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May 19, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
58:26
The Snake Oil President

The boys react to breaking news that Donald Trump has claimed he is taking hydroxychloroquine, the "miracle drug" he's pushed as a cure to coronavirus but has killed test subjects. Also, they break down "Obamagate," and the GOP's long history of using conspiracy theories as an offensive weapon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
The frontline workers, many, many are taking it.
I happen to be taking it.
Hydroxychloroquine?
I'm taking it.
Hydroxychloroquine.
When?
Right now, yeah.
A couple of weeks ago, I started taking it.
Because I think it's good.
I've heard a lot of good stories.
What happened to the president in the 2016 election?
And throughout the first two years of his administration was abhorrent.
The law enforcement and intelligence apparatus of this country were involved in advancing a false and utterly baseless Russian collusion narrative against the president.
Obamagame.
It's been going on for a long time.
It's been going on from before I even got elected.
What is the crime exactly that you're accusing him of?
You know what the crime is.
The crime is very obvious to everybody.
All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I am your host Nick Hauselman and joined as always by Jared Yates Sexton and we have breaking news.
Literally just before we hit the record button we discover or find out or Trump admits that he's taking hydroxychloroquine and he has been for a couple weeks.
And he insists that this is what a lot of doctors are doing, I guess prophylactically, to be able to ward off the hidden virus that he calls it.
This is pretty shocking though, and it's certainly an admission you wouldn't think a President of the United States would ever say out loud in front of the TV cameras.
Right, Jared?
No.
I mean, listen, literally we found out about this like a couple of seconds before we started recording.
This is madness.
I mean, it really is.
So just for those, I don't know, who maybe haven't followed this closely, So, Trump has been pushing this drug for... What is time, Nick?
How long has it been now?
I would say six weeks.
Six weeks?
Maybe a little bit longer.
Turns out that he probably has financial ties, but go figure.
He's been pushing this thing, and meanwhile every expert has been saying, listen, this drug doesn't do what you're saying that it does.
People have died from it.
Clinical tests have shown that it has terrible side effects, right?
I mean, you were just talking about that.
Yeah, there's hearing and sight, but also if you have any kind of heart issue, it's fatal.
Apparently.
I mean, that's generalization.
But if you have heart problems, this is what's been proven fatal for people.
So this is a thing, obviously, that Trump has been pushing.
And again, we talked about this on an earlier podcast.
Obviously, he has some sort of financial incentive.
Right.
And meanwhile, Laura Ingraham's been pushing this thing.
Fox News hosts have been burning down the White House talking about this, trying to get him to push it.
I mean, on one hand, it's a Hail Mary to have a miracle drug to figure this thing out so we can just open up the country or whatever.
I don't believe for a second that he's taking it, first of all.
Oh, interesting.
I don't.
I feel like it's a lie.
I feel like this is a late-night infomercial.
Yeah, I use the George Foreman Grill, too, every night, and that's what I cook on.
It's another Trump product, but, I mean, the idea that the President of the United States would, first of all, just take a drug that he said, you heard the quote, he said that he heard about it in letters.
like that he got, right?
And for a president of the United States to do, if he is doing it, that's madness.
And if it's the president of the United States lying about taking a drug to sell it to the public, that is madness of a completely different kind.
Well, I'm tempted to believe him because of the way he rolled it out when he was talking about hydroxychloroquine and other people taking it.
And you can kind of just see him, like maybe that the wheels are turning.
Well, should I tell him that I'm taking it?
Like he can, and he goes, you'd be surprised at who takes it.
In fact, at least we don't have to search very long for a nice soundbite at the beginning of this episode.
But to me, it sounded like as soon as we knew what was going to happen and when listening to that tape or that little video clip, I was like, oh, yeah, he's going to admit it right here.
It just seemed like he can't help himself to the point where I just didn't feel like he was lying.
I do feel like he probably is taking it.
But here's what's interesting to me is that they had gone away from hydroxychloroquine, right?
Right.
Yep.
After the the tests were coming back and it just didn't seem to have any effect at all, aside from some sort of anecdotal evidence.
He hasn't brought it up.
Right.
I don't think he's anyone's really brought it up in a serious manner for several weeks.
So that's really interesting to me that he brought it back up again now.
Although I think we know why.
Right.
I mean, with the testimony of Dr. Bright and it's centering on how resistant he was to allowing hydroxychloroquine to be bought in mass quantities and all they did.
I suppose that's what's got it back on his adult brain.
But this is it's still stunning to me.
Okay, so again, I cannot emphasize this enough.
As you were listening to this, this is going to come out on Tuesday, you were literally hearing us process this in real time.
Like the madness that we just found before we recorded.
So here's a couple things, just freestyling.
One, he might have just decided in the middle of this thing to just say it even if it's not true.
You know what I mean?
Like he might have just decided he says things.
I mean, this is not a well man.
This is a chronic liar.
On top of that, I mean, so are we to believe that Donald Trump has told his doctors, who by the way have like a responsibility to keep the President of the United States as healthy as possible, he's somehow or another dictated to the White House doctors that he's going to take a medicine that has been shown to kill people?
Like, how does that happen?
Take me through that process.
Third, I'll just throw this in because I got two more points here.
My God, the brain reels.
Third, just a quick little side.
I have a friend of mine who has a daughter who depends on this drug for lupus.
It's a lupus drug.
And you have many Americans around the country who can't get their medicine because the problematic president is out there hawking a miracle cure that doesn't work.
And then fourth, there's all this news coming out right now that vaccines are in the trial stages, right?
That they might come out next year, late next year, whatever.
There's some promising, there's always a lot of promising things or whatever.
So maybe he's pushing back against this whistleblower.
Maybe he's trying to get in on the financial part.
The problem is we have no idea.
All we know is that whatever this is, it's in bad faith.
My god, what a terrible time this is.
You know, the other context is, you know, recently over the weekend there were reports from friends and from, you know, again, fake news but nonetheless sources talking about how he clearly understood how bad this was going to be several weeks ago.
And he was telling people how bad it was going to be.
And so, in my mind, I'm conflating that with now, you know, when he started taking this.
It was like two weeks ago.
So, these all might be swirling together in the same kind of thing, where this is now the admission that they did recognize how serious this was, regardless of what they're saying.
