In Praise Of Henry Ford, Trump Continues To Reveal
Donald Trump has just admitted he won't shut down the country, even if the pandemic has a deadly second wave. Unfortunately, the numbers are showing that's a distinct possibility. Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the ramifications, Trump's constant appeals to Neo-Nazis and fascists, and welcome author and lawyer Teri Kanefield to discuss the rule of law and effective means of acting against this regime.
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The company founded by a man named Henry Ford.
Good bloodlines.
Good bloodlines.
If you believe in that stuff, you've got good blood.
A democracy will naturally It has one way of becoming more inclusive as we improve the institutions.
Within democracy, there's always a force working against that.
You will always, within a democracy, have a force working against the democracy.
I tested positively toward negative, right?
So, no, I tested perfectly this morning.
Meaning I tested negative.
But that's the way of saying it.
Positively toward the negative.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
My name is Nick Hauselman, and as always, I'm joined by my co-host, Jared Yates Sexton.
And you have to stick around for Terry Canfield.
We did an amazing interview with her, and she's got a great Twitter feed with a lot of incredible threads that will give you some hope in this darkness that we are all experiencing.
And that's what you might have heard in the very beginning of this podcast, a quick snippet.
But really, what's more important right now is that Trump had just appeared at the Ford factory And was quoted as saying that if there was a second wave of coronavirus, he is not going to, quote, shut down the country, whatever that means.
And I'm just thinking we're going to have a whole other pandemic on our hands perhaps.
Jared, how are you feeling today?
We're going to put out the fires.
We're not going to close the country.
We can put out the fires, whether it is an ember or a flame.
We're going to put it out, but we're not closing the country.
Put that on your presidential library, am I right?
Just right out front.
Just get some real inspiration.
The President of the United States of America who's in charge of protecting people has now said that he has no interest in protecting people, which, you know, makes clear what he's shown us for months now, which is great.
So he's at the Ford factory and he refused again to wear a face mask.
He then showed that he had a presidential seal face mask.
And he was asked why he wasn't wearing it, and he said that he didn't want to give the press the pleasure of seeing him in a face mask.
He then tried to hand it to the press, who didn't want to take it, and then he spoke at the Ford Motor Company, which for those of you all who understand history, you understand that Henry Ford, or as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis called him, Heinrich Ford, Oh.
Has a history of, you know, popularizing anti-Semitism, you know, propelling the idea of the Elders of the Protocols of Zion.
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, which, by the way, for everyone keeping track, Nazism, anti-Semitism, the whole idea is that you gotta, you know, thin out the human race and work on bloodlines.
President of the United States talking about Henry Ford.
Good bloodlines.
Good bloodlines.
If you believe in that stuff, you got good blood.
Oh, you know, that last little bit is really a special treat for all those white supremacists and Nazis out there.
I have, you know, forgive me if I have the song, We Didn't Start the Fire by Billy Joel kind of going in my head now, since he wants to put these out.
And actually, it's kind of appropriate because he's not going to take any responsibility for these embers or these fires burning, and he's going to try and frame this whole thing against China.
But I think that it's insane.
We already had heard him discuss and the inside came out.
I don't think he realized it was coming out loud when he had said that people, him, were discussing letting the virus wash over the country.
We know that was probably him saying, just let it go and we'll get herd immunity, whatever he thought, and then people will die, right?
That would have been millions.
And I feel like we're right back to that again.
Yeah, can we talk about things like herd immunity, Billy Joel?
I would much rather talk about Billy Joel than what we're talking about here.
They're going to have to insert his name into that song now.
It's unbelievable.
So, you have a president who is speaking to, and by the way, he's talking to militias, he's talking to neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, he's talking, obviously, to Christo-fascists.
I'm sorry, but when you start talking about a virus wiping out hundreds of thousands of Americans, all I can think about is Darwinism in practice.
You know, survival of the fittest.
I mean, this is a person, and this is documented actually, that Donald Trump believes in, like, eugenic-type talent.
Right?
I mean, actually, it was when he was at the CDC, right?
Where he was like, oh, my uncle was a scientist, so obviously I understand these things very well.
Like, he literally believes in the idea that blood carries power, which again, you know, if you translate that into German, you could, you know, be at a rally or two.
I just want to put real fast out there, and I understand people are like, well, why are we bringing the Nazis into this?
Well, let's talk really fast about Henry Ford.
This is a guy, so Adolf Hitler had one portrait in his office.
It was of Henry Ford.
Henry Ford inspired the Holocaust, right, with mass production.
And on top of that, Adolf Hitler even went so far as to tell American newspapers he really wanted an America with Henry Ford as a fascist president and he was more than willing to send troops to help it happen.
Henry Ford, who, by the way, was honored by the Nazi regime.
And you have Donald Trump going there.
It is not an accident.
Do you know what I mean?
We can talk about how we can somehow or another say some things every now and then and have secret meetings.
This is not an accident.
None of this is accidental.
No.
I mean, the thing is, because you might want to give him the accident label on some of these things that are so inept that end up actually helping him.
But, I mean, we know, I'm choosing to believe that all the reports and biographies done on Trump have shown, like, you know, Mein Kampf supposedly was on his bedside table.
Like, I'm choosing to believe that that probably is reasonably true, only because he keeps
These things keep coming up and like even the fact that like his grandfather was or I'm sorry his father was arrested at a Klan rally in the 20s you know sort of indicates if you're willing to go that far then he was probably like raised that way I'm sure he heard a lot of this stuff so this is and you know and it's just he's constantly telling us how he feels and I also I also want to say you know this mental decline thing which I think a lot of armchair psychiatrists want to get in on and
It's really difficult to say because they're not actually like they're not in the room diagnosing him But I really feel like this is now a case where he doesn't he can't control himself, right?
He doesn't his mind seems so thick and twisted at this point that he doesn't even know like what the reality is and where he is and what he's saying so this is the truth it is really coming out and Wait, are you talking about like a president of the United States who might just say completely out of nowhere apropos of nothing that he's taking a drug that has been shown to kill people and have no actual intrinsic value in handling the disease he's talking about?
