package that was passed by the Senate yesterday is almost three times as big As the stimulus package that was passed in response to the Great Recession in 2008.
So, it's very uncertain.
And the amount of, I think, complexity and general anxiety at this moment is quite warranted.
Yeah, I'm so glad you brought it up that way.
I think that this stimulus package, there was so much emphasis, obviously, on the sort of political wrestling about this thing, whether it was going to get done, whether it wasn't going to get done.
And especially, you know, with this deadline of when the Senate needed to pass it by.
What gets lost in all of this is This is a historically large thing that has been passed.
It's not completely understood, for sure, and I don't know how you feel about it, but the way that I look at it is, it's the beginnings of a solution, but it is certainly nowhere near an actual solution.
It's a band-aid on a very large wound, but it's, again, it's so, so massive, and I think it speaks to the need to do something very, very large.
And I think that a lot of people who feel like things are gonna be back to normal, like the President of the United States who thinks the country is going to be reopened by Easter, I think are either in denial or ignorant of how large of a crisis this actually is. - That's absolutely correct.
I kind of liken it, in DC speak, to a continuing resolution.
You know, we always have these budget fights that come up in Congress, and instead of just solving them, Congress will sometimes kick the can down the road a few weeks or a few months with a CR or a continuing resolution.
It's just enough to get by.
This stimulus package, as big as it is, $2 trillion, is literally just enough to get by.
We're just trying to survive the next month or two months.
That's all this is.
And what I really worry about is the lack of political willpower to address those who will be most affected, which is individuals in the middle class and folks who are struggling in poverty.
Those are, you know, the most vulnerable population of the country is going to be the most affected.
And it feels like a lot of folks who are in leadership right now, particularly Republican Senate leadership, have completely disregarded that.
And that's on top of the whole negligence and irresponsibility of the Trump administration handling this crisis since early January.
So it's pretty dispiriting, I would say.
And I think people are right to be worried.
You know, the idea of this continuing resolution, the way that this can keeps getting kicked down the road, it is indicative of so much of, I think, what is wrong with our government and how it has worked.
I mean, you know, we move into this pandemic and, you know, you have Trump standing up there saying that he inherited this Outdated, crumbling system, when in fact you have had decades of opposition to even the most humane and simple, you know, human dignity when it comes to health care.
And the idea that every time we ever talk about health care or, you know, medical treatment as a human right, it has just been destroyed left and right.
And now we've gotten to this point where this resolution is just sort of I am feeding a little bit of money into a system that has shown itself to be completely unstable and unreliable and inhumane.
And it just feels like this is just more denial of the actual problem.
And the problem is that we have an economy that just doesn't work and doesn't treat people like living, breathing human beings.
That's right.
I mean, this is a perfect storm.
You're absolutely right.
It is the complete failure of our health care system, and it's the failure of our overall infrastructure.
It's the failure of our political system to act in good faith, not only toward those who are in need, but the larger population in general.
It's just a failure on everyone's part in leadership to get this done.
And it's been brought on by this, I mean, just catastrophe of series of missteps, intentional missteps by the Trump administration.
Um, you know, it was a couple of years ago that, uh, Trump fired the federal, uh, federal teams pandemic, uh, or excuse me, the federal pandemic team.
You know, the folks who are, uh, who are assigned to specifically deal with a situation like this to make sure that our federal government is prepared to respond to it.
He fired them all.
And this is after we came into office and intelligence officials, health experts, the White House itself, President Obama, all told Trump that one of the things you really need to look out for is a possible global pandemic and the absolute terror and havoc that it could wreak on our economy and society in general.
And he disregarded all of that.
And so we find ourselves in a situation where we're scrambling just to be able to be in a position to save lives.
And we don't even know if we can do that at this moment.
The chronic shortage of ventilators alone is going to lead to tens of thousands of deaths before this is over.
Actually, not even before this is over, before the month of April ends, I would say, is probably a more accurate way to describe that.