You know, the other thing is, they bought 29 million doses of hydroxychloroquine, right?
They're sitting somewhere, they did all the stockpiling for that, wasted all that money, and again, keeping it away from people who really need it.
Wait, when did the White House infection start?
Oh, that's a good question.
Well, I mean, by the way, there were some new ones last week, right?
Right.
But I would say in the last, I think, two weeks ago is when we heard of, gosh, who was the first person.
Was it two weeks ago?
Like, probably.
So is there a possibility that... Okay.
Keep going.
Okay, hold on.
Follow me through on this, because again, we're trying to figure this out.
This is madness.
Is there a possibility That the President of the United States, Donald John Trump, who was selling a fake drug based upon recommendations of Fox News hosts and a Hail Mary and possibly a financial interest, who doesn't think that the drug actually works.
Is there a possibility that as the White House started suffering infections and it got closer and closer to him, that he's just like, the hell with it, I'm gonna start taking this snake oil?
Like, is that a...
That's insane, Nick!
Yeah, well, I mean, it's that, but they also did this draconian... the draconian measures that everyone's complaining about were being done in the White House.
Everyone, every, like, hour they were taking their temperature and they're keeping everybody away.
All the things that, like, they don't want anyone to actually do in real life, they're doing.
So, you know, it's not that insane and, you know, I don't... I could follow this whole train of thought.
I could see that, like, it's closing in on him, right?
He's already a paranoid fool as it is.
Sure.
So, you know, but I just feel like this is not... What he is doing doesn't help him as a prophylactic measure.
Well, it doesn't help anybody.
Yeah, it doesn't help anybody.
Right.
Unless he's admitting to us that he had it or he has it.
They're treating him for it right now.
Could that be a possibility?
Like, maybe.
Although he doesn't seem sick and he would probably be sick at his age, but I don't know.
Maybe he's one of those asymptomatic people.
I, again, the mind reels.
You know, I was having a conversation with, I went on the Unprecedented Podcast the other day, and I was having a conversation about the sheer horror of realizing that the President of the United States actually talks to his TV and the TV talks back to him.
You know what I mean?
Like what kind of a post-modern horror show that actually is?
Like that relationship between Trump and the TV.
And now, you couldn't make this shit up.
I mean, you really couldn't.
It's so ridiculous that this fake president is now talking about a fake drug.
And like, as if we didn't have to worry about a generational pandemic and an economy that is just in a crater somewhere.
Like, now we have to sit here and figure out what our damaged president is doing, right?
Like, it's not even that we can have a state of affairs where we understand what's happening and we make decisions about where we go.
We now have to sit here and be like, we have a madman at the wheel.
What did he mean when he just screamed?
You know what I mean?
Like, that's incredible.
Yeah, and what are the side effects of a drug like this for a guy who has to make decisions like that?
I mean, here's a guy who won't even give us his taxes, and now he's giving us his medical history, of which he never would give before, and would lie about it so insistently before.
You're right, madness is the great definition of what we're talking about here.
Well, and I want people to think about this for a second.
Right?
Okay.
Man, this is nuts!
So, Donald Trump, who is President of the United States, just told the country that he is taking a drug that has... What side effects was it again, Nick?
Oh, there's a lot.
Well, I mean, the big one is people were dying if they had any underlying heart problems, but then there's hearing loss and there's blindness and stuff like that.
Okay, and by the way, I mean, I know Donald Trump is like the vision of fitness, so we're not worried about that dude's heart, right?
So, the President of the United States Just announce to the country and to the world now that we're talking about it, right?
He announced to literally everyone in the world that he is taking this drug that has these side effects and has killed people.
So suddenly you have the entire apparatus of the United States government, which by the way, like the health of the president is a major component of that.
Whether the president is capable, whether or not the president is healthy, where they're going, what they're doing.
This has been, to bring this around to what we usually do, this has a historical precedent in this country, right?
I mean, you had Woodrow Wilson who was debilitated for months and whose wife was the secret president.
You had FDR who hid his paralysis, his entire presidency.
Now all of a sudden, you basically have every intelligence agency, you also have national defense, you have everybody in the federal government right now who suddenly has to worry about the fact that a president who's not in great shape is taking a drug that has severe side effects.
And if he's lying about it, then that's a bullshit thing anyway.
But if he's not lying and he's taking it, like, That is just a magnitude of a different thing like that that people have to be having like flash meetings right now Yeah, don't let's not forget JFK had Addison's disease as well.
Oh, no everything the JFK hid from the public for sure.
Yeah Yes, so let me ask you this real quick real quick.
It's a sort of a pivot but do we feel like the Republicans are sort of Is there a notion of demonizing people that get it like it's their fault for getting the virus?
Is there a feeling of that?
Like, you were dumb.
You got it because you were being dumb or you did something wrong and you got it.
Does that feeling exist?
I feel like when he was describing Stephen Miller's wife getting it, it kind of had that feeling.
Yeah, that was a weird thing.
So, there's a couple things happening there.
One, the evangelical right looks at this like I've talked about in the past, like, you know, God's wrath or, you know, God taking it out on people.
The other part of this, and we're going to talk about Ronald Reagan later too, you know, there's a lot that has happened in this country, particularly post-Reagan, where people look at people who get sick, people who have financial problems, and basically it's a sign of personal weakness.
You know, if you get sick or your entire life gets wiped out, Well, we live in a quote-unquote fair economy, a meritocracy, which, by the way, is a total lie.
So, as a result, if anything bad happens to you, it's your fault, right?
I mean, and it doesn't hurt that people of color, particularly African Americans, are being especially hit by this thing.
Absolutely, there's a component of that.
And so, if he has it and he doesn't want to admit it, I mean, that's part of it, I assume.
Yeah, and I feel like, I wonder what that does to the base and how they'll respond.
I mean, I think that they have an amazing, they're very limber in their mental gymnastics, so they can always come up with a way, but I do find that... Well, he could never tell them.
He could never tell them.
You know what I mean?
Because if he got it, if the President of the United States got it, then it's a problem.
Right.
You know what I mean?
And I'm willing to predict that they won't let him take many questions at this point, at least after that, because what you just laid out would have to be every other question would have to be probing to find out exactly what the nature of this and why and who prescribed it and who is monitoring and all these things.