Is that what you're...
Possibly.
Does that fit within that?
Sure, sure.
And by the way, you had said you didn't believe it, and I kind of believed that he was taking it, but I've now done 180, and I'm in your camp now.
Especially because that letter that came out from the White House doctor was such a non-response, and clearly did not say that they prescribed it to him and he's taking it.
It makes it clear to me that, like, I don't think he was taking it.
Or he is taking it.
And I mean, that's what we're talking about here.
And, you know, it's one of those things where, like, people People try and figure out whether or not Donald Trump is a secret genius or a complete dolt, right?
In situations like this, like what we're talking about with these comments at the Ford factory, and by the way, like we're not sitting here saying that Donald Trump is like trying to create like the Fourth Reich or something, right?
But this is the kind of thing that Stephen Miller might whisper in his ear.
Talk about Ford's bloodlines.
Like, that's a guy who understands this stuff.
You know what I mean?
I know, but here's the weird thing.
Stephen Miller was raised Jewish.
Jared Kushner is a devout Jew.
He made his wife convert.
But again, I guess what it shows you is that there's no moral compass here.
There's no sort of religious standard.
You know, I don't even know because they're observant.
It's hard to rectify those two things.
But would you go out?
Like, okay, so we're just a couple guys with a podcast which we are so grateful for you to be listening to right now.
Or watching on YouTube.
Or watching on YouTube.
I don't consider myself president of the United States material.
That I know not to go in front of the Ford Motor Company and start talking about Henry Ford's blood and the worthiness of it.
That is an odd decision.
Anti-decision.
You know what I mean?
And that's one of those things.
I was trying to tell someone about this the other day.
I was talking with a reporter about cults and American mythology and how all these things come together and neo-Nazis.
The messaging that this administration has obviously makes a decision to talk to these people.
You know, it's not just dog whistling, right?
It's making sure that certain things get inserted into the discourse.
Certain people get retweeted.
Certain people get amplified and highlighted.
It's just an odd thing to be talking about this while also saying, by the way, if the pandemic gets worse, we're not going to do anything about it.
It's just an odd confluence of things.
Well, let me ask you this, Jared.
Have you seen an expert in epidemiology or any kind of virology posit that there will not be coronavirus coming back in the fall or the winter?
No, but that also doesn't stop him either, right?
He keeps saying he thinks a vaccine will be available very, very soon, and everyone's saying maybe next summer.
Right.
You know, if it's fast-tracked.
Tell me if I'm wrong.
I read this somewhere, I believe, that the fastest that a vaccine has ever been created is like four years.
I read the same thing, four years, and it was his own, their own, the Defense Department was the one that came out and said summer 2021 maybe, and I know it was a contingency plan as if maybe there could be an advanced timeline, but everybody's pointing that, but we know this, we know that he can't, oh did you see him even talking about how he tested negative for the coronavirus today?
No, no, no, no, he tested very positive.
Yes.
He can't even say it.
The word negative, he can't say it.
The power of this positive thinking that you've talked about oftentimes, it just sort of permeates everything and it's completely colored as the reality.
He doesn't live in the reality that everyone else needs to be living in.
That's one of the things I'm really excited about with the interview with Terry is I feel like by talking about the rule of law and the history of law, I feel like that that really, you know, settles this thing into a nice, understandable kind of a thing you can wrap your head around.
But here's the other side of that coin.
We're on our own with this thing.
You know what I mean?
The pandemic is not only terrible and generational and something we've never seen before, we're still finding out symptoms.
There's still mystery mutations out there.
We're in deep trouble with it, but it's even worse because Trump's not going to help us.
He didn't help with the first wave of coronavirus.
He just told us explicitly he has no desire to help with the second one because it's all about his reelection.
Right?
Meanwhile, and we got to talk about this thing.
I live in Georgia.
They just got caught doctoring their materials in order to show that the outbreak isn't as bad as some people think it is.
And they did it to reopen the economy, and they got caught.
Florida, meanwhile, there's all kinds of rumors running rampant that people are getting fired for not doctoring material there.
Well, that's not... One person who's in charge of the website is fired because she refused to manually adjust data.
Right, she was fired and says the reason is because she refused to change data.
So it's one of those things where it's like, on one hand, you know, it's just disgusting that Trump would say that.
But on the other hand, it's actually weirdly reassuring that he just said it.
Do you know what I mean?
Just to say, it's like you said a while back, and I thought it was really interesting and compelling.
You said, they don't have to hide who they are anymore.
You know, they can just do what they want, and they don't even have to really hide it anymore.
And you thought it was, like, almost refreshing, right?
You don't even have to deal with a lot of the bullshit that they throw at you.
In this case, I'm like, thank God.
Thank God you would just tell us straight out that you have no intention of saving lives, and you can put this out there and let people know who you are.
That's how I approach this.
It's like, yeah, I know.
I knew that was the case, but hearing you say it, you know, I'm just really glad that he said it.
I don't even know where to because this starts to apply across the board but as far as you know what's going on with the numbers so if you didn't know in Georgia they rearranged the dates so that so that looked like the the chart went steadily down even though they had May 1st Next to April 20th and whatever that was.
By the way, you pay attention to the charts, right?
Like I assume our listeners do too.
You look up the chart and see where things are.
Right, yes.
I don't know if you've noticed it.
It spikes.
It goes up and it goes down and it goes up and it goes down.
That's how these charts look.
And if your chart doesn't look like that... Somebody's weird.
Something's weird.
But here's the thing.
That's what it is.
This is rooted in Fox News.
Because it's a long history of Fox News completely doctoring charts that they show on TV.
And there's one guy on Twitter, I don't remember who it is now, would show them.
And people who are like, you know, in math would just have the biggest laugh because It's completely off.
That y-axis is completely not to scale properly, and they just, you know, they just make up the numbers to make it look a certain way, and no one questions it.
So, this is all rooted in the same thing.
I mean, you could consider this rooted in the same notion of, like, voter suppression, you know?
And it's all kind of rooted on one side of the aisle here.
