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April 10, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
36:28
Can Religion Save You From The Coronavirus?

With a holy weekend looming, Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how the Cult of the Shining City, a nationalistic, Neo-Confederate, white-identity evangelical cult has taken over American politics and the Republican Party, and the danger they pose during the coronavirus pandemic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
Aren't you concerned you could infect other people if you get sick inside?
No.
People who don't cover this.
No.
I'm covered in Jesus' blood.
I'm covered in Jesus' blood!
And the politicization of decisions like the hydroxychloroquine has been amazing to me.
And as soon as he said something positive about it, the media's been on a jihad to discredit the drug.
It's quite strange.
No.
No.
Go ahead.
We want to have it, and we're going to see if we have it.
Do you need it?
No.
Is it a nice thing to do?
- We need that, though, Mr. President, to make sure people are safe going back to work.
You don't want to send people back to the workplace. - We want to have it, and we're going to see if we have it.
Do you need it?
No.
Is it a nice thing to do?
Yes.
Hello, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I am your host, Nick Hauselman, joined by my dutiful co-host, Jared Yates Sexton, as always.
And it's an interesting Thursday afternoon with the news that Jerry Falwell Jr.
is serving some sort of a subpoena or some sort of thing, wanting to arrest people from the media.
So, Jared, as being a member of the media, I wonder how threatening this feels to you that he's going to turn his campus police on you.
You know, this reminds me of when I was little and you'd be outside playing and all of a sudden, you know, there was the one kid in your neighborhood who always got upset and then they'd be like, I'm telling.
You know, that's what this is.
It's just straight garbage.
Jerry Falwell Jr.
We can't ever forget the junior because we have to we got to link him to his father's just poisonous legacy and the fact that he is just a complete shell of his father and so incompetent and just a just a totally nepotistic failure.
This is so sad because what happened was, and we got to talk about this thing, and so when people are going to hear this, it's going to be Good Friday.
We're a couple days out from Easter.
I have a bone to pick with the white identity evangelical neo-confederate cult that we're going to get into in a minute.
But Jerry Falwell Jr.
reopened Liberty University basically to pretend like coronavirus wasn't a real problem.
Inevitably, his students, his poor, victimized students, came back to the university.
Coronavirus.
This is shocking, Nick, because science is real.
Um, we're quickly exposed to coronavirus and then immediately, you know, that, that showed that he had made a poor decision, which is not shocking because he's Jerry Falwell Jr.
This whole thing's so pathetic and it's so awful and so stupid and it's just, I have to tell you, I'm so frustrated right now.
Today is a day of frustration with the coronavirus pandemic and, and the American government and the Trump administration, all of it.
I'm very, very frustrated, but we have, we have to talk about how we got here.
Yes, well you know the thing about Liberty University it's interesting is I saw the headline originally where it says he issued a warrant for the arrest of these two journalists and I was like scratching my head thinking like you can't just issue a warrant like this is not a citizen's arrest kind of a thing.
I was so confusing and when you dig... I declare bankruptcy!
That's what it is.
And when you look into it deeper, it turns out, yeah, he wants to turn his campus police on and to somehow arrest them.
Which is like, we all remember being on a campus and like, you know, I don't think anyone was ever worried that the cops were going to, I mean, who knows, maybe they could break up a party or two.
Wait, wait.
I was scared about campus police.
Let's not throw out a net.
All right, fair enough, fair enough.
But it's like, okay, so it's not like rent-a-copter, but like, this is stupid.
This is just a political stunt, and I guess it's a way to change the narrative.
Although, here's the thing.
We all heard about him bringing back everybody early, and I guess, okay, and we get to have to know why they listened to him.
They listened to him because they thought that God was protecting them from the virus.
There it is.
There it is.
Okay?
There it is.
And by the way, they stopped listening to God pretty quickly once a couple people got infected, right?
They were gone, scattered off of that campus after about three days or whatever it was.