And I don't know if he's going to have any of those answers or going to want to answer those.
I guess we'll wait and see.
Well, and one of, I mean, he has many lanes of attack on Joe Biden, you know, right now, and one of them is the idea that Biden is in bad health, which is a projection, of course, and his mental health is declining.
I mean, that would just eradicate that.
You know, that would just be gone.
That would take away one of his lanes of attack for the 2020 election.
On top of it, you can't deny it's a problem in the country if the leader of the country is suffering from it.
So, And again, how stupid is it that we have to talk about this?
This has nothing to do with politics and the way things are supposed to work.
I mean, we should know the health of our president.
We should understand where the president is coming from on every issue.
We should be able to take it in good faith that the president is telling us what is happening in reality.
And the fact that we don't is, I mean, it's not just an incrimination.
It's a damning fact.
I mean, this is terrible.
We should know Who the president owes a lot of money to.
Oh, absolutely.
We can't even get that.
So this is another fiasco.
I mean, listen, he's just burning.
Here's the problem is I had seen an article, and hopefully you can dispute me on this, where they had said that Biden's lead overall before the pandemic was six points.
And in the middle of the pandemic now, it's six points.
It hasn't budged at all.
Which is really, I think, concerning.
Everybody's saying eight.
What's that?
Everybody's saying eight now.
So maybe it's like creeping up a little bit.
But it's still concerning to me that it's still so stable in these times when it shouldn't be.
Right?
Trump's support should be eroding day after day, death after death.
There's no conscience here.
He's never even offered really any words of solace to people who are dying at all.
It's really, because he doesn't, I think, you know, he obviously looks at these people as just fodder, you know, to get the economy going again, you know, a couple of, some collateral damage.
But, you know, it's time for us to, I think that's what the election's going to end up being in November.
It's like we have to get our conscience back.
But I don't know if it's going to happen.
Yeah, well, I mean, again, you know, I hate to be the person who, you know, is the wet blanket in this situation.
I'm not taking for granted that there will be an election in November.
You know, we got to work for it even to have it.
You know, isn't that funny?
It used to be like, do not take the win in the election for granted.
You have to fight for it.
And now it's like, do not take an election for granted.
You have to fight to even have it.
Uh, yeah.
It should be higher, but I mean that's also... I don't know how many polls that I trust.
I also... I keep hearing left and right that Republicans are just terrified of this election.
That they feel like Trump is going to bring down the Senate with him.
That it's going to be a Democratic president with a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House.
And quite possibly state legislatures falling by the wayside.
I mean, that's what people keep telling me.
Even people within the Republican Party tell me that, that they're terrified of it.
By the way, it's very, very possible that we will have neither McConnell or Graham in the Senate, or certainly at least one of them is not going to make it.
I would feel pretty comfortable saying that.
One of those two guys isn't going to get re-elected.
That would be, that's like Wizard of Oz, Ding Dong the Wicked Witch is Dead, if one of those, especially if it's McConnell, who they just, you know, elected a Democratic governor, and his poll numbers are pretty bad in Kentucky.
So that would be incredible if that happened, but I feel like that's very possible.
Well, and what you're talking about, though, and I think this is one of those moments, again, where I sort of have to bring it back around.
Like, Kentucky is trending blue, you know?
Like, even a place like South Carolina is trending away.
Texas looks like it's trending towards purple, if it isn't purple.
Georgia, where I live, I mean, nearly elected the first female African-American governor, you know, and should have.
She had the election stolen from her.
But one of those things, and that's an exciting idea that we might see like a generational change here, but you also need to understand that if people like McConnell and Graham recognize the writing on the wall that they might lose power and the Republicans understand that they might lose power, there's really no telling what they would do.
Because I have to tell you, just for people who haven't heard us talk about it in the past, The definition of how fascism takes control of a country is when a power group suddenly realizes that they're about to lose power.
That's continually happened in this country.
And when a group thinks that they're going to lose power, if they are so concerned with power over democracy, they will start to destroy democracy, as the Republican Party has already done.
There's really no telling what they might be up to and we got to talk about this and I I'm just gonna say we're gonna talk about Obamagate and we're gonna talk about this entire conspiracy theory that is now being rolled out by Donald Trump who apparently is taking hydroxychloroquine We got to talk about what the anatomy of that is, what it's been doing, but people need to understand these people are not above doing some really nasty shit.
And the more that these polls come out and the worse that this disease gets, they're going to pull out all stops.
I mean, they've already shown a willingness to do it.
They're just going to take the brakes off.
Well, we've talked about this before, but the ability to justify these things is really impressive in reality with what the Republicans want to do because they're so convinced that their way of governing and that their vision of what America should be is the right way, that it justifies any means necessary to get there.
I would say that's some of them.
I would actually take them off into a couple of different groups.
One, actually, so your man Nixon, right?
So Nixon infected the Republican Party with that idea, which is, what's good for Nixon is good for America.
Because it's basically this old idea, and I traced it in my book, American Rule, going back to John Adams and Jefferson and Jackson, right?
This idea that God and the will of the universe runs through me, and so at all cost, I have to win or else the country loses.
That's one type.
There's a second type that doesn't give a shit about what's good for the country.
You know, Donald Trump does not think what he thinks is good for the country.
He's just like, ah, whatever, what are nations?
I'm gonna profit.
Right, so Trumpism is a step forward and it's it's where those two things come together, right?
It's that Nixonian idea plus also the Trump idea and when you bring those together, that's how we get the current crisis.
But you're right.
There is like that idea that I have to do literally anything possible.
Okay, so you're positing that Nixon, the imperial presidency, was rooted in, you know, what he thought was really best for the country versus like corruption, where Trump has now morphed that all across those decades to now this is really motivated by corruption and we have sort of a clash of these two storm fronts have hit and now we have this hurricane.
Right, and what they have in common is, going back to what we're going to talk about in a second, which are conspiracy theories and paranoia, right?
So Nixon truly believed that the entire world was out to get him.
He did.
Like, if you listen to the tapes, it's when Nixon talked, particularly when he got liquored up a little bit, he told the truth.
He thought the academics were out to get him.
He thought the press was out to get him.
A lot and a lot and a lot.