No matter what you want to say, we continually see the Republicans doing this, and it's almost like this notion of The projection that they have saying, well, the Democrats are doing it too, so we have to do it to like balance it out.
Although that's a different story.
Nonetheless, it's a really troubling thing because this is when we're talking about life and death, not even just like sort of votes for democracy.
Well, I just want to throw this out there because I would be remiss if I didn't.
So a really good source for this, and he's done exactly what you're talking about, Alberto Cairo, who is a dear friend of mine and one of the best graph people out there.
His book, How Charts Lie, is just...
Necessary reading.
And it gets into how misinformation has been spread through that.
So Alberto Cairo, hats off.
He is wonderful.
If you really want to get into how these things are manipulated and like how they play against people and pursuit of information, Alberto Cairo.
I will next say that what you're talking about is exactly right.
I don't know how to say this and not sound alarmist, okay?
So in Georgia, We had an election, you know, with Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp.
And for those who aren't familiar, Brian Kemp is the idiot governor who reopened Georgia and also said he didn't know that people who were asymptomatic could spread the disease.
Good job, Brian.
So Brian Kemp is also the guy who campaigned in his big truck that he was going to pick up illegal immigrants and take them back over the border.
He also trained a shotgun on a young man in one of his ads because he is a classy individual.
He sees himself as the next Trump.
He really does, right?
But so he basically stole the election in Georgia away from Stacey Abrams, who would have been the first female black governor.
Well, so he stole an election.
He, the other day they canceled an election so he could name a Supreme Court pick.
Yeah.
And you look at all this and you're like, okay, you can't even tell us how many deaths we have so we can make informed decisions about this.
Our elections aren't necessarily free and fair.
What do we have after that?
You know what I mean?
Like it's just the eradication of liberal democracy and open and fair society.
I mean, again, you know, Terry's going to be on talking about this in a little bit in a really important way.
But if you don't have that, and if you don't have trust in government whatsoever, and you can't believe that your vote matters, and you can't believe that you can't even believe what's actually happening during a pandemic, where's that leave us?
What's that do?
It's confusing because, you know, the people that are shouting, I'm not wearing a mask and you can't keep me in.
Well, they're going against the government.
And yet they also completely and utterly back Trump.
And we were going to talk about this with Terry because it's very confusing to have both those positions.
You want to throw on anti-vaccine, vaccination stuff as well.
And then you throw in all sorts of other, you know, sort of the conspiracy side of it.
And you have these people that just sort of are filled with completely conflicting ideas.
And they feel so strongly about all of them that it must be really difficult emotionally and mentally exhausting to be those people.
And it might explain why they're so quick-triggered to push against all these things.
And maybe also explains how easily they're led by this guy like Trump.
Well, and by the way, a quick aside before I take that in that direction.
I'm really enjoying right now.
So we've been on this cult of Trumpism, cult of QAnon bullshit for a while, right?
Oh yeah.
Oh man, we've been going after this thing for a while and we've been talking about this and discussing it and analyzing it and getting to it.
Finally, the mainstream media is interested in it, which is great.
I'm so glad that they're exposing it.
Meanwhile, because these people are so afraid of pointing out white supremacy or pointing out that things might be problematic in this country, they're like, QAnon might be a new religion.
It's like, really?
It's a new religion, is it?
Because we're doing a lot of work to avoid calling it a cult.
Which is what it is, right?
Yeah.
I want to talk about another cult with this, and this goes along with that point.
I would be remiss if I didn't talk about it in this podcast.
A little op-ed today published in the Washington Post by Joe Scarborough.
I'm going to read the title.
I believe in American exceptionalism.
That's what makes this crisis so hard to accept.
Right?
This is a person who, by the way, is one of the most powerful political figures in the country.
He has a platform like nobody's business.
Meanwhile, the title of the op-ed says, it all.
Right?
Which is like, I refuse to believe that America can be like this.
And it's like, look around, Joe.
It is, right?
And that is its own cult.
And so people right now are so afraid to admit that things are falling apart and that things are getting really, really bad.
They're so afraid because it messes with their idea of America that, like you said, there's people out in the streets right now.
If we have a vaccination, are they going to take it?
No.
No!
They're not!
And on top of that, if we have another wave and let's say Whitmer closes down Michigan, like locks down Michigan even more, or another Democratic governor does whatever and Trump calls them enemy of the people...
They're already storming legislatures with guns.
They're already threatening people.
They're chasing down members of the media.
Like, what are we doing here?
And why don't we recognize just how bad this thing is?
Certain states can't vote, right?
Other states don't know how bad the pandemic is.
Trump is withholding life-saving supplies based upon political ramifications.
It's bad.
It's a really bad situation.
And if you want to pretend like it's not, it doesn't make it less true.
This is a really, really terrible situation.
Sure.
He's also offering all sorts of misinformation.
He tried to insinuate that Michigan sent out actual ballots when they just did the ballot applications, which is completely illegal for them to do.
And he called it illegal.
And he doesn't even recognize that there's a ton of Republican states that do the same thing.
And it works great.
Real fast, Nick, why would a Republican president care about sending in mail-in ballots?
Why would that possibly be a problem?
Don't you want everyone to vote, Nick?
Oh, that would be shiny, happy people holding hands.
That'd be amazing.
Wouldn't it?
But it would also help turn out the vote, which the Republican Party never wants because it can't win a free and fair election.
Right?
And so we have a president who is wrongly calling this thing out.
It's normal practice.
He's calling it illegal.
And what did he threaten to do?
What?
What did he threaten to do?
He threatened to withhold life-saving supplies and aid if they kept breaking the law.
It's not true.
And by the way, it's not like Michigan is now going through another catastrophe of dams breaking and flooding an entire huge swaths of area that are going to be another emergency they're going to need help with.
So, I mean, by the way, they're still reeling from the water being not safe to drink.
And by the way, not to scare everyone, I live in Georgia so I pay a lot of attention to the Atlantic Ocean.
Yeah.
Hurricane season's coming.
Early!
For the fourth year in a row.
Early!
And by the way, it's almost like climate change has a role in all of this, but that's neither here nor there.
Almost.
So what happens?
Tell me this, Nick.