Because we're going to be dealing with this on a constant basis for the next year.
Right, and that's, you know, watching these daily briefings.
And by the way, I keep telling listeners, if you can at all, avoid them, and take them through a filter of people who will tell you what the propaganda strategies are, and what the lies are, and what little information they actually offer that's useful, because these things are, they're nothing more than delivery systems for propaganda and misinformation right now.
And what you just brought up, and I think that you did a wonderful job of distilling the timeline of this thing, which is that this is an administration that has no interest whatsoever in actual governance or solving of problems.
This has always been a grifting enterprise in every way, shape and form that has systematically dismantled government as we know it.
Yes.
And now we end up in this place where these failures, and I was interested to talk to you particularly about the human rights aspect of this, which is that men like Trump, and I've been very vocal lately, we have to define him as an authoritarian.
Historically, he has all of the markers of a historic authoritarian, and for people who aren't familiar, it means a man who is insecure in his own power and his own self, and as a result has to continually build up movements and illegal steps to sort of bolster themselves.
And authoritarians are completely incapable of solving problems.
They are only capable of scapegoating other people for those problems.
And which, of course, I mean, is Donald Trump's M.O.
And so far we have had a scapegoating of the Chinese, which has led to widespread harassment and targeting of Chinese Americans and Americans of Asian descent.
Undoubtedly, we're going to find out, I assume in the next few months, that Asian American businesses are just being destroyed.
I mean, just absolutely dismantled.
And I think people have Wrap their heads around what the long-term effects of that are going to be.
But can you talk a little bit about what it is when authoritarians or governments that don't actually address problems and they start scapegoating individuals, what does that do to put human lives at risk?
What does that do to human rights?
What are the consequences of this sort of catastrophe public relations tactics?
Yeah, it's very vicious and sneaky, because you'll notice that they would use this language.
I think the RISC are using it a lot, maybe two or three weeks ago.
So what they do is they'll roll out terms like the Wuhan virus, which is where the virus originated, which is in Wuhan province of China.
They'll say things like Chinese virus.
Uh, they'll, they'll deploy xenophobic, uh, uh, terms in general without outright saying, um, that, you know, we need to be wary of Chinese people, but it is a way for, uh, uh, the federal government and the Trump White House in particular to, uh, talk to his supporters and say, look, this isn't our fault.
This is those, you know, weird Chinese people who are out to get us.
Um, who clearly hate America who who hate our freedoms and, you know, it's almost like they are making the case that this has been intentionally done, um, from Chinese communists in order to harm us.
It is incredibly incendiary rhetoric.
Uh, that is, uh, only intended to shift off blame and put all on.
The Chinese government.
And I look, I have no doubt that some government officials in China work to cover up the virus because we already know that.
But there were also, you know, just numerous heroes, I would say, in Chinese society who attempted to be outspoken about this and treat people and, you know, kind of sound the alarm bells about how bad this is going to be.
And what we see now is that everyday workers in the United States, in China, all over the world, are dealing with the impact of the just complete negligence of their governments.
It's pretty heartbreaking.
And what I will particularly say is that I am incredibly worried, as you said, for Chinese American citizens or citizens of Asian descent who are being targeted and harassed on a daily basis because of Trump's rhetoric that clearly scapegoats people of a certain ethnicity.
Yeah, and I think it's important to talk about the fact that we continually say, like, this nebulous phrase, the Chinese, as if the people in China aren't actually victims of an authoritarian government themselves.
As if, you know, the people living in China aren't actually, or as if the actual citizens who are under the thumb of an authoritarian regime are somehow or another responsible for the lives of a government that withholds and keeps them from any rights whatsoever.
That's absolutely right.
And I, you know, I also think it's interesting, you know, to point out that, you know, Trump loves Xi Jinping, the president of China.
He loves the leadership of China because he's living out or they're living out his dream.
You know, he wants to be an authoritarian.
He wants to have an iron fist control of the US.
If we did not have a constitutional ban on seeking more than two terms as president, he would absolutely be running for third, fourth, and fifth terms.
