The coronavirus pandemic spirals out of control while Donald Trump continues to lie and brag that damning a quarter of a million of Americans to a lonely, terrifying death is somehow an achievement worth bragging about. Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the tragic events of the week, the maddening strategy of lying until it breaks the will of the people, and welcome Sarah Kendzior, one of the foremost experts on authoritarianism, to the podcast to discuss the very real dangers to our freedom and our lives.
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The states should have been building their stockpile.
We have almost 10,000 in our stockpile, and we've been building it, and we've been supplying it.
We're a backup.
We're not an ordering clerk.
We're a backup.
And we've done an unbelievable job.
What a lot of the voters are seeing now is that when you elect somebody to be a mayor or governor or president, you're trying to think about who will be a competent manager during the time of crisis.
And you're seeing certain people are better managers than others.
I think most people have actually followed the presidential, you can call them whatever you want, I would never use the word dictates, because if I used that word I would be in such trouble.
In fact, you'll put me in trouble just that I even mentioned the thought of it, okay?
Welcome everybody to the Muck Rig podcast.
I am your co-host Jared Yates Saxton.
I'm here with my favorite co-host Nick Hauselman.
We have a special treat today.
Author and expert on authoritarianism Sarah Kinzier is going to join us.
She is the best-selling author of The View from Flyover Country and her new book Hidden in Plain Sight The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America is coming out next week.
Not a moment too soon, so that will come later, but we have some really serious stuff to talk about.
Since we last taped, the coronavirus pandemic has gotten worse.
The situation in America, we found out today that 6.6 million Americans have lost their jobs, bringing the total over the past two weeks to 10 million, leaving our economy a smoldering crater.
And the Trump administration, which began this pandemic talking about how it would just go away and possibly no one would die, made an announcement that they expect upwards of a quarter million Americans to die.
Nick, what do you what do you make of all this?
You know, I've been interacting on Twitter with some people about this, and I feel like a lot of the minimization, or what I feel is the minimization of the coronavirus and the threat, is almost like we're arguing the same thing.
So it's almost like I'm yelling, 5 plus 2 is 7, and they're like, no!
2 plus 5 is 7!
They're almost arguing the same exact thing, and I almost feel like maybe it's a coping mechanism.
How do we each individually cope with what could easily be a really frightening thing where somebody we directly know is going to suffer from this greatly?
Or is this a thing that only a couple percentage points of people are going to actually deal with?
And to me, there is obviously the fine line because I think I've distilled it down to something we talked about a lot in the past.
We've talked about Donald Trump being, you know, the power of positive thinking.
And as a result, if you're only focusing on that, you can never have a contingency plan, right?
You're never going to accept the possibility of something going wrong, so you're not planned for it.
And so I feel like here, we can't let our brains move into that kind of mode.
And so as a result, we must minimize it.
And here we are.
And that's an interesting take.
And I'm starting to feel like maybe I am being too alarmist about all this.
But I can't tell.
I think being alarmist right now is absolutely necessary.
I've been thinking a lot.
You know, we think in terms of history and generational moments.
The only thing that I can even begin to start to compare this with is the time period between September 11th and March of 2003, when the invasion of Iraq began.
You know, that was a period of time.
Where I, I was, I was in college at the time and I went through, um, I spoke about this at a, at a speech not too long ago, uh, September 11th, you know, I, I was with a bunch of people and a bunch of young men and they were angry and drinking and, and, you know, it was a lot of America, you know, raising of the fist and, and jingoism and, and, you know, that, that's one thing that you can do when you're frightened.
You know, you can puff up your chest and pretend that you're not frightened, which is the essence of masculinity, right?
Is to, to pretend like you're not worried.
And after a while, that turns into anger and violence.
And by the time we started talking about going into Iraq, I had had an awakening about how things worked and how terrible the Iraq war was going to be.
And for anybody who knew that going into March of 2003, and for the years that came after it, it was a very lonely, isolating, maddening time, right?
Watching not just your country destroy another culture illegally but watching the people around you lost in it and you know having you know I would I would talk to people in my family and I would be told that I was a traitor and the traitors deserve death while my family talked about these fascistic ideas and it took a toll you know I feel like I aged not just years but decades around the Iraq war and the way that that felt
What we're watching right now in this country, and this is a really somber thing, we're watching a generational crisis.
Like in the next few days, in the next couple of weeks, we're going to see some really awful things and we're going to go through some really tragic moments.
That is a hard thing to wrap your head around, and it's exhausting, and it's tiring, but it's also infuriating.
We have an administration that has not only mishandled this, but has gleefully mishandled it, right?
I was saying today, and I say it all the time, Donald Trump was never... He's not a politician.
I about called him a politician.
He's an anti-politician.
He doesn't make things better.
He's there to destroy government and government processes.
And what we're seeing is what happens then.
We don't need to lose 250,000 people.
We don't need to watch ER doctors and nurses and health care providers clothe themselves in garbage bags and wear scarves, you know, because the government won't provide for them.
What we're watching is a willful mishandling and a complete malfeasance by an American president.
So I don't think it's alarmist.
Alarmist.
I think we're watching a really, really dangerous, frightening time unfold, and wrapping our heads around that, I think, is absolutely necessary.
Yeah, and perhaps perspective can help, even though what I'm about to say is definitely won't.
But if you look at the context of everything, and you can trace all these things back to 9-11, a lot of these things that all sort of beget the next thing, the next event, then it's hard to argue anything but Osama bin Laden won.
He won this war that he wanted to wage against the United States.
And if you look at it that in context, you know, maybe we have to do that so that we can actually have the self-reflection to rebound and come back properly and have a healthy society.
You know, I was doing research on my upcoming book, American Rule, How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People, and I thought I understood September 11th and Al-Qaeda and the War on Terror, but I didn't, you know?
What I understood was a popular history, the type of thing that they teach in classrooms and they don't really get into things.
only cost like a few hundred thousand dollars and it brought America to its knees and not only did it do that it led to trillions of dollars it led to millions of deaths I think the military operations I want to say it was around 60 countries and it made America Complete hypocrites in the public and world eye.