So it's not like this Jesus' blood covering, which by the way, you saw that interview, right?
The lady pulling out of the church?
Yeah, I didn't just see it.
I lived it for years, Nick.
The moment that she said that, it transported me back to Southern Indiana and my entire childhood, which we have to talk about.
No, that was the most familiar thing that I've seen in years, and people who look at that, and they laugh at that, and they think it's madness, and it is madness, and it is funny.
I mean, it's a lot, Nick.
Yeah, and that was an interview they did from a car of a lady driving out from a service, having gathered with all these different people.
I don't think we talked about it last week, or last show, but yeah, she said that she had Jesus's blood on her, obviously proverbially, and correct me if I'm wrong with what that means, Is that that is what's going to protect her like a, as if she's got some sort of, you know, immunity to the coronavirus.
Is that right?
Is that how it feels?
Oh, man, Nick, I really enjoyed watching you work your way through that.
That was amazing for me.
I assume there's like... I warmed up my gymnastics beforehand.
There's a swath of our listeners right now who really enjoyed watching you work your way mentally through that.
That's one of my favorite Muckrake podcast moments in a long time.
Um, so, it comes down to this, and you know, I've been talking now for a while.
about what I call the Cult of the Shining City, which is the term that I have labeled these people because it's hard to say evangelicals because not all evangelicals believe this stuff.
When I say the Cult of the Shining City, I am talking about a specific type of white identity evangelicalism that has neo-confederate beliefs, and we'll go into the history of that and where it came from.
But these people literally believe That America is God's chosen country and the people who he, capital H, shines his light and his will on and his favor on are protected from evil.
They believe that the coronavirus is a plague on evil people and that if you accept Christ as your personal savior and as a result that you were washed in the blood of Christ, That you are going to be protected from this because when they look at, and by the way, for people who hear all this and they're like, what the hell are we talking about?
Think about every time there's been a hurricane and Pat Robertson gets on TV and he's like, this is because of gays.
And everyone's like, what is Pat Robertson talking about?
And so in their world, there is a racist, closed-minded, evil God, the Neo-Confederate God, which we'll talk about in a second, who literally looks at America as like, I really don't like how America is going right now and I really don't like you know how the last election went or how people are getting married and loving one another and starting families.
I think I'm gonna throw a hurricane that way which by the way hurricanes happen before any of this stuff happened but you know whatever we don't want to do too much logic here but it is It is a madness that isn't just madness.
It's a madness that has overtaken this country and has led us to a place where to simply look at the news right now is to pull out your hair and gnash your teeth.
It is the most destructive madness imaginable.
Well, I want to go on the record, before anybody shows up at my house, they might show up at yours, and just say that I have the utmost respect for people that want to dedicate their lives to a religion.
You know, if you're going to be a priest, and obviously, you know, be a good priest, I suppose, I'm not sure how we're supposed to designate that, Then, you know, or a rabbi or anything like that.
Like, I have a lot of respect for you choosing to live your life that way, in a pious way, and righteously, and all the things that go along with that as being part of a modern society as well.
So, I don't want to, you know, poo-poo anybody for having an intense belief in a religion.
But I suspect that this is something different.
That starts to defy logic.
I think it's the issue here for you, right?
Is that what you're sort of gristling against the most?
Well, it doesn't just defy logic.
It actively rips apart reality.
And it has for decades now.
The first thing, and by the way, you've been on an absolute roll lately.
And for sure, our audience has taken notes.
So I'm going to go ahead and recommend a movie that they can watch this weekend, you know, over Good Friday and over Easter Sunday, which I think will help explain a lot, which is Jesus Camp.
And there's this moment, and it sort of goes more into Pentecostal Christianity, which is all part of this sort of thing.
And one of the things that one of the characters in it says is they're talking about terrorists.
They're talking about Muslim terrorists.
And the woman says, we can actually learn a lot from them and that they look up to them.
And they're different sides of the same coin.
