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April 17, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
40:43
This Protest Sponsored By Covid-19

An anti-quarantine rally in Michigan stole headlines, but was it real? Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss a history of pseudo-events, psy-ops, and manipulation by American officials, politicians, and recently with Russian propagandists. It's a long, dark history, and helps explain just how we ended up in these odd, dangerous times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
Tonight, thousands descending on Michigan's capital in Lansing to protest the governor's current stay-at-home rules.
I truly believe that restrictions should have been put on the people that are sick, that are coming down with the illness.
I truly believe that there are some people that are at a higher risk than others.
Us people that are at a lower risk, I feel like we should have continued on our lives and continued working.
We'll never know the precise number of COVID-19 cases that come as a result of this gathering, but we know that there will be some.
Hi, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I am your co-host, Chair Jade Sexton.
I'm here with my favorite co-host, Nick Haussleman.
We are obviously still in the coronavirus pandemic crisis things.
We thought they were leveling off, but we're now having record loss of life.
Meanwhile, the topic we're going to talk about today.
There's a lot of misinformation happening a lot of manipulation happening just recently a group of.
I don't want to call them protesters, because protesters mean a group of people who get together and actually protest something.
But you had a bunch of people in Michigan who got together to protest the quarantining measures, caused a big, giant mess in Michigan, went after Governor Whitmer, And it turns out upon closer examination that they did not necessarily go there on their own volition.
No!
That there was a lot of money.
I know this is shocking and our listeners are understandably reeling away from their listening device of choice.
It was Soros.
No, it turns out that they were given a bunch of money by groups that were linked to... Let me see if this name sounds familiar.
Betsy DeVos?
Does she have a position in the government?
Yeah, I think she's been on TV a couple times.
Been on TV a couple times.
Oh, that's right, Betsy DeVos, who is the Secretary of Education for Donald Trump and is trying to eradicate public education as we know it and is the brother of the man who started Blackwater and a paramilitary group that is offered to serve as America's paramilitary group and also spied on Americans for the Donald Trump administration.
And vacations in the Seychelles.
It is a really problematic thing.
What are your initial thoughts on this besides abject horror?
Well, the Republicans are probably going to argue, oh, these are really protesters.
They really want to have a voice.
The irony here is that whenever you see other protests, they're the ones who always say, hey, it's Soros-backed plants and paid people doing this all fake stuff.
So I find the irony here is thick.
uh but there's no question that it's easy to sort of trace this group back uh especially under the guise of like there's there's what are they protesting here because in the midst of protesting like i guess they want to go back to work they're now potentially infecting each other without a mask or anything it was the most strange macabre thing you'd ever see and there was anger you know they were blocking streets and not letting uh i believe a a uh
an ambulance couldn't get to the hospital for 10 or 10 extra minutes, which could have been devastating.
Uh, it was, it was just the most ridiculously planned, um, stupid thing I think I've just seen in a long time from just every level.
And that's what we need to talk about is the fact that it wasn't an actual protest and it didn't have any sort of actual political bent to it besides serving as an artificial pseudo event.
Um, This was meant to be a political hit on Governor Whitmer, who Donald Trump has singled out multiple times and attacked.
And she has been quite vocal about Donald Trump's inability to fight the coronavirus or, you know, unwillingness to fight the coronavirus.
It turns out that this, like a lot of things in America over the past Let's just say the last couple of decades, events that are set up as propaganda events, and that's what this was, is it was not actually a grassroots meeting of people.
It was a manufactured event by moneyed and powerful people to create the illusion of an upswell of populist anger and populist movements, which we're going to talk a little bit about the Tea Party in a second, and the history of that and how that whole thing worked.
But the problem is that American politics are being more and more manipulated by these giant propaganda psyops that are that the wealthy and powerful are doing not just in America, but it's also being done by.
Russia, you know, during the 2016 election.
And this is something that we are very vulnerable to.
And it works.
And that's the sad truth about it.
But thank God we know the truth, even though the truth probably won't be disseminated because headlines will say that this was some sort of populist protest.
Can I just throw out a conspiracy here because I just want you to know where my mind works.
We're not even a few minutes in.
I love it.
We're already there.
Do it.