What happens, and by the way, thank God Terry's coming on here with actionable items, because we're talking about like real actual shit that is not great and it doesn't feel great, but it's true.
What happens in a couple of months when the coronavirus is just raging like wildfire Right?
Republican states have opened up almost completely and then all of a sudden a hurricane side swipes the eastern seaboard.
It hits all the way up and all of a sudden you have governors who need aid and we're facing a re-election.
Which, by the way, this is what everybody said during the impeachment.
You cannot trust this person.
He will break the law.
He will use politics and the fate of the nation for his own purposes.
That's what we're looking at right now.
And these things are compounding.
I mean, it's not going to be pretty.
Oh, I thought you were going to be able to draw the connection to not being able to have an election, where they're going to call that off in November.
Oh, God.
By the way, what's the best way to call off the election is to say that the coronavirus is now running rampant too much and we need to keep people at home.
So in some weird, twisted way, they might all of a sudden completely reverse course.
And you know what?
No one would even say boo about it.
That's what's crazy about it.
They'd be like, oh, yeah, we should stay at home now.
We can't go to the voting booths yet.
And that would be another way to extend this thing.
But again, I can't get there yet because the Constitution is pretty clear, but that to me would be the way that they would be able to manipulate that better.
Well, I mean, what if the Republican states are open and the Democratic states are locked down?
And what if people who would vote against Trump are the people who take the coronavirus seriously, as opposed to the others?
I mean, the whole point of this is I'm sorry, I don't know how you feel about it.
I lived through 9-11.
I lived through the Iraq War.
I lived through the financial crisis.
This is the worst I've ever seen it.
Like, this is a really bad situation all the way around.
And there are still people.
And by the way, with the worst possible president at the worst possible time.
And there are still people who are in denial about how bad this thing is.
They still are like, oh, again, it's Joe Scarborough.
Dude, you have to read this op-ed and everybody listening, go hate read it.
It's like, well, the home of Neil Armstrong and eagles soaring through the sky and football kickoffs and barbecue sandwiches and little girls crying and waving flags made in China.
And it's like, dude, those things are just symbols, you know?
And meanwhile, this is a person who's supposed to understand this stuff and is tasked with sounding the alarm.
And meanwhile, I mean, I'm sorry, but the most impotent thing that any of these people can say is, Mr. President, do your job.
Well, he's not interested in doing his job.
And he's not doing his job.
And he's not going to do his job.
So call it what it is.
Actually get in front of this thing and call it what it is.
You know, speaking of his job, on Twitter, I don't know if you saw this a few hours ago, but he actually, again, remember how he said it's refreshing that they're finally able to act so unscrupulously out in public.
They don't have to hide anymore.
He actually said this, quote, many will disagree, but Fox News is doing nothing to help Republicans, comma, and me, comma, get re-elected on November 3rd.
What?
Can you imagine George W. Bush saying that?
You know, you had said what you lived through and how it felt and how it feels now.
Yeah.
You know, certainly going through 2000, it felt bad.
We were upset.
We didn't want, we wanted Gore to win.
We wanted to continue the policies and the progression that we had gotten through the 90s.
But, you know, it was, and by the way, we had to deal with 9-11 and then Afghanistan, all those things.
It didn't, it doesn't feel like it does now.
That was, we still felt like there's a president who was a human.
I'll give him that.
I'll give George W. Bush that.
Sure.
And by the way, it was Cheney who was the Trump.
That's another podcast.
But the thing here is that Trump is now explaining it.
He's like, I expect Fox News to be a propaganda channel, which it had been for a long time, which we'd all been saying, and certainly none of the Republicans would want to admit that.
And here it is in our face.
Every day, more and more.
And that's why I think this mental decline is really the pressure of what's going on around him and the polls that are indicating that he's not going to win, no matter what happens, are really putting pressure on his brain and this is what's coming out.
Well, I mean, in the past, what you would have had with George W. Bush is Roger Ailes, who ran Fox News and had complete editorial control and direction over Fox News, would be on the phone with Karl Rove or Cheney or W. Bush, helping them, you know, start an illegal war that would kill tons of people and, you know, be a crime against humanity.
Or an FBI agent?
You know, and it's really, it's really amazing What you just said, which is he not only wants it, which is terrible.
You know what I mean?
Like even to really actually want a propaganda arm is a problem.
Like there's something wrong if you are president of the United States and you're like, I really think a network should just carry my water.
That's a problem.
But not even having the filter to keep from saying it.
Because the whole point of Fox News is to pretend like they're fair and balanced.
They have nothing to do with me and they call it down the middle.
And he has said, and people need to understand this, I've been screaming this from the rooftops forever, he really thinks Fox News is hard on him.
He really does.
And it is a corporate propaganda arm by design and by operation.
I mean, when he was in North Korea, he said he wanted a North Korean style propaganda tool.
He keeps telling us these things.
He keeps telling us, and you have to listen.
You can't be in denial about this anymore.
He's telling us who he is and what he wants.
That's what he wants.
Period.
You know, here's the thing I find interesting, and we'll hear about Terry Canfield talk about this for a second.
You know, you have this group of people that feel like when they don't agree with the government or, like, the president, they don't feel like the government is theirs.
They don't feel like they need to be listening to the laws because they so disagree with, like, the president.
Well, does that mean that every four, every eight years, they completely flip-flop and actually then do believe the government and do want to follow the laws?
Is that how this thing goes?
Do you know what you just said without saying it?
You just talked about the eradication of liberal democracy and open society.
Because that's not how this is supposed to be.
And listen, I do not say this lightly.
I say this as somebody who researched this thing and wrote about it in my new book, American Rule.
I don't know about you, but it's like, I always heard about the Civil War and, you know, I heard about battles.
You know, and the speeches.
And obviously, like, the authors love to talk about how good Robert E. Lee looked in his coat and on a, you know, horse or whatever.
Which is garbage.
When you look at the Civil War, what actually happened was that the South saw that they weren't going to win elections anymore, right?
The advantage they were given with the signing of the Constitution and the establishment of the Senate and the Electoral College meant that their power was going away.