Just because we're talking about religion being dangerous doesn't mean all religions are dangerous.
It just so happens that the religion we're talking about, this cult of the Shining City that we're discussing right now, and that encompasses all of this, is its own type of politicized, ideological, nationalized, dangerous white supremacist movements.
And it actually hides behind this thing, right?
It hides behind the idea of a religion.
But in truth, it's this really insidious, poisonous movement that has, there's no other way to say it, it's really screwed up America.
And it's put all of us in danger.
And right now in this pandemic, we're in extreme danger because of these people.
Uh, you know, that sounds reasonable to me.
And again, there are times when everyone's mindsets have been shifted slowly to what, you know, people have been ringing the bell very loudly for a while.
Sarah Kenzie was one, you know, and who keeps sounding more and more sane, you know, and more and more, you know, normal every day that goes by.
This is another one of those things where, At this point, you know, maybe a while back, we would have felt like, hey, listen, these are people who just want to, you know, have the religion and live their life a certain way.
But you're right.
There's a nefariousness to this, which it infects, just like the coronavirus does.
And that is sort of the same.
There's a direct correlation to the people like that and the people who want to support Trump.
I suppose it's in the DNA or something about the willingness of people to want to join this kind of thing.
There's something built in and perhaps, would you argue that it's also a regional thing or it's related to maybe where you are in the country?
Oh yeah, for sure.
I mean, it's everywhere in a way.
So like, I grew up in this thing.
I grew up in southern Indiana.
I grew up in some really extremist, like Baptist, Pentecostal religion.
And there's a lot of stuff going on here, but it is white identity expressly.
And also, like, where it is concentrated is not only in, like, the South and the Confederacy, but what I would call the extended South.
You know, again, like, I think you've spent some time in the Midwest.
You grew up in the Midwest.
And I assume that you have seen Confederate flags in the Midwest.
Correct?
Well, listen, I grew up in Chicago.
Well, you're not going to see a lot of Confederate flags in Chicago.
I did drive down to Memphis and we were in Springfield.
So I think the closer you got to the old Blackwater, to Mississippi River, is when you'd start to see it.
So I live right now in Southern Georgia.
I mean, Southern Georgia.
I see Confederate flags all the time.
When I drive by my courthouse, I see a Confederate statue.
You know what I mean?
Like, this is like a regular thing.
But I'm telling you right now...
It's not so much more than what I used to see in Indiana.
And the whole thing is that it has spread because it's actually, it's not about a region.
It's about white supremacy, right?
It's about the idea that whites are somehow inherently superior and they deserve power and privilege and domain over all things.
And what people don't understand Is that when the Civil War happened, the nation was divided into two.
People think about the Confederacy and they think that somehow or another the Confederacy was its own nation.
It wasn't.
They thought that they were continuing on the tradition of America.
That they were the real America.
Now, if that sounds familiar, there's a reason why it sounds familiar, right?
So they, right, they claim George Washington, they claimed all of the founding fathers, the Constitution, which is funny.
If you want to spend some time this weekend, go read the Confederate Constitution.
It is the original United States Constitution, plagiarized, but it gives more power to the powerful and mentions slavery explicitly, right?
White supremacy.
So, the Confederacy had its own religion.
It was Christianity.
And their religion was a completely white supremacist religion in which there was a racist god who said that whites are the best and everybody else has to bow down before them.
Well, guess who carried on that tradition?
Jerry Falwell Sr.
Who was a neo-confederate preacher because those southern preachers kept preaching that and whenever Martin Luther King during the civil rights era was talking about Christ and you know things like socialism and social justice, which is all throughout the New Testament.
Jerry Falwell starts telling people, he's like, no, segregation is the line of God and you can't cross it.
So all of a sudden, the evangelical movement that we're talking about, the Cult of the Shining City, it becomes a neo-confederate evangelical cult, which is all about white supremacy.