Because I didn't sleep well the last few nights.
I've been having these weird dreams that I'm in high school and I missed the entire season.
Oh, you and me!
So I show up the last day of the season like kind of like begging the coach to let me on the team and play but I wake up from that you know exhausted and just I can't go back to bed so I'm searching around and so basically you know we could go back I used to joke that all these these protests eventually are gonna be like sponsored by Starbucks And I only wish that we'd have protests that were commercially based sponsorships versus the nefarious political things that we're seeing like this.
But you could go back, you know, and argue that even in the 60s counterculture movement, there seems to be evidence that that was fueled in part by like places like the CIA.
And that's how LSD was being, you know, used in manipulating these people, which might actually explain sort of the death of that, the radical ideology that supposedly had come out of the 60s and then sort of disappeared pretty quickly by the mid 70s and then got into Reaganism.
So I kind of felt like I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it is that killed that movement that in theory would have inspired decades of progressiveness in our politics and in our lifestyles.
And in fact, it went the other way.
So anyway, the point being that this has gone on for a long time.
We have people on Facebook that went to these rallies that were sponsored by the Russians in 2016 and who don't believe it when you tell them that they were.
So it's not surprising at all.
And you only hope that people aren't going to die from this.
First of all, I love that your dreams about missing high school is you didn't play on the team.
And my dream is that I didn't study for the test.
So I'm glad that's the dynamic that we're bringing to this podcast.
Second of all, I also love that you started all that and prefaced it with maybe this might be a conspiracy.
That is stone-cold history.
J. Edgar Hoover oversaw an entire... People say extra-legal, which just means illegal.
An entire illegal program that was totally set up to undermine Counterculture movements and groups, they would send FBI agents in to infiltrate them, cause problems, in some cases get people killed, violate their civil rights and human rights.
That's not at all conspiracy.
That is completely 100% true.
The CIA, I mean, the CIA was like dosing people with LSD left and right, and they were using everything from brothels to, you know, higher education facilities and laboratories.
Like, there's a reason why if you quote-unquote experiment on humans, like, you have to go and get it approved.
Part of it is, of course, the Third Reich, but another part is the fact that they were just dosing people left and right.
So, that's not even conspiracy.
That's 100% true.
And that contributed in part to the reason the counterculture fell apart.
But there's another part to it, and this is the other little ugly part to it, which is...
Eventually the counterculture became so prevalent and so large and strong, particularly with middle-class white kids, that all of a sudden all those companies you're talking about, the ones who could sponsor a protest, they looked at these kids and they said, there's money to be made off of this.
Let's sell them blue jeans.
Let's sell them rock and roll.
Let's sell them the facade of being progressive hippies, right?
And all of a sudden that's why popular culture becomes quote-unquote hip is because they start selling the culture to them.
But you don't have to go to protest anymore.
And do you know why you don't want to go to protest?
Because the FBI and CIA have people at the protest who are putting people's lives in danger.
So it becomes a lot easier to buy your counterculture than to go out and risk your lives because these people are trying to kill you.
This is 100% something that has gone on for decades in this country.
And I'm glad you put your finger on it because it's that strain of thought that created this manipulation that is still echoing through.
I mean, that type of... And by the way, just to point out, the CIA that you brought up, they were doing this stuff in every other country.
They were carrying out one PSYOP after another, misinformation, they were creating movements and countercultures and protests, and they did it all to manipulate foreign affairs.
And it happens to be what's happening in America right now.
Right, so it's almost like turned in on itself to some degree.
Now, I don't think it's the CIA doing this.
I don't even think the CIA does this anymore.
Obviously, they legislated that out and you have to choose to believe that they followed that law.
I have to say, we're not crackpots.
We're not talking about tinfoil hat stuff.
No, the CIA is not doing this at all.
You're exactly right.
But that is something that they were engaged in for decades and they totally broke their law and they broke their mandate not to interfere with American affairs.
They absolutely did.
And by the way, the folding of that and what they were doing and what J. Edgar Hoover was doing also folds in on the Nixon administration.
And we all remember what happened out of that, which is he basically was going to get impeached and had to resign before they threw him out and would have been prosecuted had Gerald Ford, his buddy, not pardoned him.