You know, we went against every principle that we've ever said that we cared about.
And on top of the trillions of dollars spent, do you know what we didn't spend trillions on?
We didn't spend trillions on our infrastructure and education.
We didn't spend trillions on our healthcare system.
We should have a better healthcare system.
We just should.
Like, we shouldn't be caught, you know, with our metaphorical pants around our ankles at this moment.
We should be ready for something like this.
And on top of that, That whole thing, and this is something I think people need to wrap their heads around, going back to what you were saying about arguing the same things.
There's a reason why people in this country don't trust experts, and it's because we had to live in austerity because we were spending all this money on a war on terror, and the best way to make sure that people don't want money spent on education is to tell them that educators And experts are dangerous liars, and we don't need them.
And that also makes people really good targets of manipulation and propaganda.
And so that is where that came from.
And every misstep that has come since that time period that we're talking about has led America to a point where, and again, I don't want to sound grandiose or hyperbolic here, we're watching an empire crumble.
Right now, right?
And we're talking, and it's bizarre.
10 million people are out of work, the economy is in tatters, and it's like one of those things where, like, the only right thing to do right now is to go outside and scream and pull at your hair and gnash your teeth, but we have to live!
You know, it's a horror show.
It's an absolute horror show.
Okay, well, let's extend this out because there might be a way to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
There actually is.
I mean, it's already too late to prevent some of the atrocities that we're going to go through.
And we're following the path of Italy.
It's actually probably ramped up and worse in Italy was and we're about maybe 10 days behind where they are So it will get terrible.
But in theory there are there is this notion that there is some treatments that they could use There's gonna be an announcement apparently coming up sooner that they found some other treatment that that might work as well as even like Hydroxychloroquine and the z-pack and zinc, you know might prevent deaths at the very least, you know independent of any other side effects or whatever and
So, you know, there is a version of the Matrix, in theory, where, you know, we kind of just, like, just try this in an even bigger rollout, try some other things, get a little bit handled, and then, you know, within, like, two or three months, you know, you can start to get people back to work or whatever.
But that said, the biggest fear, in my mind, is that that two months is going to be like a month.
And then it's just going to come all back, roaring back even faster that way, and more virulent, and even more difficult to contain, and probably even a bigger drop in all the markets and all those different things. - Yeah, so right now, South Korea, which I believe they had their first positive which I believe they had their first positive case of coronavirus on the exact same day that we did, they're pulling themselves out from the wreckage right now.
You know what I mean?
Like they're restarting their society right now and figuring things out.
We have messed this up on so many different levels.
On one, you know, You cannot understate the danger of the fact that Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Republican Party saw political advantage and profit in pretending like this wasn't going to be a problem.
Right?
Donald Trump thought his reelection could be aided by pretending it wasn't a problem.
Fox News made a ton of money.
Made a ton of money killing their viewers.
And the Republican Party succeeds every time that experts aren't believed.
And they thought they could throw a tax cut at it if it got too bad, which they did.
And now we're watching the remnants of that.
And you're absolutely right.
This thing will probably come back.
Every expert tells us it will.
But we should, as a society right now, be talking about how to make an economy that is pandemic proof.
But instead, we're just, you know, we talked about it in an earlier podcast.
It's like building buildings to withstand earthquakes.
Eventually, you understand the earthquakes are going to come if you're in like California, right?
Or Japan or something.
You understand that earthquakes will come.
So you start building buildings different.
Instead of just rebuilding the same building that gets knocked down time and time and time again, which is what our economy does.
You should be building a building that can sustain and change and work through things like this, but we're not going to do that because we don't learn our lessons and we've been taught not to by people who gain and profit and advantage because we don't learn our lessons.
And let's address the Fox News thing because, you know, it was almost a revelation that Trump was willing to, in a somber tone, acknowledge that there might be between 100,000 and 250,000 deaths after all of this.
That was mainstream media as well, which we have to talk about.
It is one of the most disgusting things.
But here's what's going on now, and you're hearing it on Fox News, and this was predicted by some of these guys a week ago, where they were going to now pivot towards how we are quantifying deaths.
Either you die with the coronavirus or you die from it, and that to them is a really important distinction.
To me, simply because they can lower the number of deaths that way.
And it's outrageous because any doctor will tell you that if you have underlying conditions and then you get COVID-19 and die, you died from COVID-19.
You could have had a long life dealing with underlying conditions for years and years with your loved ones for a long time.
It's outrageous that that's what they pivot to, but it's not shocking.
That's the other problem, right?
We've seen this one time and time again, how they shift the goalposts to fit whatever they needed to fit in the reality as much as they can bend it towards.
It's ghoulish, is what it is.
It's ghoulish.
So, like, just throwing this out there.
If, for whatever reason, the Muckrake podcast led to the death of a bunch of people, like, something that we said or something we did Killed living human beings and caused harm.
You and I would sit down and be like, we gotta make this right.
You know what I mean?
We would have a moment of conscience.
We would have a moment of thinking about that.
These people, and by these people I mean Donald Trump, I mean Fox News, I mean people like Rush Limbaugh, I mean corporations, they get in a room and they're like, how do we spin this?
And also, by the way, you over there in the corner, how do we make money from it?
What do we do here?
How do we deny it?
How do we gain advantage from it?
It's a sickness.
It's a sickness that has infected America.
This public relations PR propaganda spin and it leads to an erosion of everything.
Human dignity.
It leads to a loss of democracy.
It leads to pandemics where the President of the United States shamelessly said it was just a flu and a hoax is suddenly spraining his wrist, patting himself on the back for managing to kill a quarter million Americans.
Which, by the way, is more... I think I read the other day, it's more Americans that died in World War I, and it's also more Americans than Vietnam and the Korean War combined.
And people need to understand this.
This is going to be a giant, traumatic, societal-changing thing.