And people don't like to admit that, they don't like to talk about it, but the strain that we're talking about right now, which is the Republican Party and what has happened over the past few years, people like Jerry Falwell Jr., all of them, It's part of that same group, and anybody who grew up in it knows it's a cult, or people who've gotten out, people who are in it don't understand that it's a cult, but the people who've gotten out understand it's a cult, and quite frankly, during this coronavirus pandemic, the things that they're saying, and you've seen it too, they're like, well, it'll kill the bad people, and I am fine because I am God's chosen, right?
Because they believe in a wrathful, racist, white supremacist God.
That's what they believe and that's why they're doing what they're doing.
And they asked the lady in the car saying, you know, you could infect other people.
You're going to the store, whatever.
And again, like her stock answer is that I have Christ's blood and it's going to, it just simply won't affect other people and it won't affect me.
And it's sad because, you know, people are going to die from this, you know, and they're going to be very, very, very sick from this.
And, you know, by the way, there's some parallels to the ultra orthodox Jewish community as well, who also support Trump in a similar way and who also were against Obama, you know, because his middle name was Hussein.
You know, that was it.
That was the only reason why they were against him.
Plus, they were racist.
But, you know, we see this right now in Israel.
They were doing extreme measures to keep this thing down.
And I saw video clips of Cops in hazmat gear tackling a guy and arresting him because they were tracking with their phones whether they were actually quarantining.
And it was an ultra-orthodox guy.
And it's no surprise to me that they would also act in this sort of libertarian way where nobody in the government could possibly tell them what to do, which is sort of also in that same sense.
You can't tell me that to stay at home.
Only God can tell me that, I suppose, is what they would argue.
And so they're going, and not only that, they need to flaunt it.
They need to let everyone know what that is about.
And that's interesting because it's not limited to just, you know, the evangelical Christian community either.
There is a, you know, a cult-like connection between a lot of these religions, you know, easily arguable.
There's a danger, and this happens throughout history, and this is one of the reasons we don't actually understand fascism, is because if you actually understand fascism and study it, it terrifies the hell out of you.
Because you see it, right?
Because our society has so many elements of it, and we're always on the precipice of this thing.
Religious faith and ideology of religious faith can lead people being taken over by these cults of personality.
And here's the thing, we don't like to admit this.
Right?
And so, like, I'll give you an example of, like, a cult of personality that isn't Trump, and then you have Trump, who is his own cult leader.
Barack Obama formed his own cult of personality.
That's how he became, like, a movement president, right?
And by the way, that's not a criticism, because to be elected president, you have to construct a cult of personality, and then you give it up.
You don't lead as a cult leader.
Right?
And you can admit mistakes and shame.
But Donald Trump is the kind of person who has been looking his entire life for a cult to lead.
That's all he wants.
That's what he needs.
And that's what cult leaders are.
They're terribly insecure people who need that constant feedback loop of worship and fealty.
That's who he is.
He was destined to do something like this.
Which, by the way, he grew up in this church.
One of the main people, Norman Vincent Peale, Power Positive Thinking, who we've talked about on this podcast, he was a devout worshiper of that idea because it was about, oh, God gives me wealth and power because I am great and God loves me.
So all of this stuff transfers over to power.
All fascistic leaders end up corrupting religious faith and then taking the people who believe it and using it to turn religion into a nationalistic political cult.
And we don't like to talk about, we don't like to think about it, but that's the truth.
That's how you understand where we are and how we got here.
And right now, I mean, you know, sitting here again this weekend, People are going to church.
Do not be wrong about that.
People are going to be at church.
They're going to spread coronavirus.
We're going to see people die.
And by the way, in my family and in my faith, or my old faith, the one I grew up with, this cult, they'll be like, well, it's God's will.
Right?
There was a plan here, and that's the way it all fits in.
And then meanwhile, everyone's like, well, I was godly, so I didn't get infected.
And by the way, this is one of the reasons why, like, when I went to church as a kid, they would get out snakes.
And they would handle, you know, venomous snakes.