But the point of that is that a lot of the people who are sort of the Republicans now, even who were alive back then, look back on the Nixon administration.
Love it.
Love it.
And would say the only thing they did wrong was to like try and pay hush money to the burglars so they wouldn't talk.
Like that was the real problem with the Watergate situation.
And it's hilarious to me that that's how, that's the kind of mental gymnastics they've made in order to sort of bury the intrinsic corruption that was seeping through the entire White House from the Vice Presidency to the Presidency and all the way down through Mitchell, through the Attorney General and everyone else.
So, but again, there's a direct connection to where we are now, which I find also very fascinating.
And I've done this before where I've exhortated people who were around back then for not recognizing this and not recognizing having seen it firsthand as an adult and not recognizing what they're doing right now is just disgusting to me that they would allow this and then cheer it on.
Yeah, real fast, a quick little note of history, and this is fun.
And by fun, I mean horrific and the type of thing that we should lose our minds over.
After the Nixon administration, there were a lot of young Republicans who looked at what Nixon did and they were like, you know what?
There's a lot to look up to here, and that's probably what the future of the Republican Party should be.
And those young Republicans were the ones who took over things like Young Republicans of America and the College Republicans.
I've got a couple names written down here.
I'm just gonna see if anybody remembers these names.
Hold on, I'm sorry.
Getting my glasses here.
Roger Stone.
Yeah Karl Rove Sure Wait hold on This guy's name sounds familiar.
I don't know where I got it.
Paul Manafort.
Yeah!
And so you have a group of people who took over the Mechanisms of power that back it's really weird actually in the 1970s into the 1980s leading into the Reagan revolution because by the way Everyone's always like Ronald Reagan like stepped out of Zeus's forehead waving an American flag And he was ready to you know serve as you know President America or whatever and And in fact, he wasn't really interested in any of that.
He caught the wave of power that started from the grassroots in the Republican Party with all these think tanks and all these young Republicans.
They looked at Nixon as an instruction manual.
And that is one of the reasons we've ended up in this.
So, the Ronald Reagan administration and the way that it ruled as an administration, it didn't actually participate in reality.
It created a structure of what I like to call pseudo events, okay?
This is what we know about the presidency, which is this.
They trained the media to cover whatever they wanted to cover because they would give them content.
They'd be like, today, and see if this sounds familiar, today is infrastructure day.
And you're going to come to the White House and I'm going to give a speech about infrastructure and you're going to carry my message out to the people.
And they ended up working as a transmission belt for the Reagan administration.
So all of a sudden it created politics in the popular mind as a TV show, something we need to watch.
And it's almost like, you know, it's like you.
You're a basketball guy.
You watch a team long enough and you start to realize, oh, they're getting hot.
That team is starting to slump, or that team has problems, blah blah blah.
And all of a sudden, Americans are supposed to watch this manufactured coverage, and they get the pulse of what's going on in the country, but the pulse is manufactured.
So Michiganders, right, and people around the country, they see this protest, and we're gonna get into the mechanics of it and how this thing works.
But they look at this protest and they're like, these people are upset about this and maybe we should reopen the country.
And they start to feel as if there's a populist uprising.
But even in the main articles about it, right?
The Washington Post did this big long article about it.
They don't mention Betsy DeVos until probably graph 15?
16?
And it's just like, oh she does have financial ties with the group that paid for this.
And all of a sudden, what you do is you hide the entire story, which is the Trump administration, members of the Trump administration, and members of the moneyed elite created a protest to help their political fortunes and they muddied reality.
That's what they do.
Alright, let me pose a scenario and you tell me how far-fetched or how realistic it could be.
So, Donald Trump is really upset because Whitmer has been criticizing him publicly, as other governors have, and you know, clear.
So he somehow does somebody in the Oval Office that says, God damn it, I wish we could hit her right now hard and do something really nasty, right?
Maybe that's all he says.
Maybe DeVos is in the room.
Maybe somebody calls her and says, "You know, the president was just kind of musing about what can we do politically that could really harm her?" And then DeVos is like, "I don't know." And then maybe she hangs up the phone and picks up her bat phone and then calls somebody else.
I'm sorry, the bat phone is not-- - Her billionaire phone. - Yeah, you know.