Like, we're going to get done with this, and we're going to look back on it and be like, oh, that is one of the major changing moments in human history.
And that's what we're about to go through.
Could Donald Trump have completely prevented this?
No.
There was going to be tragedy, there were going to be lives lost, there were going to be problems.
But the way that this has been done, it's a crime against humanity and it's a person who is always seeking personal advantage and personal profit, undoubtedly looking at this thing, understanding how they can handle it in a way that is beneficial to them and to nobody else.
And we have to talk about the fact that the President of the United States, today and days before, has been blaming the states that he will not help, that he has been holding hostage, asking them basically to provide campaign material and re-election endorsements, or otherwise he won't send them ventilators and masks.
That's insanity.
That's fucking insane.
You know, I had a Twitter thread about this the other day where I was talking about how he's trying to run the government like a business.
And there's been this notion of, oh, that's what we need, someone to finally come in and run this properly for years and years.
But we're discovering now why that's the most ridiculous idea possible, because we're talking about human lives.
And when he now says that they're only a backup, the federal government is a backup to the states, what he's created is some sort of weird marketplace capitalism, guys, where They're now bidding for each other against each other to get materials that the PPE that will save lives and I don't know if you heard today but Jared Kushner comes on there and describes how the flow is now working.
Somebody of Jared's calls him and says hey we need this hospital in New York Some PPE, and he goes and tells Trump that, and Trump then arranges privately, directly, for those hospitals to get benefits.
And that's all well and good, but how do you think the people who are completely inundated in New Orleans feel?
Or Washington?
Or Florida?
Or any of the other hot spots that are about to hit, like Chicago or even LA?
That is ridiculous!
You shouldn't be allowed to somehow get a direct line into your buddy and then somehow, you know, get these materials like that.
There needs to be, you know, a structure.
There needs to be a need.
Anyway, the point being that it's frightening.
It's corruption is really what that is.
And you throw on top the fact that they're so, they don't run business as well anyway.
Both of these guys have run business into the ground that it's frightening that these are the guys they're going to trust.
I mean listen maybe like if Warren Buffett wanted to go with the country and like try and run it like some sort of business like I don't know maybe but at the very least these are the two worst possibilities you could ever pick To even try this and it's going to kill, it's killed people and it'll kill more people and that's the worst part about it is they're not mitigating this as much as possible and there are very specific things that they've done that are clearly just inept.
I suppose you want to argue that it's intentional and I don't know at this point I can go with that too.
You know, expecting Donald Trump to govern is like expecting a dog to suddenly drive a car.
I mean, he's not there to govern.
He's not there to solve problems.
He was elected by a base that sent him there to spew cultural anger and divide us, and the other people who support him support him because he is destroying the federal government.
Right?
He went in, and we've seen it.
He put people in his administration in charge of cabinet positions who were openly opposed to the cabinet that they were representing.
I mean, that's not by accident.
He was put there to just absolutely render the federal government incapable of handling problems.
Guess what?
It's incapable of handling problems.
He has been wildly successful at defanging and disabusing any idea that the federal government can take care of it.
Now, do I think that he's pacing around thinking about killing people?
I don't know.
I don't know what lays in that man's heart, because I'll tell you what, this whole thing stinks to high heaven, and it feels really weird in a lot of different ways that we can't necessarily get into, but I can tell you this, He has been successful in rendering the federal government incapable, incompetent, and impotent.
And that is how you kill people.
That's how people die.
But here's the kicker.
The kicker is that he's the leader of the Republican Party.
And this is the party, the entire time, who's never been able to govern anyway.
And it's amazing because, you know, the cult of Trump has connections to the cult of the Republicans.
It does.
Wait a second, Nick.
I think you're forgetting the incredible bang-up job the Republican Party did of cleaning up after Katrina.
Ugh.
Yeah.
And by the way... Oh, wait!
Wait, that's right.
They left a major American city to die in floodwaters and die on roofs and die face down in dirty water.
And by the way, they let Puerto Ricans die.
Right.
Right?
They let Americans die in floods every year.
It's what they do.
But on top of that, it's like, good job, Brownie.
It's all that stuff where, and again, there's a very similar similarity here where in the very beginning, which is always the key part of being able to respond to this, is they're just completely head in the sand and inept and horrible and unable to deal with those different things.
But it's a mindset because, remember, they want small government.
They want the states to be controlling a lot of different stuff.
So this all plays into that anyway.
That's the other problem is fundamentally when you're talking about these kind of things, hurricanes, pandemics, things where the people need direct federal aid, those are the times when you see just completely botched by the Republicans.
And here's what's even worse is because we're talking about rewriting of the history now and they're trying to move the goalposts about how they're going to ascertain how they died.
And the other pivot is to Obama and what they did with H1N1.
And it just is.
And that resonates.
That's the other problem.
Those arguments resonate with enough people to keep them doing that.
And it doesn't do anything to solve any problems that we're talking about now.
Well, it does a couple things.
Number one, I just want to point out, and in the interest of fairness, I do remember when society shut down completely during the H1N1 scare.
And, you know, that we had to huddle in our houses for months as hundreds of thousands of Americans died.
I remember that too.
Oh yeah, and the American economy cratered, and Obama just lied to us every single day.
I remember that.
That's fair.
You have to take a look at this.
What actually happens with the moving of the goalpost and the blatant lying?
Two things happen.
One is you protect yourself, right?
There's the Trump of cult that is automatically going to buy this stuff.
And they're just going to, you know, they're going to tell everyone they know, they're going to forward it to them, they're going to get on Facebook, and they're going to do all this stuff, right?
The other thing, and this is Putinism, all right?
This is Putinism personified, and this is why Trumpism and Putinism are right there next to each other.
What happens is, when you lie to a population enough, and all you do is lie to a population and tell them that 5 plus 2 equals 8 instead of 7, or the more popular canonical 2 plus 2 equals 5, eventually you break their spirit.
You make people think that they'll never know the truth, and so why bother caring?
And it breeds apathy, and it breeds depression, and it destroys resistance.