I guarantee it.
So he looks at the Chinese leadership, and he's kind of salivating over their situation over there.
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, because one thing, I think a lot of people have a real hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that the political reality is so malleable.
I mean, the idea that Donald Trump, of course, who elevated Kim Jong-un to this place of respect and international standing, And of course, he's very close to Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu.
And you have all these relationships where it becomes very obvious very quickly that Donald Trump aspires to these things.
I mean, authoritarians have a tendency to find each other like magnets and sort of support each other even as they're sort of jostling for more control for each other.
And I think that's an important thing to remember, is that this is, what we're talking about with China, this idea of the suppression of what would have happened with the coronavirus, is exactly what Donald Trump has put into practice in the United States.
I mean, the only reason that we don't have more documented cases is because he is taking active action to suppress testing and knowledge.
I mean, it's bad even when you look at the numbers that we have, but it's actually probably much worse than what we know.
It's much worse than what we know, and the numbers are only going to get exponentially higher over the next month, two months, three months that we continue navigating this crisis.
A lot of people don't know that Trump actually rejected tests that were offered to our country from the World Health Organization.
And the reason he did that was to, you know, essentially cover up the numbers to hope that the crisis died out by itself so that he wouldn't have to deal with the market ramifications, you know, and the fallout from our economy.
Trump wants to get reelected solely on the strength of our economy, which had been doing pretty well in the past few quarters.
Not for everyone, obviously, but overall, the stock market is booming.
And because so many Americans associate the stock market with General economic health because of a really bad media presentation of the stock market.
He wanted to kind of run for reelection on that.
And given that the threat that the virus and the pandemic posed to our economy, he worked actively to cover it up.
This man literally chose the health of the economy and the re-election, and thus the re-election of his own administration over the lives of millions of Americans, because we don't know how bad this is going to get yet.
And I just want to ask one last thing before we let you go, and we're so grateful for your time.
One of the things that we do on the Muckrake podcast is we try really hard to talk about current events while also challenging these old, held ideas about what American history is and isn't, and sort of the myths that we have, the idea that America has always been the fairest and most, you know, liberty and freedom obsessed country that we've ever had.
And we talk about these moments in time that have more or less been erased.
And particularly in the 20th century, you have things like the first Red Scare that, you know, led to widespread violence and murder and raping and lynching of African Americans.
The Lavender Scare that for whatever reason associated communist forces with LGBTQ Americans.
All of these things that have led to suppression.
And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what has happened with human rights in this country and how you view how those things have been suppressed.
Because I take the viewpoint that a lot of nonprofit organizations and political organizations have to actively try and fight these myths, these dangerous, dangerous myths that America is the most perfect country in the world and has none of these problems.
As we're sort of watching this thing unfold, what are the things that you look back on that cause you concern, that make you worried about the direction that this country is currently listening towards?
The only way that Trump and Pence can consolidate power is by telling their supporters, look, we're on a team and those folks are not on our team.
They're actively working against our team and they, they, the folks that they point to are black Americans.
Of course.
That's why there was that huge push against.
and his patriotic action of taking a knee to protest violence against black citizens.
There is the, you know, consistent homophobic, biphobic, transphobic rhetoric against LGBTQ Americans as a way of saying these people do not represent our society.
They should not be in our military, et cetera.
There is the constant push against women in general, women who are outspoken against, you know, sexual violence, physical violence, the, you know, I mean, cross-generational obstacles faced by women in the workplace, cross-generational obstacles faced by women in the workplace, at home, et cetera.
So we have all these vulnerable groups, say nothing of religious minorities.
I mean, the, the, you know, whole campaign, the three-year campaign now of, um, of just, you know, outright, um, awful rhetoric toward Muslim Americans, against Jewish Americans, against anyone who does not fold into the white Christian American mold.
Um, their whole goal is to isolate, you know, those of us in vulnerable communities point to us and say, that's what we're fighting.