He kept saying the Jews were out to get him.
Right?
It's that conspiracy theory mindset.
It's the New World Order before the New World Order, which we'll talk about in a second.
Nixon did all of the extra legal stuff.
Because he believed it was necessary to protect himself, right?
So it's like, Nixon would look at it and he'd say, again, I am the only person who can take care of America, so I have to do these things as a means to keep myself in power to help America.
But also to balance all my enemies doing them at me anyway.
Exactly.
Which wasn't really happening.
No, it was all paranoia.
And so the difference is Trump believes that because he literally he he thinks that all of his failures are the results of other people, right?
Because the power positive thinking and that whole idea so he projects it on to other people.
But I mean, he doesn't care about how good America does.
He doesn't care what happens to America.
He cares about profit, power, and like we've talked about, avoiding litigation, right?
Not going to jail, never having consequences.
That's different.
That is his personal...
You know, it's like when he talks about the wall.
He doesn't want to build the wall to protect America.
It's a way to get votes and, you know, profit and power.
So there's a difference there because one of them actually thought that they were a patriot.
The other one couldn't define patriotism if they had to.
Yeah, no, I like that idea and it's a subtle difference in some respects, although maybe not so subtle, but the idea that all the evil that was going on in the 60s and the 50s and all those things behind the scenes, the real deep state, the Dulles brothers, you know, there was this American exceptionalism, there was this notion like we are doing this for the country and these Most people are just too dumb to know it.
We're going to have to just take it from them to make it work.
Yeah, and then we've now morphed across all of these different influences in ways.
And by the way, I think we're suffering from Watergate, right?
This is sort of what shapes, probably what shaped Trump the most, I would imagine, is the Watergate scandal, but in the wrong way.
Like, he was like, oh, I mean, just like people are looking at what Trump is doing now and trying to figure out how they can redo it without having such negative blowback, I'm sure that, you know, Trump was looking at Nixon and looking at this saying, gosh, he was on to something, and if he just did this, you know, here we are.
He said that.
He said that a couple days ago.
He literally said a couple days ago that he studied Nixon, and the problem was that Nixon kept tapes.
Right.
That was what he said.
That's what he learned from Nixon, not to keep tapes.
Which, by the way, we all knew that.
That he thought that.
But hearing it come out of his mouth was truly shocking.
I mean, it really was.
I'm telling you, it's a bunch of guys in the Oval Office hanging out all day, shooting the shit.
And that's what they're saying.
And so when he says it, it's like, they were just chatting around about it, and the TV is on, you know, on Fox News or OANN, whatever else they're watching, and it's just a bunch of frat guys kind of like just talking shit all day long, and then he'll go out and just distill some of that to the press.
That's exactly what it sounds like.
Well, and I want to contrast it there a little bit too, because what you're talking about, going back to Nixon and Trump, right?
So Nixon and Dulles and Kissinger, they had the Soviet Union as a counterbalance, right?
They thought that people were out to get them because the Soviet Union was out to get them, right?
There was actually a quote-unquote boogeyman out in the world that was like, you know, wrestling with America.
So as a result, they were like, Well, and Dallas is a really interesting one in all of this.
When I was doing research on Allen.
So, Allen goes out.
This is a really amazing little thing from history.
So, Dallas finds out that the Soviet Union is trying to perfect brainwashing, right?
Mental, mind control over people.
Right, so he goes out and he gives a speech about the dangers of mind control and how disgusting it is.
And like two days later, he starts a program in America to start trying to control people's minds.
And so it's like one of those things where it's like, oh man, they're gonna do this, so we have to beat them to it, right?
So that's the thing.
The differences with Trump and the people you're talking about, you're exactly right.
They don't have the Soviet Union.
Matter of fact, they have Russia that's trying to manipulate America, and they're like, yeah, let's find an angle where that helps us, right?
Because what they are is they are hyper-capitalist, and hyper-capitalists are always looking for an advantage.
If you actually talk to a hyper-capitalist about laws, Laws are borders, right?
Laws are things that are there.
And matter of fact, you can profit if you trouble that border more than the people you're competing against, right?
And if you get caught, the SEC might levy a small fine, but that doesn't even take care of the profits that you made from, you know, breaking all those laws.
These people would be breaking the law.
Well, they did.
They broke the law outside of the White House and they're breaking law inside the White House.
They are just, they are not concerned with laws as opposed to using them against other people.
That's all they care about.
Well here's the problem is you can either be outraged by that and use that as a way to sort of lord your moral high ground over that or you can be like people who are now resisting stay-at-home orders and are demanding to be able and violating laws you know in Texas and by the way you even have a sitting senator going and violating the law as well to go get his hair cut because he believes that these laws don't apply.
Now, I know that stay-at-home orders aren't necessarily ironclad constitutional laws that are written, but it's the same mindset now that has permeated the nation.
And our kids are going to be looking at this and thinking, you know, we talked about this before.
What keeps our society together is just the shared collective belief that these laws actually exist.
But they don't really exist.
And if enough people decided not to listen to them, then they wouldn't.
There's not enough cops to arrest everybody.
So it's a real interesting frame of mind here.
And there's a connection there between what Trump is and how his mind works and what the people who are protesting and are violating these laws are.
are.
Well and I'll tell you this, that stunt, which that was Ted Cruz doing that, that stunt that Cruz did and a lot of these people are doing, they're going to these rallies, they're showing themselves out in public, they're like not wearing a mask, all this stuff.
It's the exact same sort of stunt-ery that was taking place before the Civil War.
Right?
So, what ends up happening is when you start troubling these constructs, such as nationhood, one nation, right?
The idea that America is not divided.
We are all in this together.
It's a shared society.
When you start pushing those things, things start becoming very fragile and very, very brittle, right?
And so, over time, it takes a toll and it causes problems.
And what we're talking about now, we're getting ready to talk about Obamagate and how this whole thing works.
When you start saying that the president before you, not just, so like for instance, do I wish that Barack Obama would have looked into George W. Bush as a war criminal?
Absolutely I do.
I wish that he would have because George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were war criminals, okay?
But also, if that just happened and there was no evidence and there was no reason to do it, it sort of starts to push the nation towards a banana republic, right?
It starts pushing us towards an authoritarian state.