It's the phone that has the horns and it's red and it smells like sulfur.
And she calls whoever and whispers that the eagle has landed, whatever she says.
And they're like, yes, we're now going to do a psyops on Whitmore in Michigan, whatever.
Is that that far-fetched to imagine that there's a connection like that?
Well, okay, so first off, I just want to say, like, in the middle of all this, because this is something we have to be careful about, we're not talking about conspiracy theories, right?
The moment you start talking about PSYOPs and all that, people are like, come on, this is legitimately what happened.
Like, it is a manufactured protest, and we're going to talk more about times that this has happened and how America has a precedent in this.
Like, this is truly what occurred.
Second of all, I don't... it's really hard to understand the inner working connections of power in this country.
Because it's like Donald Trump probably thinks that all he needs to do with Whitmer is to go out and call her a nasty nickname and that's all he needs to do.
So it's not like he's like in the Oval Office, you know, orchestrating this thing.
There's also this other thing that happens.
It's like another consolidated ring of power.
DeVos is part of this other sort of hidden power in America, which is there are these groups of billionaires who, they're libertarians, is what they are.
They have this radical libertarian ideology.
And people have heard of the Koch brothers, who we're going to talk about in a minute as well.
They have this idea that they can control, because by the way, libertarianism is not popular.
Right?
Like you're not going to win an election going out and being like, government shouldn't help anybody and rich people should rule everything.
Nobody's going to win an election.
So what they do is they orchestrate all these different things.
And I'm sure you've had this before.
Have you ever been on the internet and all of a sudden you see a headline and it contradicts something that you've seen recently and you're like, I'm not really sure which of these things is true.
You know what I mean?
It's like eggs are healthy.
Eggs aren't healthy.
Oh, but eggs are really healthy.
Right?
Or are they?
They pay for all of these think tanks and all of these groups that are just paid to put out press releases and studies and all this stuff to muddy the water on everything and to make sure that Americans never have real clarity on the issues or what's going on.
That group does shit like this all the time.
They have these protests, and this is a particularly big one, right?
But they have, like, protests.
They have people, uh, they pay people to go to town halls.
They have people go to, um, what is it?
It's like when the Congress isn't in session, and the, you know, your representative takes questions down at your town hall or whatever, right?
Yeah, they pay people to go to those and disrupt them and ask leading questions and attack people.
So they're all the time maneuvering chess pieces.
So whether or not this originated in the Trump White House or just so happens that they have one of those monsters in the Trump administration, It's unclear, and that's the other problem here is when we have all this misinformation, we never have an idea what exactly is happening.
It's supposed to keep us off balance and questioning reality as we know it.
Yes, flood the zone with shit is a... Flood the zone with shit.
But although that's actually almost referencing something different as far as Steve Bannon saying it that way, but it has the same effect.
So here's how these things work.
Now, here's the question though.
These protesters were getting paid to do this, but they were also willing to do this without masks and violate social distancing.
- Some were.
- So there is that level there.
- Yeah, so here's how these things work.
Some of them were probably paid to be there.
Other people were paid to build up a social media presence that trusted people.
And by the way, they use a ton of propaganda and psychological manipulation to get people involved in these groups.
Other people, they have no idea that they got manipulated into coming to this thing.
They went because they're like, I want my country back and you're doing wrong and you're evil, lock her up, all that stuff.
So it's like a weird multi-tiered thing.
That's how the Russian manipulation worked.
A lot of people went into these protests having no clue that they were rounded up and manipulated and put into place by Russian interests.
And that said, the other layers of this is probably the outside layer of the onion is that I would imagine most of these people, if not all, are convinced that the threat of COVID-19 isn't that threatening, right?
Like that must be part of what they had been already convinced, you know, earlier.
Where did they get that idea?
Ah, now that's from Trump and from Fox and from those places, which is a lot easier to convince that layer first before you get them out and protest.
Wait, we're talking about respected news source, Fox News?
Yes.
You know, it's not like they're going to get maybe possibly a lawsuit filed against them for endangering people's lives or anything.
Every day does Fox News get directives from a corporate board that tells them how to cover the news and how to manipulate Americans?