And it's the exact same thing.
It's just hap- and by the way, this is why Trump says the invisible enemy.
Because it's all about this idea that Satan's behind it, and you gotta show that you have more faith than Satan has power.
Right.
And I guess they probably do workshop some of the things he says, the phrases and the wording.
I imagine they're sitting there in the White House in the Oval and saying, yeah, you know, I mean, I don't know exactly how specific they're going to get on that, but they definitely seem to have a sense, oh, this is going to quote unquote, play well with the evangelicals.
And there is an innate sense, yes, like this, the hidden virus, because he might just be using that as a term to want to be like a wartime president bullshit.
But they also, Definitely have that sense that this is also going to creep on creep into their brains with this the Satan stuff too and Adam and Eve I mean the snake the whole thing and the hidden, you know The hidden Satan thing, you know, it's very powerful and it keeps people down.
It keeps people in line Now, you just brought up, if people might remember, and this always creeped the living hell out of me back when I was covering the Trump campaign in 2016, when he would do that story, The Snake.
And he would compare Hillary Clinton to The Snake.
There's a lot going on there.
Because every time he's going into these crowds, and by the way, what they have done is, there's a part of them that believe in the New World Order.
Which is definitely evangelicalized, right?
It is the idea that Satan is behind a big conspiracy, globalized conspiracy.
You also have the secular, which is the deep state, right?
Which doesn't mean that Satan necessarily is doing it, but you have evil politicians who are doing it because they're also, you know, criminal pedophiles and, you know, crime syndicate people.
So you have all kinds of different things and you're exactly right.
You choose language and rhetoric that can scratch multiple things off.
Do I think that Donald Trump understands that he is the cult leader of a group of evangelicals who have been completely perverted by like Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan's hyper-capitalism?
No, I don't think he understands that.
But I think he understands it feels good that they call him the chosen one.
Right?
Yeah.
So I don't think you have to be aware that you are the messiah of a group in order to be the messiah of a group.
It just so happens that you have an endless black hole of need, and these people supply at least something to throw into that black hole.
Well, you know, again, the way we're describing this kind of religion or cult or whatever definitely applies to extreme Muslim...
worship as well, which is where we're having this unending war against that.
And it just directly reminds me of what we heard this week of our attorney general, William Barr.
Oh man, he's a big part of all of this.
He goes on Fox News and he compares the coverage of the of COVID-19 to a jihad that the mainstream media is waging against Donald Trump.
And he also has a twofer.
That's two things right there.
No, I'm just saying you're exactly right.
That's two things at once, right?
All of a sudden you're talking about 9-11 and you're talking about jingoistic xenophobic fears and you're talking about religious war.
You're exactly right.
It's both things at the exact same time.
William Barr, who is apparently some really religious person as well, is also advocating for getting out and trying to eliminate the shelter-in-place so they can get out and worship.
It's certainly the one big place he wants to make sure we can get rid of quicker, which really makes no sense because that's the most contagious place you're going to be able to go to short of, insert funny line there, I don't know, short of a concert or something.
Yeah, but it's not about church.
Because people like Bill Barr, and people like Trump, and even Mike Pompeo, he does this shit too.
What they're actually talking about when they're talking about going to church, because they don't actually worship any theology, right?
Where they see God, and I'm doing quotes for everyone listening, where they see God is in the market.
And the moment that you start opening churches, it's a sign That business is back, right?
And the moment you start going to church, and it feels like there's a moment of normalcy, and by the way, I'll just go ahead and throw this out there, even though we're having this big discussion about the cult.
What I am most afraid of is that because of the way America works, and the way our media works, and the way that our culture works, is that they're just going to announce mission accomplished, and then tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people are going to die, and the media is just not going to cover it.
When it comes back.
Right.
And so it'll be like, you know, heck of a job, Brownie.
But then all of a sudden it's like the bodies are floating down the street.
That's what I'm afraid of.
And by putting people in churches, it's the sign.