And by the way, fascistic movements are minority groups of power that realize their power is going away because they're, you know, they're outnumbered.
What happened is they started saying, you know, they started having a separate identity.
They started saying, no, those people over there, meaning Lincoln and Republicans at the time, which had switched, they were like, oh, those people over there are out to get us.
And there were all kinds of conspiracy theories.
And it was like, they wouldn't believe anything that they said.
Their media trumpeted it.
And they started believing themselves to be two separate people.
That's how countries fall apart.
That's how you get genocide.
That's how you get killing fields.
That's how you get civil war.
And unfortunately, that is what we're looking at.
If something like that happens, and if there is a spark, and we are on a powder keg, don't get me wrong, People are going to look back and they're going to say, like, all the signs were there.
We had paramilitary groups and state legislatures.
We had people, like you said, who just don't even believe basic facts from the other side.
People are going to look back and they're going to say all the evidence was there.
Everything was, how could we have possibly missed it?
Which is, their heads were in the sand.
And it's top-down.
That's the problem here.
And maybe that's what we need to do, is change the whole dynamic of our country so that the president doesn't have... I mean, obviously, what had happened over the course of several administrations was the president was losing power, right?
After Nixon, it was slowly being eroded, and then fucking guys like Richard Barr, sorry, William Barr, were coming in here, forgive me for having him on my brain too, William Barr, you know, believes in the 80s that, you know, there's an imperial presidency and then he wants to come back because after 9-11 and those things, you want to make sure that, you know, the president still has more power than he had in the past.
That's a problem.
And I think we're now realizing this, and those are some of the solutions we're going to have to come up with pretty darn quick, is that we need to limit the ability for the president to destroy our norms as easily as he has.
Yeah, and by the way, I'm not going to let this conversation go without pointing out that the Bush administration made up law and legalese in order to say that the President of the United States was basically an emperor.
Which is how we've been operating since George W. Bush and his cadre of criminal lawyers and Dick Cheney dreamed this thing up.
Which basically said, we don't have checks and balances.
It's the President of the United States, and the President of the United States can do whatever they want.
Which, going back, if you watched Frost Nixon the other day, when the President does it, it's not illegal.
Right?
And by the way, real fast, just before we get to Terry and I, I know our listeners want some hope here, so we're gonna get there and some, you know, concepts that we need to talk about.
Like, that's what they've done.
This has been a long line.
Trump didn't just come, right?
Trump is not the disease, he's a symptom.
This has been a long time coming.
He could not have just come in and done this stuff without ramifications if there wasn't a path laid out for him.
That goes directly back into the modern presidency with Richard Nixon and then through George W. Bush, not to mention Reagan along the way.
Like, this stuff has been laid out for him.
Well, with that, it's a great segue into our interview that we did with Terry Canfield, and someone you're definitely going to want to follow on Twitter after this.
So, without any further ado, here it is.
Hello everybody, welcome to our conversation with Terri Canfield, who is an author and lawyer, and I'm actually a really big fan of her terrific Twitter threads that usually can distill what is going on and also give us some hope into what we can do to get out of a situation that we're presently in with the administration.
So Terri, thank you so much for joining us today.
Glad to be here.
Well, I thought we could start really quickly by, I'm thinking, it seems almost like what we can distill this down to is the notion of whether or not you think the government is supposed to help people versus whether the government thinks that you're supposed to help yourself.
Is that too simplistic or is that where it kind of starts?
I think that's pretty good.
I mean with the understanding that help yourself obviously also means like no regulations.
So the help yourself is you know what follows from that is government doesn't help you and the purpose of government is to sort of maintain order instead of create a kind of fairness.
Yeah, I would be interested to hear what you have to say from the legal standpoint.
I mean, we've been spending so many episodes talking about the eradication of law and sort of the idea that I think people are starting to understand, which is that law that we think about sort of like governs is supposed to govern everybody.
It's supposed to be rules that we all play by in society.
But people like Donald Trump and his cronies see it more as a malleable state.
It's for containing other people while they are above it.
And I just wondered, from a legal standpoint, how have you felt watching this happen?
For someone who's devoted so much to the rule of law, what have you seen?
How has that felt for you?
Well, one of the things that sort of happened on Twitter is this idea that rule of law means certain things have to happen.
So if the law, if somebody gets away with something, then the rule of law has failed.
And this is just not true.
So there have been, people understand rule of law is a very important thing, but they're misunderstanding really what rule of law means and what happens when it breaks down.
Rule of law has never been perfectly applied.
It can never be.
So we've had problems in our criminal justice system all the way back.
All we can do with rule of law is strive to keep improving it.
Our perfection is an ideal that you never reach.
And because it always has flaws, it's very easy to attack it.
And so I think the best paradigm I've seen for how to understand rule of law as opposed to something else is from sociologist Max I guess we'd say Weber to anglicize it.
The German would say Weber.
But he was a very important sociologist about a hundred years ago and he talked about sources of authority for government.
Remember in high school and everybody fell asleep when they talked about this stuff?
Now everybody needs to know it.
So governments have different sources of authority and a rule of law government like we set up That's the authority.
That's the authority is written law that we all agree is kind of social contract, so to speak.
And there are other forms of government that do not rely on rule of law.
And so one way that I understand what's happening now legally is that there is a movement to get rid of rule of law.
And an institute, so what Max Weber gives three sources of authority.
One we can just mention and dismiss because it's outdated, which would be monarchy, what he calls traditional.
And then that leads to others, which is the rule of law, which is sort of where I get my fairness part of my dichotomy.
So the rule of law is fairness, all people are treated the same under the law, and the ruler is also bound by the laws.
So that's a rule of law system of government.
And he has another system of government, a third, which is what he calls charismatic leader.
Charismatic, people don't like that word now because they say, well, Donald Trump isn't charismatic.
So probably today we'd say mesmerizing or cult kind of leader.
A faux populist.
Something along those lines.
The authority comes not from the law, but the authority comes from the person's instincts.
And a lot of people in the United States have rejected, without saying they've rejected, they reject rule of law as a source of authority because what happens with a democracy is that a democracy can do two they reject rule of law as a source of authority because One of the things it tends to do is become more inclusive.