That's so weird because it's almost like The wealthy, moneyed, libertarian, and also extremely right-wing conservatives in this country have one propaganda organ after another.
Which, by the way, I don't know if you saw this.
I got very excited about this.
Barack Obama, who tries to play as strict as possible in his endorsement of Joe Biden this week, Called Fox News a propaganda arm.
Which, anybody paying attention, that is like, that's raising the temperature in the room when Barack Obama comes out and says that.
But they are.
And so it's just these different layers, like you said, of the onion where these moneyed, powerful, secret interests are able to do this stuff and continually manipulate.
And I'm glad we brought up Fox News because we need to talk about the Tea Party.
All right, but before, let me interrupt you this real quickly, because the question you asked me about Fox News and the corporate entities influencing what they're writing, you know, that's the same answer I answered for all the other agencies, MSNBC and CNN, but for maybe different reasons.
But, you know, they have a corporate world to answer to as well.
Yeah, there's a reason why I'm not going on a network tonight.
I mean, you know, it is one of those things where and, you know, I again, I like to give credit where credit is due.
CNN and MSNBC have consciences.
They do, right?
Like in this whole thing, they're like, we need to report on this thing.
We need to give people medical facts.
We need to deal with the propaganda that's being shoveled at us.
They fail a lot and they do succeed.
But they absolutely do cover news from a corporate vantage point.
They're all very interested in the economy going forward and the way that it is.
It just so happens that they treat it from a different sort of point of view.
You can track all this stuff down.
You can see entirely how they were set up and what their focuses are.
It just so happens to be a different type of corporate view than Fox News.
Right.
I agree.
And by the way, you know, there are standards, at least.
If they get things wrong, people will get fired.
You know, not like Fox News.
So at least, you know, New York Times and Washington Post, they have standards.
And, you know, again, we have to be a little bit trusting of all these different things.
But generally, when they make these reports and then you hear Trump saying it's fake news, there's never anything to rebut what they're reporting.
And it always turns out that it is how they report it.
It might take a little longer.
So that's the solace I take in sort of, you know, assembling all this information from different areas that like at least those outlets tend to have the standards of journalistic, you know, integrity.
I will say that neither CNN or Fox News took a creation of the Koch brothers or Soros or whatever you want and turned it into a quote-unquote political revolution like the Tea Party.
The Tea Party was a completely manufactured movement in America that gave people, white people, a reason to hate Barack Obama and deny that it was because of racist purposes.
And it was one of the most damaging things!
in the history of America for this reason.
It introduced into America malleable ideology.
And what it did for the Tea Partiers, and you might remember this, like, and we all watch The Daily Show, right?
You know, and it would do that thing where it was like, you would hear a politician say one thing one day, and then the next day they said something completely different.
Or they'd listen, they'd talk to a Tea Partier and they'd be like, how do you feel about Social Security?
And it's like, oh, keep your hands off mine, you know, but the government needs to get their money under control, blah, blah, blah.
Malleable ideology is the heartbeat of this libertarian idea, which is the winner gets to choose whatever they want and everybody else can screw off and pound sand.
And that's what the Tea Party was about.
It was the Koch brothers injecting their own corporate poison into America and creating from the bottom up.
And by the way, they paid for all of it.
They trained these people.
They put on all of the events and Fox News treated it like it was a grassroots revolution.
And it was not.
And it completely took over the Republican Party and is not just responsible for Trump.
But I mean, it laid the foundation for this whole garbage system.
I got another conspiracy for you.
Oh, I love all of it because they're all true.
The sad truth is that they're all true.
When the Koch brothers were really young, like seven or eight, they were on a subway in some major city and somebody must have puked all over them because they have the weirdest hard-on against public transportation, if you look through this.
They tried to do their best to kill so many, you know, Oil and gas, my man.
public transportation in different states.
And again, who does that benefit?
Who does public transportation benefit immensely?
Our poor people and people who don't have money for cars or who want a better way to get to work without having to sit through traffic.
And it was the weirdest thing looking through their history that that was this one thing that they had.
And I can't figure out any other reason than they had some terrible experience that's haunted.
Oil and gas, my man.
Oil and gas.
Okay.
I mean, and by the way, Like this is the answer to so many questions in American history.