The Republicans are doing this as a campaign tactics.
Ted Cruz went into that barbershop or salon or whatever it was where he got that terrible haircut.
He went in there to say, well, I don't care about your laws.
I stand on my own and blah, blah, blah.
Which, by the way, inspires other people to do it and it creates lawlessness and this brittle sort of construct.
That's what we're talking about here.
We're talking about all of these things and they sound ridiculous and people will say, well, don't signal boost the idea of Obamagate.
We need to understand what it is, first of all.
Second of all, you need to understand the consequences because even if you don't want to talk about it or admit that you know what it is or any of that, if you want to ignore it, it doesn't mean that it ignores you.
And I'll just throw this out real fast.
I'm so glad that the media is finally paying attention to these conspiracy theories and QAnon and the deep state and the shit that we've been talking about for months now.
Because they need to understand it.
They need to understand what happens and where it takes us.
And pretending it's not there doesn't mean that it's not there.
It just gives it power to grow.
Meanwhile, there was a report about one of the guys who opened up, I believe it was a salon or barber shop, got COVID.
He got the disease, violating that order.
So it's probably only a matter of time until just about everybody has a direct connection to somebody who gets it.
And you'd have to imagine at that point, that will finally have the effect that we're hoping for.
But I don't know if that's the case, but you would imagine if like your cousin or your sister or somebody that close to you is mortally sick from this disease, that that would say, you know what, this is pretty serious, we probably should listen to the government.
I don't know.
But let me give you a counterpoint on that, which is the terrible part of all of this, and that's why we have to talk about it.
So let me say, for instance, let's put our listeners in the mindset of one of these people, okay?
So you understand that the pandemic is real, right?
But maybe you've watched Plandemic.
Maybe you've gotten online and you've gotten on YouTube, which by the way, don't forget everyone, we now have a YouTube stream where you can see us talking, gesturing back and forth, me taking sips of water.
And you've been watching YouTube and checking out all these conspiracy theories.
So that tells me that, in this mindset, that Bill Gates and the New World Order and Barack Obama and Biden or Beijing Biden or whatever they're calling him today, that tells me what do they want?
They want to keep me in my house, right?
They want to keep America on lockdown.
So what can you do against that shadowy cabal, Nick?
Do you just stay in your house like they want you to?
Do you let it wreck your economy?
No!
You go out into the world and show that you're not afraid and that you're gonna battle them and you're not gonna let them ruin the country.
That's what this shit does, right?
But it short-circuits that mind and they will go outside and they will sacrifice themselves even as the numbers increase.
Yeah, and they're more than willing to say, no, no, no, you stay home, that's fine.
If you want to stay home and do whatever you like, that's fine with me.
I'm going out there and getting my hair cut and going to the beach and then going back to work.
I mean, the only problem is, it's like, I just want to make sure if the prime motivation really is bread on the table.
Is that really what we're concerned with here?
Is there enough, you know, of a safety net right now for people with what they've been passing for money into people's hands, you know, to assuage a little bit of that fear?
Or is it just like this libertarian, you know, America instinct to simply defy orders that you don't like?
We've seen, and it's, again, we talked about this last one, I don't want to rehash too much, but like the white privilege involved in In like confronting the cops over these things and we've seen all these different videos and then you see the reaction of people of color thinking like there's just no way a non-white person could ever get away with half of what you're seeing, the treatment of police trying to enforce this.
So I just can't quite wrap my head around exactly what that percentage is of people who really are, like, they're destitute, they need to get back to work to keep their family fed, or is it simply that knee-jerk instinct to simply, you know, defy orders that you don't like?
First of all, the people who need the money don't have time to go to protests.
Okay, good point.
They need to go to work.
You know what I mean?
And I have to tell you, as somebody who comes from a working-class family, my family is active in politics in so much that, you know, they pay attention to it and they care about it.
They're too exhausted after their shift at the factory to go and protest or make calls or do any of this stuff.
There is a class mentality with a lot of this, right?
What we're talking about with the protest is it's Trumpism, right?
It's people who have decided that this is their identity.
It truly is a cult.
And I also want to point out, you brought up the idea of white privilege in all of this.
These are people who deny that white privilege is a thing, right?
And that racism is a thing and white supremacy is a thing, even though experts tell them it's everywhere and it's real.
And meanwhile, people are like, these are my experiences and this is what has happened to me because of it.
Those are the same people who don't want to believe in a pandemic that scientists tell them is real and everywhere and people say these are the experiences that I've had.
Being white and privileged and in denial of your privilege is a mobile alternate reality and these people carry it with them everywhere they go and there's a reason why they do this.
There's a reason why you have the anti-vaccination thing.
It's a bunch of people who think that they just inherently know and that's white supremacy personified.
I mean, that's what it is.
You know, and the exhaustion that you described, you know, if you're going to work and you come home, you just don't have the energy to go out and get your guns out and protest.
I mean, it's the same exhaustion that I kind of felt mentally, at least, having to listen to Fox News last week, OANN, Federalist, Breitbart.
That was almost the same kind of exhaustion, in a way.
Where they eventually wear you down.
I'm telling you, if I listened to that for 7-10 days in a row, I would be thinking that a lot of what they're saying is reasonable.
Think about listening to that for 7-8 years in a row.
You know what I mean?
And here's the thing about it.
So what we're talking about here with this melding of this cult of Trumpism and with these conspiracy theories that get peddled, you know, if you were told that for eight years the President of the United States, Barack Obama, was a traitor, right, and intentionally ran America aground, he impugned on the rights of Donald Trump and his entire campaign,
On top of that, he works with this shadowy guy named George Soros and Hillary Clinton, and not only are they, you know, messing with our politics, but they're, like, trafficking children, they're part of a New World Order thing, whatever.
Like, I just want to imagine what kind of... I want people to imagine what kind of effect that has.
You know what I mean?
It's this feeling that America has not only been betrayed, but that your reality that you believe in is so oppressed that you can't even hear it anywhere except for like a very select group of people.
Like, it wears people down, but it also activates fight-or-flight.
You either say, well, I have to leave my country because it's run by a cabal of, you know, Satanists, Or, I need to get out in the streets, and I need to take my gun with me, because this is the final battle that my preacher told me about when I was younger, and this is why I've built up an arsenal of weapons, and why I have a basement full of, you know, rations, and ready-to-eat meals, and I have a bug-out bag, all that stuff.