So this is sort of a natural evolution for democracy.
So we started out with rule of law, but only white men voted.
And over the course of American history, who's included in the citizenship, who's included in the electorate has expanded.
So what happens as democracy expands that way is certain people become opposed to it.
And there's all kinds of different ways of saying why they become opposed to it.
But one way is they feel that the government no longer has legitimacy because it doesn't reflect them.
So as democracy expands, you have a natural, there's always going to be within that democracy a reaction against the democracy, against the rule of law.
So if you reject democracy, And people do reject it.
And one of the ways they reject it is they'll say something like, we were never a democracy.
We were a republic.
That's code for, we're going to go back to the way things were in 1789, which was not what we today consider democratic.
And so the alternate kind of authority for government is this charismatic leader or cult leader or different ways of mesmerizing leader, the force of personality.
And from the beginning, Donald Trump set himself up so the source of authority is his instinct.
And people are behind him willingly.
I know people look at the polls and they say, how can 35 or 40% of the people approve of this?
Because just as a democracy will naturally has one way of becoming more inclusive as we improve the institutions.
Within democracy, there's always a force working against that.
You will always, within a democracy, have a force working against the democracy.
I just want to say real fast, Nick, I'm so glad that you said it like that, because when I was doing research on my book, the thing that I found that just blew my mind was that Andrew Jackson, who is, of course, Donald Trump's favorite president, for obvious reasons and purposes, basically Donald Trump's favorite president, for obvious reasons and purposes, basically said that the will of the universe flowed through him based on the Roman idea of generals being arbiters of rule of law and God.
And so you're exactly right.
I mean, this is a this is something that's been around for a long time and thinking this is some sort of spontaneous aberration, I think it's a completely wrong.
And Andrew Jackson's a really interesting example, because Andrew Jackson was also what we'd call hierarchical.
He believed, I mean, he was a demagogue in a lot of ways, if you read his speeches.
He demonized the African-American, or Native Americans.
But he also believed in slavery, that it was a top down, that the African Americans were better off enslaved.
So he was a white supremacist, and he had a hierarchical view.
And so he was democratic.
So we talk about Jacksonian democracy.
But Jacksonian democracy just meant that he expanded who was included in We the People from what had previously been elite men to all men.
But yeah, so he did talk about Jacksonian democracy, but he was not democratic in any way.
I mean, by our standards today, although by the standards of his era, he pushed democracy Beyond what it was.
He expanded the electorate, but we still would not consider that the way he expanded Democratic today.
Well, I'm kind of curious to hear your take on how the hierarchical society works now.
So, like, post-slavery, how are we seeing, I suppose, because Jared and I talked a little bit about this sort of, you know, the white supremacy, maybe lowercase w, lowercase s, white supremacy, sort of infecting this narrative of pushing back against coronavirus, for instance, and sort of not wanting to follow what we would consider the rule of law, and they're considering infringement on their liberties.
So I'm kind of curious, you know, how does it rear its ugly head today without the obvious signs of like Jim Crow or slavery?
Well, I think the way that it rears its head is in these two views of what government does.
And so the people who are rejecting democracy, make no mistake, they're rejecting democracy because of the inclusiveness.
Okay, so this is the reason why.
So when they reject democracy, what they're rejecting is the fact that the democracy, so, and you can pinpoint when it happened.
It happened, one of the big turning points was 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
And so, so what happened is that weapon, sort of weaponized against rule of law.
So, so people who, okay, so take lying, take a leader who lies.
Why are all of these Republicans lining up behind somebody they know is lying?
Well, if you perpetuate lies that way, that destroys democracy because, okay, back to the rule of law versus charismatic leader.
Rule of law is based on truth.
Rule of law is based on facts.
Charismatic leader is based on myths.
It's based on, it comes from the whim of the person.
And so rule of law was rejected by people who said the government no longer represents me.
So we reject the rule of law because the rule of law doesn't reflect me and we're going to get behind this person who his lies are destroying a government that we believe is not legitimate.
So that's so it rears its head in this sort of roundabout way that the reason people are holding these signs that say social distancing is communism or whatever is because they prefer Right.
So they're able to separate Trump from the government in reality, right?
Because it's the government that's telling them to do these things.
Trump should be the government, but they don't see that as parallel.
Oh, that's his entire campaign.
to separate Trump from the government in reality, right?
Because it's the government that's telling him to do these things.
Trump should be the government, but they don't see that as parallel.
Oh, that's his entire campaign.
Yeah.
And the law doesn't apply to him.
All the way down to, was it yesterday, the new press secretary said, "Well, the president can vote by mail because he's the president." Right.
The entire attitude of the Trump administration, all from William Barr to all of them to Mitch McConnell, all of them, what they've done is they've said, we reject The rule of law, government, because it doesn't work.
And here's the other reason they reject it.
So going back to law.
OK, so, so Franklin Delano Roosevelt changed our government.
That before FDR, it was the Wild West.
Like, really, we had a frontier.
It was wild.
So if you were a rule breaker, if you were a person who doesn't like to follow rules, you had a place to go.
You could go to the frontier.
OK, so the frontier closed.
And what happened after the front door closed, the rule breakers in the 1920s and before, they were busy destroying, they were breaking the rules or getting rich by cheating.
Okay, so they went west and they got rich by stealing because they took land, right?
So the rule breakers during the 19th century, they had a place to go where they could break rules.
Now what FDR did is he said, no more rule breaking.
We're getting rid of it.
So we're not going to let you do insider trading.
We're not going to let you fix markets.
We're not going to let you do all of these.
Manipulate the stocks the way people did in the 20s.
So in order to do that, in order to create fairness, you need a lot of regulatory agencies and laws.
So that's where we got the alphabet suit agencies.
So they reject the people who the same kind of people who would have wanted slavery and Jim Crow.
They also want no rules on that.
So they have to get rid of the what they call the deep state.
But it's really regulatory agencies that infringe their their freedom.
In a really complicated way, it all ties together.
So Donald Trump promised to destroy the deep state.