I mean, that's one of the reasons why I keep going back to the Iraq War.
They lied to us every day, and they knew that they did, and they dulled our outrage to the point where it was like, my God, I can't look at Rumsfeld another moment.
And that's how these briefings are.
When we recorded last week, and you, oh my God, the pillow guy.
Oh my god, Nick.
I about lost it.
I about had to walk out of the room.
When they get up there, and when Trump stands up, it's part of my job to listen to what he says and how he lies.
And it's almost too much for me.
You know what I mean?
Because every day now, it's like an hour and a half of sheer bullshit horror.
And it makes you feel crazy.
And it makes you feel depressed.
And it makes you feel demoralized.
And that's how these people win.
Because they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they crush your will.
And so it's doing both of those things.
And quite frankly, it works.
And they know that it works.
And that's why we have to stay vigilant.
And we have to call it out for what it is.
That's why alarmism is necessary right now.
Jared, 1973 just called.
They want their podcast back.
Because this is exactly what they were saying then.
And they called it the 5 o'clock follies, when the generals would come out and describe how it's going in Vietnam.
And the press who were there on the ground covering knew just how ridiculous it was and how much they were lying, just like they lie now.
And we had to sit there and just sort of take it.
And that actually was even maybe more effective.
I feel like maybe less people were sort of recognizing how much of a lie it was until later, Pentagon Papers came out and those kind of things.
So, but we've gone through this already.
We go through this all the time, every time, and primarily with Republican presidents and Republican administrations.
And at some point in between then and 9-11, did we ever regain the sense of what our government should be, and did we care anymore about it, or did we... I think that there was a malaise probably since then.
I'm not sure we've ever really overcome that.
I'm so glad you brought up Vietnam because it is a really, really good analogous situation for what we're talking about.
And not because of death, but actually because of the way that the death was presented to us.
One of the reasons why we had such a big counterculture against Vietnam is because that was one of the last times that the American press was able to cover things as they saw it.
After that, they were managed, they were herded, they were given pseudo events by people like Ronald Reagan, and every war was so carefully meticulously manipulated that we could never get an idea of what was going on at any given time.
And Vietnam, because there was that openness and questioning, we came to question it.
And here's why they were lying, and here's what was happening.
Robert McNamara, who was the architect of the Vietnam War, right?
His job before that was helping run the Ford Motor Company through a technocracy, through an idea that math and technology could solve any problem, as long as you threw it at it.
Guess what?
It doesn't.
Problems are inherently human, and they have to be handled by humans and with humanity.
When you throw technology at it, and you throw numbers at it, and you throw out humanity, which by the way, just a quick aside for people paying close attention, that is the corporate mindset, and that is the corporate way of doing business.
is you don't care about the humanity and you just do it.
That's why we end up in these problems.
And they lie to us because they think we either can't handle the truth or they don't want to give us the truth.
And it eventually erodes any sense of national character, national trust, and it leads to a period of malaise.
And you're exactly right.
We have not only lost track of who we are as Americans, we've lost track of the fact that we need to keep track of who we are as Americans.
We're so lost in mythologies and lies that it's hard to even find your way back out.
Jared, it's almost the same malaise as the people who want to minimize the COVID-19.
Sure.
In a way.
They were always saying we were going to lose 200,000, Nick.
They never said it would be like 15.
Right.
Ever.
Like a miracle.
It'll just go away in the warm months.
Oh, it'll just vanish.
You wouldn't even believe it.
Happens so fast.
I know.
So it's interesting because there's so many parallels and it just keeps washing over me like, oh my god, this is the same thing happening over and over again.
History repeating itself.
And it makes me kind of frightened for what would happen next.
What is the next thing that's going to happen that we're going to have to deal with?
But you also brought up an interesting point, which is you coming out of college around 9-11, you know, again, people who are older like me actually had experienced Plentiful times and good economy and and relative peace throughout the world.
We actually had a worldview of that even though we were kind of born out of Watergate but Anybody your age or younger doesn't know anything about that No, I so I graduated from graduate school in August of 2008.
I Wow.
That's a good time.
Right before the market crashed.
And by the way... Did you buy a house then too?
No.
And let me tell you, the finances of my generation have been destroyed in every way possible and we've been juiced for every bit of blood and profit that we ever could have had.
But what you just brought up is something that gets lost in so much of this conversation.
Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die.
It's going to be very, very traumatic.
The economy is absolutely cratered and is in trouble.
We're going to be dealing with so many cultural leftovers from this.
There's going to be trauma.
There's going to be depression.
We're probably not going to get the futures that even we thought possibly we could have had within this neoliberal nightmare.
They're going to be worse.
There are going to be ramifications.
And while we're talking about it, you know what crisis breeds?
What economic crisis breeds?
It breeds war.
It breeds fascism.
It breeds a seizing of power and a crackdown on individual liberties and human rights.
We have a giant fight ahead of us.
And we need to be aware of that.
We have to walk and chew gum at the same time and understand that this is going to be terrible and we have to be ready for it.
We also have to maintain hope, but we also have to remember who is responsible and be prepared for what's coming because it could get really bad.
Yeah, but the impeachment trial was really what made everybody lose sight of the ball here and drop everything on the COVID-19 response.
Yeah, can we talk about that real fast?
How stupid that excuse is?
It just makes me lose my mind.
So, he's done a perfect job, but he was so distracted by impeachment that he didn't do a perfect job.
I mean, again, it's 2 plus 2 equals 5.
It's that thing that you have to do in your head, which is, oh, these two things are completely contradictory.
You can hold them in your head at once.
And if you can do that, you are the perfect Fox News viewer.
And I hope that you subscribe to their application.
And Fox Nation or whatever in the hell they're rolling out to kill more people next week.
And he was so distracted and focused on the impeachment hearing that he was golfing every weekend.
Got to take your mind off of it.
Yeah.
Oh, you know what?
He also – he wasn't too busy to go across the country and hold rallies every other night.