What was that documentary?
It was a really good one a while back.
I don't know how many people watched it.
It was like, Who Killed the Electric Car?
And the fact that we didn't develop these things.
We were just like, nah, we like this polluting type of transportation.
And now also, by the way, real quick thing on the Koch brothers, which is really fun.
It's hidden in all of that, which is that their father is one of the founding members of the John Birch Society.
And for anybody who is familiar with that, the John Birch Society was a completely xenophobic, racist organization which infected the Republican Party.
Yes.
Oh, that's right.
Oh, his kids did the exact same thing in a different way.
They just happened to clean it up and hide it behind a bunch of tri-corner hats and red, white, and blue bullshit.
And so, it's just been this continually racist manipulation of people that pushes libertarian ideals, malleable ideology, and all it does is it lines their pockets.
One day after another, they just keep making more and more money while they're poisoning our politics and our reality.
But the point you're making about malleable ideology is that it dies.
It doesn't last very long.
We don't hear about the Tea Party anymore.
It's not a thing, right?
I don't think it's a thing anymore.
It's like a distant, you know, years ago we had this thing.
It got some people into power, Mike Pompeo being one of them.
But I think the reason why it doesn't always last is because the things they stood for Have no conception of what they actually voted for, what actually happens in the government in terms of limited spending.
We just continue to blow out the deficit year over year.
And there's no, you know, maybe Rand Paul will fart a little bit one day or two and say something about how bad that is and then continue to vote for all these policies.
But that's about it.
You know, those Libertarians and those Tea Partiers don't even, don't really exist anymore.
Certainly not on the platform that they ran with.
Well, this is the fun part because what happens when you have movements that are based on malleable ideology and manipulation is they constantly have to cannibalize themselves and then be rebirthed.
So the Tea Party became Trumpism and Trumpism, you know, infected the Republican Party writ large.
It actually, the legacy of the Tea Party is going to be really important moving forward because it shows how the Republican Party had to, they were basically either going to leave the Republican Party or the Republican Party was going to become them.
That was it.
And the Republican Party became them and then they became the Trump Party.
But I'll tell you the other legacy of it is it also inspired a big deal of American political theater with our friends the Russians who showed that you could create these, you know, Grassroots, well, I'm sorry, fake grassroots movements.
And you could use Americans prejudices and fascistic, you know, racist undertones and classist undertones.
You could use it against them.
It was like it was like a playbook handed to Vladimir Putin and the entirety of his political technologist.
If anybody again, if anyone wants to lose some sleep, look at Vladislav Surkov, who basically in Russia creates one party and one rival and one one problem in crisis after another that Vladimir Putin solves and becomes a hero in front of everybody, which, by the way, in case you didn't notice, is kind of like what Trump does every time he steeps into some sort of cultural crisis and creates it and then, quote unquote, wins it.
Yeah, it's a post-political, post-modern movement.
And the Tea Party showed everybody what America could do if it got manipulated in the right way.
But here's the real weird thing about this is that by, you know, 2016, 2017, the Koch brothers were completely against Trump.
And there was a big falling out and they didn't want to, they weren't going to support anybody in the Republican Party at some point.
That was the threat.
So you have to argue that, or conceive of the notion that the Koch brothers, for how horrible they were and their ideology, they recognized that Trump was even worse, especially probably in that sense of malleable ideology, where he wouldn't commit to anything.
Can I throw a little conspiracy theory toward you?
Okay, let's hear it.
Actually, you know what?
I'm not going to give a conspiracy theory.
I'm going to tell a story from my childhood.
A little young Jared, Saturday evening one night.
Watch his Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Randy Savage taking on Akeem and the Big Boss Man.
Big tag team match.
Macho Man Randy Savage, Hulk Hogan are best friends and oh no they blew up and now they hate each other and they've got a big match at WrestleMania.
Guess what?
People pay up.
Oh and by the way if I don't Man, am I remembering this right?
Oh, yeah, that's right.
It took place at the Trump Casino, and Trump was there in the front row.
Interesting!