So what's the deep state?
Come on, it's the FBI.
That's what he's doing.
It's all of these agencies now, quote, conservatives, liked law enforcement back when law enforcement was about putting blacks in jail.
But what happened after the women's movement and after Brown v. Board is women started going to law school and becoming prosecutors and lawyers.
When I was in law school, it was the first time that most of the class were women.
And so what happens when you have female prosecutors?
They say, well, we're not going to just go after, we're going to start going after the white men.
And so all of these changes, so law enforcement changed since Brown v. Board.
So instead of law enforcement being a mechanism for keeping black men in line and re-enslaving them, law enforcement started looking at white men, and they don't like it.
Some white men don't like it.
So destroying the government, destroying rule of law, means Getting rid of all those agencies.
And in some ways, going back to the Wild West.
Because the lawbreakers now, it's odd.
They have nowhere to go.
And Timothy Snyder talks about that also, with empire.
So back in the age of empire, before World War I, if you were kind of a rule-breaker in Great Britain, you could go out to the colonies.
So there's a place for rule-breakers to go.
But the frontier closed, the age of empire is over, and the rule-breakers are stuck with us.
Yeah, and I think one of the problems is that the one place that the rule breakers now go is in corporations and, you know, in all these places of power where they're now able to.
I mean, I think what you nailed it right there is the fact that over the past decades, particularly Reagan and post Reagan, it has just been.
gutting regulation completely and basically saying trouble the law all you want, break the law, you know, the white collar sort of exceptions that we obviously have.
I guess my question with that would be because so much of it has been sort of co-opted by the people that we're talking about here.
I mean, I think people have a hard time understanding that Donald Trump is not there to be a politician.
He's not there to be a president who helps people or save lives.
He's there to destroy the remnants of what you're talking about, right?
So when you look at this thing, and you look at the fact that the criminals are in power, What recourse do you see?
How does that work?
What can people do?
Because that is obviously the refrain that keeps happening is if they have all the power or they're in these positions of authority, what can we do?
How do you see that?
Where do you see the avenues for that sort of fighting back?
Okay.
Well, before I answer this question, I'll tell you that my solutions are never as popular.
Mine either.
Mine either.
So nobody ever likes them very much.
But you have to work within the law and this is difficult.
And so I'm not sure.
One of the things that you see out there is this idea that we have to fight like Republicans, where that means they're breaking the law.
We can't.
You have to work within the law.
Let me just say that democracy is very frustrating.
And a lot of people don't like it, and even people who think they do like it don't like it.
And there are a lot of people on all sides of the spectrum, they get very frustrated with democracy because it's very slow grinding work.
And what makes it frustrating to people, particularly who don't have a legal training or don't understand how government works, is it just seems so complicated they don't understand it.
But it's very, very, very slow.
And so you cannot get anything quick working within democratic processes.
And the checks and balances are designed to slow things down.
That's why Trump was not able to create a dictatorship in four years, because nothing happens fast.
So people get very frustrated with this.
And I get a lot of people on Twitter telling me, we need him out now.
There's no legal way to do that.
And as soon as the solution involves going outside of rule of law, it is all over because no side is upholding the rule of law.
Yes.
And then you have destroyed the rule of law.
And so it's very hard for people to understand that the process of getting out of this is going to be painfully slow.
Yeah, I noticed, just real fast, just to add to that.
One of the troubling things that I've had, and I think you just absolutely nailed it, is there are a lot of people, you know, you hear people talking about coups, you hear people talking about somebody being removed from office, or, you know, God forbid, terrible extra-legal means, right?
And that's just as problematic.
Right?
On both sides of the issue, no matter how it happens, you cannot, and my fear is, you cannot be drawn into the same dirty tactics that these people are using because once you do that, there's nothing left.
There was a very large account on Twitter who blocked me because she said, we cannot wait.
And so I asked her in the comments.
I didn't retweet her.
I didn't call attention to it.
You know, I didn't try to embarrass her.
I just asked her.
How?
There are no legal means.
There's no, without the Senate on board, there is no way to take out Trump legally.
And so she got, she called me a bad lawyer and blocked me.
But I know that, I know that that's, I know it's frustrating.
And so, right, you can't, so that's just saying what we can't do.
You know, what can we do?
Actually, I come at this with an interesting experience.
Not personally, but my husband's Chilean, and he lived through the Pinochet dictatorship.
And also, I've studied American history and the history of law.
So people will say to me, it's never been this bad.
And I go, you know, I'm sorry, but an African American woman with a sense of her own history is not going to tell you it's never been this bad.
Right?
It has been.
And the Chileans got out of a dictatorship without Okay, there was violence from Pinochet, but the actual way that they eventually got out of the dictatorship was not violent.
It took a long, long, long time.
And for a while, they then had one of the strongest democracies.
And so, the way that that happened was bringing people together, any way that you can.
And so, some of these Never Trumpers I really like, and some of them I really don't trust.
And I won't name names.
Oh, I'll name some names.
No, we can name some names if you want to, but go on.
Go on.
I just got on a roll about this.
I'm sorry?
For the record, I love all the Never Trumpers.
They seem to have gotten it.
Some of them I'm not sure about.
But you need to bring I mean, we certainly need everybody to come together right now.
So anybody who's opposed to this kind of autocracy and this kind of anti-rule of law and this kind of leadership call, we need everybody to come together.
And so it has to happen.
I mean, as I see the long term solution here, the first thing is to win in November, but by good margins.
Hopefully, if you can win by large enough margins, then change can happen quickly.
And when you talk about what happened after Reagan with the deregulation, remember, we had that in the 20s.
So this isn't the first time.
So we know what it looks like when the industry is not regulated.
And it isn't pretty for workers and for factory workers.
And so and so winning by a margin.
And then what has to happen is we have to work on changing the.
OK, so take Texas, for example, and Georgia.
You're in Georgia, right?
So California used to be ruby red.
California, California was very, very red all the way through the 90s.
It started changing in the 90s.
We gave, Reagan is Californian, right?
Nixon, they're all, they're from California.
And so California went from very Republican to very blue when everybody was able to vote.