And by the way, we're going into Easter Sunday.
I want people to understand this.
And I know this is weird, but it's what happened.
It's why they announced they want the economy to come back.
Political manipulations always work best, like we were talking, when you combine them.
Easter Sunday is about resurrection.
This cult believes in a pseudo-Christian religion, but they worship profit and power.
That's what they're into.
They think that those are denotations of God's will.
So what denotes that?
The market.
And they want to go in.
They want people to... I guarantee Fox News is going to cover this like nobody's business.
They're going to talk about churches that are in session.
And then they're going to talk about the market coming back.
Because you always have to mix symbols.
And that's what these people have always been about.
It's manipulation of politics through religion.
That's really, really fascinating.
Frightening.
There's a five-hander, there's a certain kind of baseball player that can hit, run, throw, whatever.
The five-tool player.
Double fist or whatever they call that for a movie too where it's like it's got comedy and drama and it's almost like this is what they're doing in worship they're like we got a triple crown here where we're gonna cover 9-11 and we got you know dog whistling racism and we you know and we got and you know Armageddon all in one I mean that that to me is kind of scary Well, what you're talking about is exactly... I'm so glad you said it that way.
What you're talking about is the reason why America is in trouble right now.
Because the story's too convoluted.
Right.
Do you know what I mean?
It's like when you're watching a movie, you're watching a TV show, or you're listening someone tell a story, and it just gets so convoluted, it's like QAnon.
Right?
If someone were to sit down with us, if we were to get a QAnon believer on our show, and by the way, they are more than welcome to come on and we will have a respectful discussion.
We would love to talk to somebody who believes this stuff.
But if you actually listen to the story, it becomes so convoluted that only somebody steeped in it Can understand it and follow it.
Everybody else falls apart.
Now what you're talking about, that 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, you know, how many lies America has to tell about itself?
All of a sudden, do you know who stops believing it?
Everyone around the world.
Right?
America loses its sheen.
It's no longer the mythological, you know, city on the Shining Hill.
But guess who else loses it?
You and me.
Right?
Because we're not in it.
And all of a sudden you start realizing, you're like, I think these people are incredibly full of shit.
And I think this is a cult.
And I don't know what's going on.
And we've talked about it on this podcast.
That's when people leave the cult.
You know what I mean?
Like when they lose the thread and they're like, oh my god, I think I've been in a cult.
I need to get out of here.
And that's the story of America.
It's a cult that most of us have been in.
And eventually, at some point, you open your eyes and you're like, oh my god, I don't think the story of America is real.
And the mythology has been hiding all this stuff.
It's exactly what you're talking about.
It's when all of this stuff gets so complicated that you can't even follow it anymore.
Well, I think that what happens and what remains in the brains of the people who are supporting the evangelical movement, who want to cling to that, is, and it's the same thing that Trump has, is they can't seem to, they have to double down.
They cannot be wrong.
And so that's the problem.
You can't admit weakness, right?
You can't admit being wrong is weak.
We can't admit that.
And even like that's a particularly masculine trait.
I still feel like, you know, women will also in this in that cult sort of double down as well.
And you have to double down because you can't be willing to do that, which also ties directly into this notion of how they fired the captain of the USS Roosevelt for writing a letter about, you know, dire consequences of having COVID on a ship.
And Trump directly said he showed weakness and we cannot do that.
You have to get, you know, there's no choice, whatever, to fire him.
Although he also seemed a little bit sympathetic which I thought was fascinating.
Did you have a response to that when you saw him say he kind of had a bad day?
He doesn't deserve to have his career ruined for a bad day.
I was shocked by hearing Trump say that.
Yeah, that was a weird thing, but it's also... Trump has a really hard time wrapping his head around dualities and nuance, you know?
And it's like, well, he's in the military, so he must be tough.
I don't know.
I don't know what to do.
The only person he's ever figured out was John McCain, who criticized him, and the Gold Star family that criticized him.