And rally the idea that a true American is someone who is a white Christian, uh, you know, and and falls into that Midwest.
You know, uh, uh, I guess corn fed kind of, uh.
Uh, ideal.
Um, and it's, it's very concerning.
It is scary as hell.
And that's why we're seeing just this ongoing campaign of, uh, legislative attacks of cultural, uh, I would say offerings and musings from Trump about, you know, how people who do not, who fall outside of his particular demographic are not real Americans.
And it's only going to get worse if he's reelected.
And so I want to, what I want to tell people is you got to register to vote.
You gotta register to vote.
You gotta get your friends and family to register to vote.
And you have to make sure that, you know, to just communicate to everyone around you that our society is on the ballot in November.
It's not going to get any better if we're not showing up and being heard.
Yeah, and as a product of that corn-fed Bible Belt culture, you know, I've spent so much time sorting through sort of the conspiracies that have motivated and activated the people that I've grown up with, and the one consistent uniting factor in all of these conspiracies, whether or not, you know, Protocols of Elders of Zion, New World Order, the Deep State, all of it is about minorities, whether or not that is women, LGBTQ Americans, or African Americans,
Or the poor, and it's them conspiring together to take down white patriarchal evangelical power.
And if you know that, and if you've experienced it, I mean you hear the dog whistles in every one of these speeches and every public presentation.
It's remarkable to me, too, because the breadth of diversity in our communities is just awe-inspiring.
For example, I'm a Christian.
I go to church.
I'm a military veteran.
I have all these aspects of my identity that are so important to me that fall into that traditional mode.
And I think, you know, that that goes for tens of millions of folks across the country who would identify as progressive or liberal.
For us, this is not a battle of religious ideology or your skin color or your sexuality or your gender or your religion.
It's it's about just being decent to those around you and not being decent to people.
You know, we believe in what America could be.
They want the America of the past, the America that was exclusionary and hateful and really just hurt everyone.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for coming on again.
Everybody should follow Charlotte Clymer on Twitter and everywhere and everything Charlotte writes.
Thank you so much.
Jared, it was such an honor.
Thank you so much.
And seriously, thank you for what you do in general.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right, everybody, that was Charlotte Clymer.
Please heed what Charlotte was saying about the dangers of this moment.
You know, we keep talking about Donald Trump as an authoritarian and what that means.
We need to recognize who he is and what he's capable of.
Certainly, he has put a lot of American lives at risk.
And before this whole thing's over, as it just keeps getting worse, I mean, he's only going to turn the temperature up on that.
So thank you so much to Charlotte for coming on.
Yeah, and the instinct to deny that the authoritarian regime is taking hold is a real powerful thing that most people want to instantly go to.
But if you look at all the different highlights of the Trump administration starting in 2017 when he took over, it does become a little bit more clear that all the things that people were sort of sounding the alarm on Are happening and did happen are going to happen there and they're talking about him.
So when you look at in the aggregate, it does seem a little more clear that that's the path we're on versus a knee-jerk reaction to say, oh, we will never do that.
So really important words to heed without question.
Yeah, and I don't want it to be true.
I've said this over and over on here.
I wish so badly that I was wrong about Donald Trump, but it was just so obvious who he was and what he was inheriting with the Republican Party and that whole system and infrastructure that was behind him.
At this point, just denying it and pretending like it's not true just gives him power.
That's all it does at this point.
We're way and we're in the middle of a giant, giant societal and political crisis, existential crisis.
We have to recognize who he is.
So we're just very grateful for Charlotte for coming on.
Yeah.
And well, thank you, everybody, for joining us today on the podcast and listening.
We really appreciate you being part of the conversation.
And don't forget, you can always follow us.
Jared is at J.Y.
Sexton and I am at Can You Hear Me?
S.M.H.
Please, if you like this, give us a nice rating and a thumbs up over on iTunes or wherever else you listen to the podcast and whatever you guys do out there, make sure you practice good social distancing and stay safe out there.
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