Yeah, but that's just him communicating with the people.
And luckily now he's able to give a rally out every single day to a captive audience.
And he'll tell you he was number one on Facebook yesterday.
Which, by the way, can we talk about that for like 10 seconds?
It's like a child that you dangle the keys in front of.
And this is the person, and this is important, that monster got up and bragged about his ratings and being number one on Facebook.
And American mainstream media were like, What a president.
That's FDR right there.
That's Eisenhower.
What I had seen on the coverage was they were pointing out that he's nowhere close, at least to Obama, in terms of followers.
But I'm not sure that's what he even meant.
I think he probably meant search term, or whatever that naturally is.
You're trying to make sense out of a senseless thing.
You're exactly right.
He probably trended.
And before he walked out, Jared Kushner handed him a piece of candy and said, you're number one on Facebook.
And he was like, way to keep up the tone.
Which, by the way, did you see this?
Trump was bragging.
He's like, oh, all I gotta do is talk nice and they say nice things about me.
Like, Trump, who is a moron, a failing moron, understands how to manipulate American media better than anybody else.
What's that say about American media?
Well, if you're talking about needing to tear down our economic system, then your argument has to also be we need to kind of tear down the media and the way it's being covered.
Now, you could argue that it's not being treated in good faith by these Republican people in the administration, but at some point we need to... and I don't even know what the answer really is.
We've talked about this before often on the pod about the way the media covers all this stuff.
And if you know what it reminds me of well I was I was teaching at a public high school in the valley in LA a big you know 3,000 4,000 student campus and I was there in 1998-99 and a lot of teachers that were there were there when my wife went there in the 80s okay they were awesome teachers and this school was like a country club Well, by the time I got there, 12-15 years later, it was an inner-city school with a lot of problems.
And those same awesome teachers that would get nominated for all these national awards, whatever, had no idea how to teach.
Not only that, but a lot of them were like, you know, almost like veterans of war, you know, trauma.
They had PTSD.
They didn't know exactly how to respond.
And I kind of feel like we're in the same position here.
Oh, I mean, that's America in a nutshell.
It really is.
We've juiced everything out of this country that we possibly could.
That's what Reaganism was.
I come from a factory family, and one of the things that my family always has to deal with is, inevitably, after NAFTA and after deindustrialization, All of a sudden what happened was the people who own the factory would inevitably take the factory to Mexico or another country where they didn't have to pay minimum wage or retirement or health benefits or, you know, pay attention to regulations or anything.
Which, by the way, just for the record, I think is a traitorous action.
I think it is just murderous and traitorous.
I think it is something that we don't talk about enough in this country.
These companies willing to do this.
But on top of that, so they would leave.
And guess who would come in?
A venture capital firm, the type that Mitt Romney would work for and a lot of these other ghouls would work for.
So what would they do?
They would come in and they'd say, hey, we're going to save your business.
So here's what we're going to do.
We're going to lay off literally everybody that we possibly can.
We're going to reduce you to a skeleton crew.
And you're going to work for less money, more hours, in worse conditions.
And we're going to do that until the wheels fall off.
And then we'll declare bankruptcy and we'll make money.
Now, America has created a situation where every one of our industries works this way.
And all of our business works this way.
And our education system works this way.
And it's everything for an advantage or a couple of pennies.
And everybody knows it's not sustainable.
But it leads to profit in the moment.
I can't reference a, well I guess it's a movie as well, but it's also more of a stage play I think, it's The Producers.
We're talking about basically that, where they discover that they get more money by doing a failed show on Broadway and getting the insurance money than if they actually put something together well.
And then the weirdest thing was it actually ended up becoming a farce and a really successful anyway.
I think the producers is a great analogy because one of the things that ends up happening in this post-political period, so politics is supposed to be about how to make the country better and work better.
No, it's about draining the country while presenting the illusion of making the country better.
It's actually like the producers, but they actually put in more effort in making the thing work.
Right?
In making the play look decent.
And they can do that through myth and manipulation of prejudice and all that stuff.
But no, I think the producers is a really good analogy.
So the only thing that's different about the producers, in theory, would then be to mirror what's going on now, is that, you know, 60% of the audience would be throwing tomatoes at the actors, even if they did try to spruce it up and make it look good, right?
I mean, we do have people in this country who are really upset and do understand what's going on.
No one's marching in the streets like they did back in the 60s and 70s, but certainly the feeling is there, right?
Absent the outrage.
Yeah, in this analogy that basically liberals or Democrats would have been swindled into buying season tickets and then basically told, you know, to hit the bricks.
It's one of those things where it's unfortunate, but it took Donald Trump in a lot of ways.
I wrote this the other day.
He's like a Rosetta Stone.
Like, all of a sudden, he made very clear what was wrong in the country.
You know?
And all of a sudden you look at it and you're like, oh my god, American exceptionalism.
It's a total myth.
Oh my god, American history is really screwed up and we don't really know what's happened.
Oh, the meritocracy is not real.
Oh, white privilege is real.
White supremacy is real.
And all of a sudden these people who are in denial start realizing how bad it is because the play is so bad.
If he was even 10% more competent, because that's the thing, when he gets up there and people talk about his tone, it's because for like 10 seconds he's not, you know, Drooling on himself or you know talking about You know some sort of prejudice thing like there's a moment where and we've talked about on the podcast We're like Mike Pence will nod, you know, and he'll be like there it is.
There's a president right there.
Good job.
Mr President and and if he was even the the least bit competent We would be living in such a more dangerous time, but it's actually more dangerous in a different way because he's incompetent Right, but we can see it Well, Jared, I need to interrupt you because I would like to congratulate you for finally getting a shelter-in-place order in Georgia.
It's Mazel Tov.
I have to tell you, so for people who aren't aware of this, I live in the state of Georgia and our governor Brian Kemp is an anti-democratic despot in the making.
He desperately wants to be Donald Trump.
For anybody who isn't aware, he campaigned for the governorship by standing in front of a truck and saying, I got a big truck and I'm going to use it to round up illegal immigrants.