So yeah, it takes a toll, and it really does mess with people, and that's what, I mean, that's what Trump depends on.
It's what the Republican Party depends on, unfortunately.
Well, that, and they also depend on being able to not have people vote.
You know, because we all know if we got everyone who was eligible to vote, the Democrats would win every election, and it probably wouldn't be very close.
But I do feel like, you know, that folds back in on Obamagate, what he's doing.
What I had said last week was, having gone through that for those three days, and if you missed the pod, you should check it out from last week where we went into detail.
Nick killed it.
You got it.
No, you predicted this entire news cycle that we're currently in.
Yeah.
A hundred percent.
Well, either way, I mean, whatever I did, I went through and we talked about it, and it was really insightful, I thought, just to kind of get that handle, and I'll probably do it again at some point, but I felt like the ObamaGate stuff was powerful enough that it's going to gain traction much in the same way that the Hillary emails did.
And it's only a question now of just how much traction can he get.
That's what it will be.
That's all we're going to hear from now until the election.
I don't think there's going to be anything else that's going to pop up that's going to be quite as powerful as that is anyway.
So we're going to see that.
The Hunter Biden taking a billion dollars from China, it's not really gaining.
No one's really buying it.
So I think this is what it's going to be.
And the scary thing is that with William Barr involved, They're probably going to be able to roll out more cherry-picked testimony from the different congressional hearings that will probably somehow back up a lot of what they're saying.
It's making me pretty worried.
Yeah, so one of the reasons why, well, so first of all, we have to talk about the complicity of the mainstream media and how they amplify this, right?
They are so afraid of being seen as biased.
They will take anything that Trump throws out there and at least give it a moment in the sun, right?
This story, they'll just push it and push it and push it because they want to pretend that they're covering this election from an unbiased viewpoint.
So, just like Hillary Clinton's emails, this will go into a deep, deep rotation.
The other thing people need to understand is the reason why this works is because this has a link going back not only to Richard Nixon, but like then later on to Ronald Reagan.
And I posted about this a little bit on Twitter today, and I wrote an article about it on the Muckrake.
This goes back to the Vietnam War, and you know, which obviously was a major defeat that America suffered, and it really messed with us, particularly our masculine consciousness and our idea that America is exceptional.
Ronald Reagan came along and pushed, and for those who aren't familiar with Nazi history, it's called the knife-in-the-back theory for anyone who hasn't heard it.
And the knife-in-the-back theory was popularized by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels basically saying that World War I, like Germany could never be defeated in a war except for if it was betrayed, right?
And that's the knife in the back.
We lost a war because we were betrayed.
Ronald Reagan pushed that exact same thing in the 1980s and completely revised our idea of the Vietnam War You and I were talking about it before we taped.
All you have to do is watch Rambo to see this whole thing.
It's this mythology that Vietnam veterans came back, they were spit on, they were called baby killers, and we didn't support them.
And by we, I mean liberals and opponents of the war.
And so as a result, America was betrayed.
And Donald Trump has been amplifying this thing for years.
He's been saying we failed those people if we had a patent, if we had a Pershing, if we supported them, if we were willing to use nuclear weapons.
We never would have lost a war.
And now that traitorship, they say that liberals and Democrats are traitors.
Now when they say that Obama's a traitor and Biden's a traitor, it's that.
It's that linkage.
It's that legacy.
And it taps right into it.
It fits right into it.
And that's one of the reasons why this thing has legs, unfortunately.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, I can remember.
So, Rambo, the first one, First Blood, it was really a great movie.
Great movie.
Because it had a lot of subtext.
And, you know, the big line, the big Oscar line for Stallone was, I just want America to love me like I love it.
You know, and while he's in prison and, you know, they're hassling him, he ends up, you know what, becoming this crazed... Like, you could tell that story from the other version, by the cops version, and it's a crazed lunatic, you know, vet who's lost his mind is attacking this small town.
I want to point out real fast, because we're in the habit of recommending movies.
During the quarantine, I've gone through the Rambo movies.
Yeah.
It is fascinating.
So you start off with Rambo in the small town.
It took my point, but go ahead.
Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.
No, I mean, the point I was going to make was look what happened to that, how bastardized that whole story got based on what was a small, terrifically done subtextual movie, and then it becomes this Hollywood fare, like action star Rambo, you know, to Rambo 3.
How many were there?
I want to say five.
So it became a capitalistic franchise based on the bastardization of a very serious chapter in our history.
Right, and what ends up happening, and this is one of those things, we're going to talk more about this in the future and I'm going to do a lecture about it here before too long, the idea of how mass culture affects our idea of the world and the reality and how it goes back and forth, like the president talking to the TV, right?
So, Rambo starts off with this guy who feels like he's been rejected after serving in the war.
The next film, he goes over to Vietnam to free prisoners of war, which is another conspiracy theory that America left them behind, right?
And then in the third one, he goes to Afghanistan and helps the Mujahideen, which end up becoming, in part, Al-Qaeda, which is weird.
And then before the whole thing is over, he's fighting against a cartel.
So, I mean, it's the metaphor for how we view America and how it reflects it back in a mirror.
But you need to understand, that was a purposeful thing that Ronald Reagan did, right?
So we come off of Jimmy Carter, who we cannot talk about enough on this podcast, because he was rejected for being honest about America's problems.
Reagan comes along and says, there is no problem with America when we're not being betrayed.
And so now we're in a situation where, again, you have Donald Trump, who is a lot like Ronald Reagan, who is saying, we've been betrayed.
And people hear that, and there's a deep cultural memory of that idea, of that myth.
So, Obamagate's not going away.
I don't care if people want to ignore it or put their head in the sands.
Like, that's unfortunately the defining narrative of that cult.
It just is.
I had someone on Twitter, because when I mentioned it, I'm like, having gone through three days of this and whatever, like, it's going to have some traction.
Somebody wanted to say, like, you know, this is like the Russia thing where most Americans didn't seem to care about Russia and then the investigation.
And I thought, am I in my own little bubble?
I think that's insane.
I think people were glued to the TV every night waiting to hear more from Mueller.