It's almost like Donald Trump grew up in the era of professional wrestling and is a professional wrestler, and it turns out that when we have manufactured controversies and feuds and, you know, problems among people, you can gain power and money that way because, you know, everybody else, a bunch of marks who I don't know, might crowd into a Lansing street and, you know, demand the right to go to work and die of coronavirus.
Those marks believe what they see on TV and they believe what they read.
So that is not a conspiracy theory.
I was just reminiscing out loud that somehow or another that politics in America and around the world have become a lot like professional wrestling.
Yes, the.
That's okay.
That's a nice story.
Sounds good to me.
It's a good story.
Hey, if anybody hasn't seen it, that's a big Saturday Night Main event.
That's a good time.
Alright.
I mean, listen, I wouldn't be a stretch for me to envision the Koch brothers and how they like to communicate, seeing a guy like Trump and being like, this guy, we got to get him out of here.
So I don't necessarily believe that they initially didn't rub, he didn't rub them wrong.
But I do also feel like, you know, yeah, once they, they're like, oh, look at that.
Like, we can actually get some things done here.
And like, you know, we have the control of the entire government.
We could do some stuff.
I could see how they could be like, ah, it's okay.
We'll just have to ignore all those things we don't want to really deal with and just go on with the Republican Party.
I'd like to read something for you.
This is a Muckrake exclusive.
I wish there was a sound effect.
This is a quote in my new book, American Rule, How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People.
This is from the section on the Tea Party and the Koch Brothers.
This is from a Koch Brother-like insider.
Are you ready?
Yeah.
Okay, I'm going to read this quote for you.
This was told to the journalist Jane Mayer.
This right-wing redneck stuff works for them.
They see this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves.
The Donald Trump thing is right up their alley.
It is exactly what they like to do.
They like to go for that redneck, American, red meat, bias sort of stuff.
Which, by the way, is who the John Birch Society went after too.
Again, it's like America.
American history goes in cycles and we see it continually repeat itself.
The rich in this country, the rich and the powerful, have continually, continually manipulated events to show us a history and a story that is not true.
It has nothing to do with our actual reality.
It misleads us and it changes our politics.
And unfortunately, we're not aware of it most of the time.
And it gets hidden and it gets obfuscated and it is incredibly dangerous.
Right.
And by the way, I can remember even in 2010, as soon as the Tea Party became a viable thing, that it just reeked of, there's a black man in the White House, and we need to create this outrage and tap into these things to protest him, and then basically encourage Congress to obstruct anything he's going to try and do, just for the sake of obstructing him.
We cannot have him be successful.
We cannot let him be better than W. Bush or H.W.
Right?
We can't let this guy be this transcendent figure when, you know, It'll just point out how bad the Republican candidates and presidents have been in the past.
Yeah, and the thing that you just said, it was going after a black president, but it couldn't be about that, right?
Again, this is about misdirection.
Here are the arguments that they gave.
Oh, he's a liberal who spends too much money.
By the way, Barack Obama was a center-left candidate who was all about fiscal responsibility.
The next thing, he's not actually American, right?
It's not that he's black.
It's that he's not actually technically American, which is birtherism.
It's a way of being racist without admitting you're being racist, right?
The other thing is... Oh, I mean, again, it's that redneck stuff that works for them.
And by the way, I'm saying this.
I know that sounds a little slurrish, but I grew up a redneck.
So let's just, you know, put it where it's at.
These are my people.
Can I make the Jewish slurs then?
We can do whatever we want to do here.
But I will say that When they talked about Obama being a devilish threat, it was to my people.
It was to a bunch of people who were raised up to believe that the Antichrist was coming, and that he would have a lot of charisma, and he would manipulate people, and people would treat him as a messiah or whatever.
They do that.
They play upon these things that we're raised with, and they put it out there, right?
So, for instance, This Michigan thing.
I haven't looked at the materials.
I guarantee the materials were just like, they were going after toxically masculine men.
They were going after working class people, saying that there's all kinds of people getting welfare handouts and all of that stuff, right?
It's a bunch of white supremacist evangelical ideology that they use against the people.
Which, by the way, if you look at the reports about Russia and how they interfered with our politics, and by the way, not that they just interfered, they're still interferinging.
You know what I mean?
They go for that same stuff.
They recognize that our weaknesses are our inherent prejudices and the myths and the mythology that we've been inundated with and they use that against us.