Those are the only times he's like, no, I'm going negative on these people.
Everyone else, whatever.
I think you're right because it's about fragility.
So what we're talking about, and this is one of the reasons, and again, like I grew up in this, if you were in this particular call to the shining city, you were told, well, you can't listen to rock and roll music.
You know, you can't go out and see.
This is actually in Jesus Camp.
There's a really interesting scene where the kids are talking about Harry Potter and it's like, well, I don't know if you should be watching Harry Potter.
There's, you know, witchcraft in that.
And the whole idea, and this is, by the way, why, and I'm sure you remember this.
It's like in the 1980s or it's like, well, if you listen to this rock and roll record backwards, you hear the voice of Satan.
Right?
And it's this idea that if you see the wrong movie, you listen to the wrong, you know, cassette or record or CD, you're done.
Right?
And so as a result, you become sequestered and you are completely cut off and quarantined, if you will, from any information that could possibly lead you astray.
That's cult-like behavior.
Right?
So in this case, if you have one person who says, I think this COVID-19 thing is out of control, the cult throws you out.
You're an apostate.
I mean, look at Mitt Romney.
Mitt Romney will never be welcome to another Republican event for the rest of his life.
And this is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative.
This was the standard bearer of the Republican Party in 2012.
He'll never go to another Republican event for the rest of his career.
Period.
Because it's an apostate.
If you say one wrong thing about that, there's no way they can let you be in.
You have to get out.
You just have to get out.
Yeah.
And I already told you my theory about that.
A couple things.
Mitt Romney should just run.
I guess he should run as an independent.
Just to siphon off the 80,000 votes that will sink Trump.
And then the Democrats will welcome him as a hero.
He'll join the Democratic Party.
He can finish out his career as a hero and choose any assignment he'd want in any of the Senate committees.
You know what I mean?
That's what he should do.
And he won't, but that would be, that was my theory a while back, and that would be the way to ensure, because again, this all ends up being to ensure Trump losing.
How we can do that.
And it still doesn't feel like, even though the approval rating is going down on his handling of COVID-19, it's not going to stay at 60% as we have, you know, dying week.
But it's still enough, it's still high enough that it really makes me concerned that he's going to win again and win, you know, in the same manner he did in 2016.
Man I'm feeling today for me and I don't know where you've been like it ebbs and it flows like I have days of hope where I'm like we can do this thing and we can figure this out and we can reform it and then there's other days where I'm like we're never gonna learn our lesson.
There's like today is announced obviously on CNBC and it was like they're gonna throw like another I don't know Who knows?
Trillions of dollars don't exist.
It's just a made-up number, right?
They're going to throw X amount of trillion dollars towards businesses through the Fed or whatever.
And meanwhile, 10% of the population of America is unemployed.
They don't need to be unemployed.
Yeah, it's probably more at this point.
And they don't need to be unemployed.
It just so happens that corporations are like, yeah, we can lay people off and run a skeleton crew.
Can't wait to do that.
And so now I'm like, yeah, of course, if we even have an election, you know, this is where this thing is going to go.
And you know, as you're sitting there talking about Mitt Romney, the really cynical part of me is like, I can just see him in 2021 going out to lunch with Trump and Trump having him lick his boots and beg for Secretary of State or something.
I'm just so Fed up with all these people.
It's just a disgusting situation. - Well, let's revisit this notion of, you know, all of us coming out of the cult of what America stood for.
'Cause that was really what it was.
And it just echoes every day since Trump was elected that we're simply not living in the country we thought we were living in for all these years.
Now, a lot of people have gotten that a lot earlier than me.
And when it hits you in the face, it is devastating.
And one of the things that accentuates this notion that this is not reality is the stock market.
So we now have 17 million people over the last four weeks declare unemployment, out of a job.
The unemployment rate, according to the Washington Post, is 13%.
And yet, the Dow has been up.
It finished up 285 points today.
It was up equally.