I feel like that was a huge thing for a huge swath of the country.
And this is someone who was well-respected on Twitter, who's supposed to know better.
I was shocked to even hear that notion of, oh, and maybe it's their rationalization to try and put away the Obamagate thing and not have it be as serious by trying to downplay Russia or whatever.
I think it is.
I think it's going to be a serious thing that people are going to tap into because, again, it just keeps fomenting the notion of deep state.
The only question, though, is this the base?
Is this a very finite amount of people?
Or is he going to pick off those 70,000 people in three states that's going to win him the election again?
First things first, people absolutely cared about Russia.
And when that ended up becoming the thing, the big moment was when Mueller went and testified, right?
That was to be the climax of it.
And by the way, we have to take it around to what we were just saying.
The reason why that didn't quote-unquote resonate is because everyone expected it to be a made-for-TV moment.
And everybody the day after is like, he is not the leading man the Democrats wanted, and this was not the movie version of the book that the Democrats needed, right?
Which, by the way, is one of the reasons why America's in the trouble that it is, is because we want that spectacle and the metaphor.
But what you just said is important.
Is everybody going to buy the Obamagate thing?
No.
The media will carry the water.
If they have a Senate meeting or a hearing, if they have some sort of, whether it's a show trial or some sort of investigation into it.
And by the way, how much money did they spend on the Bugazi hearings?
Oh, tens of millions.
Tens of millions of dollars.
And they even admitted it was to hurt Hillary Clinton.
They are not going to stop linking Democrats with China and saying that everybody's a traitor and projecting the Russia collusion thing on them.
This thing will gain traction because it has that deep cultural memory, but also because the media loves this shit.
They love it.
It's great for ratings.
You know, it gives them something to pretend they're not biased about.
But you're right.
That's the question, is will it pick off those voters that we're talking about?
And I don't know.
I really don't.
I mean, yeah, because, again, you know, when you start seeing the leaked testimony where you have over and over again Clapper and Brennan saying, well, I didn't see any evidence of collusion, you know, and then they keep going on.
Now, meanwhile, you have to imagine they're laying out a lot of other connections to the Russians to the Trump campaign.
from Russians to the Trump campaign.
We know that there are hundreds and hundreds of connections during the campaign.
We know that there are hundreds and hundreds of connections during the campaign.
So they're cutting that part out, and they're just leaking a little tiny bit where, like, they say, well, did you see Kislyak kissing, you know, Donald Trump out of the mouth?
So they're cutting that part out and they're just leaking a little tiny bit where, like, they say, well, did you see Kislyak kissing, you know, Donald Trump?
In the forest.
Right?
And they didn't do that, right?
Like, so that's, and they have to sort of say that in the court of law under oath.
And that's the problem.
But, like, again, like, I've mentioned this before, I keep feeling like what Mueller did was he put it out to test them to see what the reaction was going to be.
So when he released the Mueller report, he was like, okay, let's see if Barr is going to release it like he should, or is he going to bury it for a week and then come out with his own version of what it was, which required not one, but two letters from Mueller back to Barr saying, what the fuck are you doing?
Why are you lying about my report?
And so to me, this might be why we're getting the leaks of the unmasking.
We got the leaks of the unmasking in the first place because it's clearly from, you know, the CIA or the FBI, because they're the ones who are seeing all these things and what's happening and what the Trump administration was doing to respond to these things.
And ultimately, like in Watergate, those are the guys who kind of end up deciding who gets in trouble and who doesn't.
I try and hesitate retro-engineering things in the favor of saviors.
I don't think that Bob Miller was what we thought he was.
Like, everyone got all excited putting him in Captain America outfits and, you know, having prayer candles to him or whatever.
I think he was a guy who did his job and wasn't into, you know, going after people.
And he's like, well, I can't prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt, and if you don't want to act on it, I don't know what to do.
I think he's part of an old guard, is the problem.
And he doesn't understand what exactly has happened here or how it works.
The fact that all this stuff is coming out, it's a Hail Mary.
It really is.
I mean, they have nothing.
They destroyed the economy.
I mean, what are we at now?
90,000 dead?
Is that right?
I think by the end of the month, we'll probably be over 100,000.
The summer projections show that it's going to increase, probably, with the way things are working.
They have no other play.
It's just too many.
It's not even accurate, the death counts.
And we're seeing the above normal counts.
So even if it's a little bit more, those are COVID.
It's just too many.
It's 20% deflated at this point.
So it's frightening.
And he's not going to get punished for this.
He's not going to get punished for saying $100,000 and walking it back to $60,000 and then $70,000.
Whatever happened to flip-flopping?
That used to be the dreaded term that you can't be associated with.
And here he is.
He doesn't have a position to stand on in any of these things.
You have to have shame to suffer consequences.
Right.
That is the end of the thing.
He does not have shame.
He doesn't care.
Probably doesn't even know.
I mean, again, like if you told me, if you came from the future and told me that this hydroxy claim that he made today was just completely out of nowhere and it wasn't, you know, he just said it to say something, like, I wouldn't be shocked, right?
And this is a person who, he doesn't understand the concept of shame.
He's never had to suffer consequences in his entire life.
I mean, and he's not going to outside of the possibility of losing an election.
I'm not one of those people who's expecting him to lose the election, bow out gracefully, and then, you know, be prosecuted.
That's not how the world necessarily works.
I would love it if there was a sealed indictment held by the Supreme Court Sergeant of Arms or whatever the hell people like to think.
It's not true.
And this is just a big, complicated mess, and we just have to understand that.
I don't see a silver bullet here.
I really don't.
I mean, I think Biden's also on the record as saying he's not going to give him a pardon if he gets into office.
And I tell you, if he did what Ford did to pardon Nixon, which cost Ford the election basically in 76, I don't know how Biden makes it through Two years in the White House, if he did that, I think the country would just lose their collective minds.
I would hope.
I know I will.
I'll tell you, from the research that I've done on American history, I have noticed that every time there is a new president, the national mood changes in a massive way.
Going back to what we were saying about the president watching TV and the TV affecting him and him affecting the TV, the way that these things work.
America is really affected by presidents.
Like, it's this weird psychological connection.
I can't even begin to imagine what a Biden presidency would feel like.