He's a disgusting person and probably stole the election from Stacey Abrams, but we can't really talk about that.
He said, and this is amazing, so he's getting paid six figures to be the governor of the state of Georgia.
And by the way, it's the state where the CDC is.
You know what I mean?
Like while he's sitting in his mansion, the CDC is down the street.
And he says, oh yeah, we're now going to shelter in place.
I didn't realize that you could spread coronavirus and not have symptoms.
That's amazing.
Well, we're going to be safe now.
And it's just like the most incompetent leadership and also just malfeasance you can imagine.
It's disgusting.
And the southern governors right now are killing people.
They're literally damning people to death.
Right.
It's interesting because you can track the map of the states that aren't doing a really rigorous shelter-in-place policy right now.
And I guess it's tapping into some notion of like being independent or being a libertarian.
Being tough, Nick!
You gotta be tough!
Yeah, but it's also, you can't tell me what to do.
But it's like, you're getting kind of on, you know, if you really feel that way, it's like, are you one step away from saying, ah, laws, I'm not listening to any of your laws.
I'm just going to do whatever I want to do.
And, you know, hopefully those are those will treat people with enough, you know, Within the bounds that no one comes and tries to forcibly remove you from my house, but this is what you kind of see, the instant reaction.
And I see this with kids all the time where, you know, you bark at them to do something and the instant reaction is to say no and to resist no matter how important or valuable whatever you're saying is.
Yeah, exactly, and it's, man, it's the same strain and it's the same disease.
You know, it's like, if Trump could get rid of coronavirus by talking tough to it, he would.
Which is what all this invisible enemy bullshit is about.
The silent, invisible enemy, and the war against it, and we're gonna defeat it, and it's gonna be a grand victory.
And you know, you might as well, in the background, you see Vladimir Putin removing a shirt and putting on butter.
It's just it's this bullshit masculinity thing and you're exactly right.
It's a bunch of like starch shirted like country club guys sitting around on their fourth or fifth cocktails after playing 18 talking about how tough they are while they're terrified that they're gonna die and And they're just out there lying to people and damning them to unnecessary deaths and destruction.
And it's as disgusting as it gets.
And it's a Republican trait.
That's what it is.
Because the Republican Party has been taken over by these people and dedicated to these people for so long that they just can't govern any other way.
They just can't.
It's an invasion of the body snatchers.
It's the same story over and over again.
You know, be careful, you better not fall asleep or you'll wake up a communist.
And then we move into now, like, the fear of, you know, people, undocumented immigrants coming into this, you know, this country.
It's amazing how those techniques work.
They really do.
And it's like in enough people's DNA that it works.
And it seems to be related to sort of maybe where you live in the country.
That seems sort of clear, indications of that.
And I don't think that's ever going to change, right?
We're never going to get to a position where enough people... I don't want to say believe what we believe, because anybody can believe whatever they want to believe, but enough people are...
What's the word I'm looking for?
Not woke, because that's not the right word.
No, aware.
You know, I think aware is the right word.
Like we're gonna have Sarah Kinsey here in a second, who I think her book is the type of book that is necessary in these moments where you get information out there and you can start to change things.
Because what you're saying about whether or not it can change, it's one thing after another.
It's stuff we keep talking about.
It's when all of a sudden you make people think about history and you make people start turning their backs on myths, you know what I mean?
And all of a sudden they start like actually looking at reality a little bit.
It wins some people over.
Like if you think about a cult, like it's awful, but if you think about like, you know, like a Jonestown cult or something, not everybody who died is everybody who's ever been a part of that cult, right?
People leave.
People find the light and they find truth and they move away from it.
So there are people who can get away from this because all of this is just a big jangled knot of myth and identity and the lies that we tell ourselves and the lies that society tell us.
It can be rectified, it can be moved against, but my god it's really hard.
Right.
Well, the interesting thing about Sarah Kenzie here is that
It's the image I have in my head is like a year ago when she was saying the things she was saying and writing the things she was writing like that book was red literally the color red and then over the next year the book actually changes colors because it almost like it just becomes more true every day that goes by so it's almost like now it's like your favorite color when maybe a year ago you wouldn't thought that was the most ridiculous thing you'd ever heard anyone say about authoritarianism and where our country is going towards but you know what every step of the way She's been right.
And it's unfortunate, and it's scary, but there's really no denying, as we, you know, step by step, it's the playbook they've been following, and she's outlined it for a long time ahead of the curve.
Yeah, she absolutely has.
And, you know, I've known Sarah a little bit for a while, and there's been a lot of us who have been talking about this stuff and sort of calling it what it is.
And the general notion is to fight against it.
You know what I mean?
It's to say, that's ridiculous.
That's crazy.
It could never happen here.
And that helps you sleep better at night sometimes.
But this is not the moment to be sleeping.
This is the moment to be awake.
This is the moment to be aware of what's happening.
And now more than ever, I mean, lives are at stake.
Democracy is at stake.
The fate of the country is at stake.
So we're going to go and talk to Sarah Kinsey here for a few minutes and hear what she has to say about Democracy and the dangers of, you know, life during plague time under an authoritarian like Donald Trump.
All right, we have with us, and we are incredibly fortunate to have with us, Sarah Kinzier, who is the author of the best-selling The View from Flyover Country and an expert on authoritarian states.
She is currently the co-host of Gaslit Nation, and her book Hidden in Plain Sight, The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America will release next week.
She is one of the best and brightest and most necessary voices in the country.
We are incredibly lucky to have you.
Thanks for being on, Sarah.
So, it's hard to even know where to start anymore.
You are obviously one of the most vocal and accurate critics who has been calling this thing what it is all along.
One of the more infamous phrases that you've introduced to Lexicon at this point is that this is a crime syndicate masquerading as a government.
In a time of plague, what does that mean for what we should expect going forward, particularly as Donald Trump just grows more and more, I don't know, blatant in his disregard for human life and democracy?