Yesterday, and it has no bearing on what actually is happening in reality.
Now, I remember I worked at the mercantile exchange in two summers during high school.
And, you know, it was a pit of like 50 guys making trades.
And in theory, like they're the ones who, whatever given day it was, would control the price of these things.
It had nothing to do with anything else but a bunch of random white dudes sitting around a pit.
You know, it doesn't exist that way anymore.
But it really feels the same way now with the stock market, where it's just literally Whatever anybody decides that day to do, it happens.
It's completely manipulated.
Again, we're taping this on the right day to have this conversation.
Or maybe it's the wrong day.
I don't know.
They're not afraid.
You know, that's the thing.
It's like in the middle of all of this, when the pandemic was fresh and the stock market was cratering, it was because they thought that actual change and reform was possible.
And now it's not.
We're just going to shovel, you know, we've talked about it on this podcast about it's like a runaway train, right?
Going down the tracks, it's going to derail at some point.
And the question is, do you try and find the break and you try and fix the problem?
Or do you just shovel more coal into it?
And we have decided as a country, well not as a country, you know, there's like 1%, 2% of the country that decides this.
So the 1 or 2% of the country decided we're going to shovel so much damn coal into this thing and we're going to see where it goes.
And that's why it's jumping.
They have gotten, we talked about this on the last podcast, They got everything that they wanted.
They're going to get complete financial relief.
They're going to figure out how to turn that into profit.
They're going to figure out advantage.
And on top of that, they got to lay off a ton of people without taking a stock hit and without taking a PR hit.
So people are going to be working for less.
They're going to be working harder.
They're going to be working longer.
And I mean, they're just going to continue to exploit people.
And there's just no repercussions in sight whatsoever.
So it's simply not fair, and we've known that it's not fair for a long time.
These multi-trillion dollar corporations can certainly go two, three months without significant income and still be able to be viable and not have to cut people.
But remember, the other thing is, what you described as far as, you know, firing people and making the people who have their jobs do more for less money and more hours, that's been happening over and over again.
That happened when the tech bubble burst around 2000.
It happened in 2008 during the housing collapse.
So it's like, this is a real vicious cycle here where the quality of living has so severely dropped that we can't get a minimum wage raise to make that viable.
And again, if you've ever wanted to find out how or needed proof for why this whole system is rigged against anybody who's in the lower class or even like lower middle class, this is it.
Well, real fast Nick, just a quick question.
If you were to get a minimum wage hike, what would happen to the businesses that employ people in America?
Well, the argument has always been that they'll go out of business because they can't afford to pay the minimum wage.
Or they'll pack up and they'll go somewhere where there's not a minimum wage, right?
So what you're talking about is you're talking about an era where corporations have grown, those trillion dollar, billion dollar corporations, they've grown to be nations unto themselves, right?
So all these people that we're now going to shovel trillions Brilliant!
And by the way, they're like, oh, we need to take away lunches from kids who can't afford lunches.
Oh, we can't afford that.
We can't afford to feed kids lunch.
That's insane.
We could never have single-payer health care or whatever.
We could never afford it.
Even that is like, well, what does that have to do with the coronavirus bailout?
How does kids needing to eat have anything to do with that?
You're just adding shit in there.
Yeah, and none of it's fair.
And that's the thing that we have to be aware of, is that this thing just isn't fair.
And we're going to document that over the next couple of episodes.
Because, I mean, really, we have to talk about why it's not fair, why it's never been fair.
And the only way that we can ever try and make it fair or humane or real is to realize why we've gotten to this point.
But we thank you today.
It has been a frustrating day.
We hope you have a good, safe weekend.
You know, we really, really appreciate your continued support and listening.
Please continue to subscribe, like, share.
It has made such a huge difference and we are so appreciative of our growing audience and the interaction.
Please reach out to us.
I am at JY Sexton.
Nick is at Can You Hear Me?
SMH.
We'll be back next week.
Until then, stay safe and wash your
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