The same way I can't even imagine what a second term of Donald Trump would feel like.
I think once we get past November, if we have an election, and if it's a fair election, I think all bets are off on everything.
But I have no idea what to expect.
Prognosticating is, you know, it's a flip of a coin sometimes.
It really is.
You know, I shudder to say that I actually could envision what a Trump second term would look like.
But you would be picturing it from New Zealand, is what you're telling me.
Right, yeah.
I mean, I'd be on a beach somewhere else.
But, you know, I've seen, I believe it's Back to the Future 3.
So we've seen that timeline.
Is it 2?
That's 2.
Biff was based off of Donald Trump, yeah.
All right, sorry, three is the train, right?
Yeah, three is the country western, yeah.
So, yeah, so number two.
So, you know, I've seen that one.
We already know what happened there.
So, yeah, you know, it's not good, however you want to play it, but the bottom line is if, like, we don't put into place... Listen, we can argue that letting Nixon off sort of, you know, allowed Trump to...
And that's a big part of it.
the mantle.
There was just no ramification for what Nixon ultimately did.
I watched Frost Nixon, actually, this weekend.
And it's a really good movie.
It's amazing how Ron Howard was able to capture a play on film.
And it really has...
It was just so echoing of everything that we're talking about right now.
We're not learning.
We don't seem to learn from our mistakes very well.
And that's a big part of it.
The Nixon thing, and this goes to Carter, and this goes to Reagan.
With Nixon, this was a large cultural governmental decay that led to Richard Nixon and his presidency, which broke basically every law and shredded the Constitution.
When he resigned, people acted like it was an exorcism.
Suddenly everything was fine in America again.
And it wasn't.
And that's the thing, by the way.
You have someone like Ford.
Ford is remembered for pardoning Nixon.
His presidency was a disaster.
And it worked.
You know, one of the reasons he didn't get reelected is because he relied on former federal chair Greenspan.
And, you know, who was basically one of the architects of neoliberalism and, you know, it's one of the reasons why New York City became what it became and why cities are run the way that they are.
Like, that whole thing, they pretended like they got rid of the infection, you know, as if it had been removed in a surgery and everything was fine, and it just got worse.
It just continued and continued.
And that's how you get to Trump.
It metastasizes.
Again, we have to put this out there.
He's a symptom.
He isn't the disease.
This has been a long, long time coming.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, by the way, that was what started candidates releasing their taxes, right?
Because Nixon wouldn't.
And here we are with Trump.
And in theory, you could argue that Trump wouldn't have gotten elected in the first place had he released his taxes originally.
So there's an example of a connection there where like, okay, they need to demand this.
This has to be the law where you have to release those if you want to run for president and you want to be president.
That's one great example of what they never bothered to do and sort of relied on the kindness of strangers to keep our government running.
We should talk about this next time, but the fundamental construct of the government is either you believe it's supposed to be to help people or you believe that people are supposed to help themselves.
I think that's the difference between, you know, Republicans and Democrats to some degree.
I will say there's a slight third way in that.
So one is that you believe the government should help people.
The second is that you believe people should help themselves.
And the third, which is what we're seeing, which is the government shouldn't help people except for me.
Yes.
Okay, that's good.
And that is the evolution of it.
That is why Trump is different.
It's because he is the embodiment of that idea, which is America is great because it helps me, right?
And that's the mindset of it.
As long as its laws serve me and its economy serves me, America is great.
But if it But it shouldn't help those other people.
The government hands off my social security.
You're describing that they're really rich people, I imagine, but it's like, what about all those people that keep voting against their interests?
And I think the disconnect is they don't realize it is.
Farmers will keep voting for Trump no matter what, even though he's destroying their industry.
No, but you're talking about a different thing.
You're talking about people who have not been served by an economy, who have given up on the economy serving them.
What they win is that on Fox News they get to watch the president flipping off people they don't like.
Yes.
And so that is where they gain cultural wins versus personal wins.
And so it's the exact same reason why people follow a team or why they celebrate when their team wins a Super Bowl, right?
Because they're not getting paid millions.
They're not going to the Hall of Fame.
But they, as a fan of this, are seeing the thing that they're a fan of, quote-unquote, winning.
Because you're exactly right.
These people vote against their interests all day, but they don't expect the government to help them anymore.
They want somebody out there who is telling the people that they dislike that they can go to hell.
Now you're describing in the last dance from last night the lady in Indiana who was foul-mouthed and pointing in the short blonde hair, the Karen in the audience, screaming and yelling.
Everyone wants to know who she is now.
And it's the symbolism that she stands for that was really fascinating.
Even the guy on the Bulls bench, Joe Klein, has to turn around and be like, what the hell?
She was so foul-mouthed and so angry and pointing.
That is it.
And I feel like on the NBA Twitter side, all reacted to that.
They recognize what that stands for.
And those are the people.
It's really a problem that I don't know if we're going to overcome.
Yeah, I have hope, though.
And this is one of those things.
And, you know, we talked about it on the last podcast.
I think that we have to get angry about it.
We have to get educated and we have to get organized.
And that's why we're doing this.
I mean, that's why we started this podcast in the first place.
And to be frank, I don't know about... I think I speak for Nick here.
I gain a lot of hope from this podcast.
I gain a lot of hope from the fact that, like, people are reaching out and they're saying that this is important to them and that, you know, they're happy to have a place to talk about this stuff instead of just headlines and the tired old cliches about politics.
So we just want to thank you so much for being here and giving us hope, giving us energy.
All we ask right now, people have been reaching out and asking if we have a Patreon, if we have subscriptions.
We don't.
What we're interested in right now is likes and shares and comments and ratings and just tell people about this stuff.
We're growing like wildflowers right now.
Tell people about this.
Let them know what's going on.
We appreciate that so much and we've appreciated everybody reaching out and the energy you've been giving us.
It's been awesome.
Until next time, you can follow Nick at Can You Hear Me?
SMH.
I am the J.Y.
Sexton.
We will be back later in the week where hopefully we're not starting a podcast with the president saying he's taking a miracle drug that has been known to kill people.
And that's something that we have to wrestle with in the first like 20 minutes.
Hopefully that's not happening again.
I'm so, I'm so tired of this.
All right, everybody.
Stay safe out there.
Wash your hands.
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