Yeah, I mean, this is the crisis that I've been dreading, you know, both in terms of the humanitarian catastrophe, but also the potential for autocratic consolidation.
And we've been steadily moving toward that for the last four years.
But this is giving them the pretext to enact all sorts of policies.
You see this in particular from Bill Barr in his proposed DOJ policies of indefinite detention.
You see this in them labeling different ethnic groups as diseased and trying to weaponize things like ventilators or masks, you know, doling them out to which states they like.
And there's a perception out there, which is incorrect, that they're going to reward the, quote, red states for their fealty.
But I'll say as a resident of a red state that that never seems to work out in reality after our many disasters.
But yeah, it's very troubling.
We see the same autocratic alliances that we had before operating with Trump praising MBS, praising Putin, a situation where Russia is allegedly selling us aid, you You know, when I said it was a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government, I was referring to a pretty broad spectrum of countries, but the main ones, you know, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, and now the UK,
You see a very similar reaction to the coronavirus crisis from all of them.
You see it weaponized in the same way where their leaders are using this as an excuse to preserve their own power and are doing so with utter apathy to the suffering of their own citizens.
And I see that in the U.S.
as well, and it's terrifying.
It absolutely is and I think one of the one of the most troubling parts of all of it is this incessant and dangerous dedication to the idea that this is politics as usual or that you know this is a crisis and yeah Donald Trump is an authoritarian but he'll really become president now and obviously he'll take this seriously because lives are on the line but what we're seeing every day is even as people are like praising his tone and saying you know this is obviously the day he became president or whatever shit they say
There is this moment where it's like, you have to notice, in the same breath as he's talking about hundreds of thousands of people dying, he's talking about his ratings compared to The Bachelor and Monday Night Football and this whole rigmarole and act that he puts on.
I mean, human life doesn't matter to these people.
It's profit, it's power, and it's the consolidation of those things.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, one of the things that's really troubling me is that, of course, there's a short-term profit goal for them.
You know, you're seeing that in, you know, their attempts to patent, you know, vaccines or apparently body bags or all sorts of things.
But what really alarms me, you know, and this, of course, alarmed me before coronavirus emerged, Is there long-term goals?
You know, these are sociopaths with, as you said, no regard for human life and who've reacted to things like the climate change crisis with that attitude, with no intent of stopping it, with an accelerationalist bent.
You know, you have explored in particular the religious extremist element to this, where a lot of people are governing With the idea that the rapture is coming.
I mean, Pompeo has been very explicit about that.
And they want to hurry it up.
They want to egg it on, or they want to use it as a pretext for enacting incredibly sadistic policies.
And it's very frustrating to not see the media and pundits and others catching up to this and talking about it in blunt terms.
You know, they still act, even now, as if we have all the time in the world to sort through this, to turn this around.
But there are people dying now, and that death rate is going to exponentially increase for months to come.
There's record unemployment.
There are 10 million people who've now filed for unemployment in two weeks.
And we have a rapidly consolidating autocratic band of psychopaths.
I don't know what else to call it.
I'm not exaggerating with any of these terms when people hear this.
I think it sounds extreme in part because it's genuinely terrifying.
But also because of this tendency in the media to try to play it down and soft pedal it.
That's the opposite of what we should be doing.
And from the start, people who have studied authoritarianism, who have studied white supremacist movements, who studied the use of nuclear weapons, who studied sociopathy, we've all been issuing The same warnings about Trump and his backers, and it is incredibly frustrating that as we are proven right again and again, much to our own incredible dismay, we continue to be dismissed as alarmist.
And meanwhile, you know, alarms are literally ringing out.
People in New York City can't sleep through the alarms that go ceaselessly through their neighborhoods as ambulances pour through, bringing the coronavirus victims to hospitals.
Like, how much more Does it take for people to grasp the severity of the crisis?
Yeah, and there's something going on there.
And the rise of authoritarian states, I think there's like this misunderstanding or a willful misunderstanding that they have to stand up on a stage and say, we're authoritarians and we're fascists, as if most authoritarian states don't happen sort of over time as people turn their backs on it and pretend that everything is fine.
And it feels like this slide into authoritarianism leads to a place where you wake up one day and I've talked to a lot of people who have lived through either fascist Italy or through the Third Reich that you know it approaches and approaches and approaches and it takes step and inches and inches here and then eventually they wake up one day and it was like it was always there but for whatever reason We have a circumstance here in America where people are just in complete denial.
And you're right, it's this outrage against what they think is alarmism versus the fact, like you just said, we just found out today we have 10 million people unemployed.
Just the other day, he announced it was going from zero people dying to 100,000 to 250,000 and probably more.
There's this bizarre, you know, frog in the boiling pot to this country where, for whatever reason, people are more in denial about this, more willing to stay in that denial and the myth of what America is and what it can't be, than they are ready to face this thing head on.
And it's maddening.
Yeah, it's incredibly dangerous.
And I understand the perspective of ordinary people who aren't immersed in this all day, how they may be reacting.
And plenty of them have caught on, honestly.
I think most people actually have a better grasp on this than the punditry.
But for those who don't, there's an element of fear where, of course, you don't want to look at this head on because you're imagining the decades ahead, what does this mean for your children, et cetera.
Sorry, I just sort of blanked out for a second.
But there's also what I've been calling normalcy bias, which is this idea that if things are this bad, if they are this dangerous, if we've hit a point of no return, that surely all of these agencies and institutions that are tasked with protecting us are going to jump in at some point and rectify the situation, indict the perpetrators, and talk in clear, blunt language about how far we have fallen and about how deep the crisis is at hand.
And the absence of that, I think, has led to a lot of confusion among ordinary Americans and also among people whose job it is to analyze this crisis, including many of our elected officials who have not spoken out with the clarity that's required or fought Trump including many of our elected officials who have not spoken out with the clarity that's required or fought
It's this constant kind of past the buck attitude of waiting for someone else to emerge, whether Mueller or SDNY or the endless wait from the Democrats for Pelosi to actually do something.