Okay, my movie reference of the episode will be Piranha.
And you might remember the movie Piranha because... That's a rough one.
What's that?
That's a rough one.
That terrified me as a kid.
Oh yeah.
There's something in this pool, right?
That was Piranha 1.
Sorry, I don't want to have a flashback.
Piranha 2, I believe, was actually directed by James Cameron.
Here's the thing.
If you can picture the letter they're going to write to the protesters and list the grievances that they want them to get.
If they put their hands too close to the water, these people are literally going to bite their fingers off waiting for it.
You know, that's the image that you can figure.
You don't need much.
You only need a couple sentences in an email that mention a couple of those buzzwords and you got a rabid group of people that are willing to sacrifice their lives to get COVID-19 to go running, you know, like World War Z. It's insane.
And by the way, If the people knew who it was manipulating them, right?
Right?
If they knew that billionaires were spending their money to manipulate them, that's when the pitchforks and the torches are gotten.
You know what I mean?
And this is, it's a very dangerous game.
This is how you get, like, the New World Order.
It's the people who are making money off of globalism telling the poor people there are shadowy cabals doing this, right?
Those are the people you should hate.
People like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or whatever.
That's what they're doing here.
They're saying, no, those people over there are manipulating you and they're stealing your money and your opportunities.
And meanwhile, the people who are telling them are the ones who are stealing their opportunities and taking their money.
And you're exactly right.
It is a really dangerous, razor thin game that they have been playing.
And if these people understood what was being done to them and they recognized what was being done, you're exactly right.
It is a dangerous game.
It is a really crazy, dangerous game they play.
And you point it out to them and they're like, go ahead, just keep talking like that.
Trump's going to get re-elected.
Thank you!
Like that's their attitude.
And you know what?
It's a bit disarming.
It's kind of frustrating because you kind of start to think that maybe they're right.
Yeah, it's it's one of those things and and people ask me all the time like how do we get out of this?
We have to just start unraveling this mythology in this history.
It's like stuff like you brought up like the FBI and CIA infiltrating like these groups, right?
This is like obvious history that you can find anywhere, but it's not taught.
You know, it's not something that, like, you learn in, like, public education.
It's scrubbed from the record.
And all this stuff we talked about with the Nixon manipulation and the people who came from that, the young Republicans, who, by the way, stole college Republican elections.
Like, that history is bizarre and fascistic.
So, all this stuff we're talking about, and then the billionaires who have been manipulating the process, all of that, this is stuff that people aren't aware of.
It's kept from them.
This is why people like DeVos go after education.
This is why they want to get rid of public schools, why they want to get rid of any funds that bring teachers into the fold.
They want to make sure that people are kept ignorant, and they don't understand what has actually happened, and that's the cure.
It's a better education, and it's getting this story out here, because it's not conspiracy.
It's not paranoia.
It's actually how this country has been operated for if not decades centuries Well, but the scary thing is is that she wants to go back even farther and actually inject more religion into public schools as well And that's another one of those, you know thumbs keeping people down Is to use that as a way to manipulate and that's what's frightening too because there's a just a blatant disregard for separation of church and state in this administration and
And it'd be one thing if it was like Jimmy Carter, for instance, who was a guy who really was pious and was religious.
But these people wouldn't even know which is the right side up of a Bible.
No, and we've talked about it in depth.
If anybody hasn't heard it yet, we'd like you to go back and listen to the Easter episode that we talked about the cult of the Shining City and how white evangelicalism has been mixed with nationalism to turn into a political force.
That's important to look at.
But we appreciate you being here today.
We're looking at some dangerous stuff.
We'll probably talk next week.
You know, everything from Donald Trump saying he has total authority to the fact that the war drums are now being beaten against China.
And there's a big danger there.
So we're gonna have to talk about that next week.
We appreciate you being here.
The audience just keeps growing.
We couldn't enjoy you more and the support you've given us.
A reminder, we really need you to like, subscribe, share, rate us, comment on us.
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In the meantime, on social media, I am at JY Sexton, Nick is at, can you hear me, SMH.
Until next time, don't believe the lies, stay safe, and just keep, stay inside.
Wash your hands.
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