So it was all through the demographics.
So once, so if you take Texas and you get rid of the gerrymandering and you get rid of some of the, so the long-term solution is to open up the voting to more people.
That's the long-term solution.
And as that happens, naturally, things are going to start to move the direction you want them to move.
But you have to remember that there's always going to be this force.
They're not going to go away.
They're going to gather force and come back.
And so it's a slow, slow process.
And what worries me the most is that some of these sort of firebrands on the left are going to not have the patience.
Right.
It's not like we're ever going to solve the problem.
Because if you look again at American history, we've swung one way and the other.
But it's never going to be a perfect democracy.
We're never going to have everything the way we want it, because this other force is always going to keep coming back at us.
Well, I have a question as we start to wrap this up, which would be, you know, if this is some sort of natural ebb and flow of democracy itself, and maybe we're moving toward eventually a kinder, gentler version of this, I'm kind of curious, do you have anything on the top of your list that the next administration, let's just say Biden wins, would have to enact to ensure that we wouldn't see a
Well, I don't know if we can guarantee there won't be another Trump, but what we can do is we can, so the Constitution allows Congress to regulate elections.
So this Congress isn't going to do it because of the Senate.
But once you start having more widespread voting, they can get rid of the gerrymandering.
Now, the Supreme Court frustrated a lot of people by refusing to take on the gerrymandering.
But what they did is they said that's for Congress, which actually wasn't a bad decision.
It was frustrating because we'd like the Supreme Court just to kind of lay it down as a rule.
But in the long run, we don't really want the Supreme Court to be sort of these kings.
So they said it has to go to Congress.
So I think we need to work on regulating the elections so that, again, Texas, Georgia, a lot of these states are going to be Democratic, just like California turned Democratic once everybody voted.
So I think that's a lot of people.
Citizens United is more difficult because that's a Supreme Court case.
So that's going to be a little bit more difficult.
But because, but there's also a long term solution to the Supreme Court.
Initially, there's things Congress can do, and there's things without the Supreme Court on board.
Something like Citizens United is going to take a little bit more, probably more than one administration.
Yeah, and I'm so glad you said that about in terms of the changing demographics.
I mean, the reason why the Republican Party is the way that it is, is it's obvious that they cannot win free and fair elections.
You know, it's a power group that realizes it's losing its hold on power, right?
And that's what happens in American history.
Every time somebody realizes that, it's the difference between democracy or less democracy.
And I want to say, it took me a while of research and study to understand that from history.
of having to research it and go over that stuff.
And I wanna say, I really admire like, one thing with you is I feel like you have a very good understanding of how dire the circumstances are, but having your feet within legal understanding, it feels like that gives you gravity, right?
It feels like that gives you something to hold on to in the midst of all this.
For listeners out there who maybe want some sort of a book or something that they could read for more understanding about legal history or just to give them an idea of something that might help them to understand this or to make their way through it, Do you have a couple of recommendations where people might start?
Legal history is really difficult because they're really, you know, that's pretty tough.
You could say it's boring.
Mostly it's too large.
I have a six book series of biographies where I try to trace American constitutional history, but you have to read a lot of biography.
I think that if I were to recommend one book would be, actually, I would do two.
One would be How Democracies Die.
Oh, that's a great book.
I think that's a good one for, they're not lawyers, but they get it.
You know, they talk about, you know, what went wrong.
But I don't know of any You know, the law books, like, aren't easy to read.
I mean, I don't know that it's kind of condensed that way, but I think that that would be a good book.
You know, Timothy Snyder, his books are rough going, but he has actually, he has lectures on YouTube.
And so sometimes I advise people to go find his lectures on YouTube and then read his books, because it's, you know, kind of easier going that way.
But yeah, I think that, you know, legal training tells me things are going to go slow.
I tend not to get as alarmed.
So I tend not to have my hair on fire when the Supreme Court does something crazy, because most of our history, the Supreme Court has done things that are crazy.
We've only had actually two liberal, what you call liberal, Supreme Courts in all of history.
And the problem is, people who were born after, say, 1960, they only know that there was a liberal Supreme Court for a while.
But we had the Marshall Court way back, and then we had the Warren Court that gave us Brown v. Board.
But through most of our history, the Supreme Court has been Conservative reactionary, which makes sense because they get lifetime appointments and because they're appointed by the president and these rural conservative areas have an advantage in the electoral college.
So I just think I tend to get less alarmed over, you know, not falling every time the Supreme Court doesn't think it shouldn't do.
Well, Terry, we can't thank you enough for joining us today and really filling in some gaps that I think that Jared and I might have been missing while we've been doing this podcast for a while.
And also, the real place to go for everyone listening is to your Twitter handle and read your threads, because those are also filled with all sorts of historical information and context to help people understand where we're going and to give them hope.
So, Terry, thank you so much for joining us.
Well, again, really refreshing to have a third voice in here and really give us the same kind of historical context that we usually get into, too.
It was kind of nice to have a like-minded person in there.
You know, really impressive stuff.
Yeah, Terry's stuff on the law I think is wonderful.
And you know that's one of those things, when you talk to people who know their stuff, particularly when you can bring in the frame of reference.
I've been saying, get educated.
We have to understand this stuff before we can really get to it.
Her recommendations are wonderful.
I think people should read them.
And we're in a pandemic.
We're in quarantine.
Read the stuff.
Get knowledgeable.
Know what's going on so you can fight against it.
Yeah, the bottom line is we need to figure out any way possible to get more people out there to vote.
If it's calling, if it's canvassing, if it's just making sure that you go out and vote, all those things are really important and that's what's going to end up turning this thing around.
Yeah, so we are so grateful that you tuned in today.
You know, we're very happy to have Terry here and we're so grateful for you.
Recently, you've been showing up big.
You've been sharing the show, you've been rating it, you've been liking it, you've been subscribing.
And I have to tell you, I think I speak for Nick here, it's made a huge difference.
And this audience is growing and we are so grateful for you.
Please, if you haven't already, like, subscribe, share, tell people that we're doing something different here.
It's not just headlines and the old Triton cliche conversations.