And every time they screw this up, it sets us back Just to such an enormous level in terms of how this harms American people, because we don't have time to waste.
We don't have time to screw up.
If Pelosi had impeached earlier, if all of the information about the depth of Trump's criminality and that of his backers had come to the fore earlier, we might have had a different outcome.
If they'd pursued people like Barr more stridently during the confirmation hearings and made sure he didn't get in, we'd have a different outcome.
If Mueller had done his job and indicted all of these very obvious future felons and people involved in organized crime for decades, if he had gone after Kushner, for example, we wouldn't have people dead right now.
We would have a lower death toll.
So, you know, all of those people have blood on their hands.
This was their actual job.
Their job is to protect American citizens and to protect our democracy.
And they have just shirked that duty.
And it's not everyone.
You know, there are many who did try, at least, to do their part.
But on the whole, we've been let down on just such an incredible level.
And I'm always stuck thinking, you know, why did they behave this way?
Why did they capitulate?
Why did they preemptively surrender?
Like, this is a textbook aspiring autocracy.
It is not hard to predict what they're going to do next, especially with someone like Trump, who's been in the public eye for 40 years and, you know, loves to just have these little tells where he lets you know what his plans are so he can flaunt your own, you know, powerlessness back at you.
And they've just dropped the ball at almost every turn.
And so I'm always, you know, wondering what exactly is at the heart of that.
And I go into that a bit in my book, some speculation.
But, you know, a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds behaved the same way.
And that always gives me pause.
Yeah, it's really troubling.
And I mean, I think you just nailed it, which is that Trump is so incompetent and so blatant in his crimes.
Like, he's such a terrible criminal, but we have a society that continues pushing him forward and giving him successes.
I'm going to let you go, but I had one last thing I wanted to ask you about, and I think it dovetails into all of this, unfortunately.
And it's like one of these slow-moving disasters that you can, we're running out of time already, even at the beginning of April, and you can already see it happening.
It's like watching it in slow motion and, you know, just screaming at people to do something about it.
Every day that there isn't something done to protect the elections in November, is another day that it's less and less likely that we will have elections in November.
And this is one of those things where people have this really unnecessary and dangerous faith in institutions that they'll take care of it.
And you see it online when you actually mention something about this, people are like, well, the Constitution says this.
And it's like, these people have no respect for the Constitution.
And the Constitution has no power beyond how people are willing to defend it.
And we have seen in this country, there is no willingness to defend this Constitution besides a few people.
So what, I would love to hear what you have to say about this, and where this thing is going, because it, like you said, It's all so easily predictable.
Like, it's just happening right in front of us, and they telegraph every move that they do.
Yeah, I mean, initially, I thought what they were going to do was what they did in 2016, which is to, you know, manipulate the election, to illegally influence it through a combination of domestic voter suppression, foreign interference, hackable machines, you know, which is something they only gradually admitted over time.
And then, of course, even with an overwhelming margin of victory, for example, for the Democrats, I think we're going to see many Republicans, including Trump, Simply refuse to concede.
Just say, you know, fake election, rigged this, rigged that, and then just not leave because that's how they operate.
I never thought that they would cancel the election because they get off on this.
They love it.
They like to flaunt that in our faces.
And that's true of every dictator.
That's why dictators win elections with like 90 to 95 percent of the vote.
They have to have that margin.
And then they're like, oh, it's the people's love.
They just couldn't resist me.
It was so overwhelming for them, you know, and so on and so forth.
I am thinking at this point that they may well cancel the November election because of a genuine public health crisis.
And that puts people who value democracy in a terrible bind because you don't want to tell people to go out and vote if it's genuinely unsafe.
But at the same time, we will never get rid of this pandemic if we don't have capable people managing it.
Trump and his backers are helping spread this thing.
And so he is a public health crisis.
in and of himself and so you know i am watching an attempt to try to get voting by mail which i think is the safest alternative and you know it has its own flaws it's not perfect some of these problems will remain like a refusal to concede but they need to be uh very proactive about that and get that moving right now in april so that we're not sitting here in october like wow another outbreak I guess there's no election.
And I do see some activity from some senators and representatives.
But again, just a total lack of urgency.
They're on vacation.
I mean, as I'm saying this, Congress is on Vacation and like we are probably talking more about this than they are and that's really disturbing to me as a citizen.
Like I feel like I don't have actual representation in government and, you know, including in the Democratic Party.
And thank you so much for saying that, and it has just driven me nuts to watch that sort of willful disregard of reality.
Again, Sarah Kinzier, we couldn't be more grateful you could come on here.
Again, Sarah's book, Hidden in Plain Sight, The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America, comes out next week.
Absolutely pick it up.
I don't think it could be more essential for our moment and understanding where we are and where we're going.
Thank you so much for your work, Sarah, and please stay safe.
Yes, you too.
Thank you.
All right.
And that was Sarah Kinzier, the author of Hidden in Plain Sight, The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America, which will be released next week.
Absolutely pick it up.
I think it's going to be important, essential reading going forward.
Yeah.
Nick, how are you feeling?
How do you feel like the next few days are going to be?
I don't know.
I'm kind of stuck in this, you know, time means nothing.
Days don't mean anything either.
And I'm starting to lose it a little bit.
I kind of feel like I'm losing my grasp on just the normal everyday sense of like how we're supposed to do and how life is supposed to function.
But there's always, at least we have wine.
At least we have wine, and at least we have our listeners.
I think I speak for Nick here.
Talking to people who enjoy this podcast and support this podcast has been one of the most rewarding things.
I'm so glad that we did this.
I'm so glad that we decided to do this, especially now in this moment.
I feel like this is an important thing that we're doing, and the listeners out there who are supporting, I think you're doing an important thing too, and we appreciate you.
Please subscribe, like, comment, rate, all of that good stuff.
Tell people about this podcast.
Tell them we're having conversations that go beyond headlines and talk about stuff that needs to be talked about.
