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May 29, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
01:00:06
The Consumer States Of America

America passes the threshold of 100,000 lost from the coronavirus while Donald Trump picks a fight with Twitter. Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss this infuriating distraction, define the post-political structure that includes Big Tech and Trump, and examine the confluence of politics and consumerism that has destroyed our democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So when he sends out 28 million ballots and they're in all the mailboxes and kids go and they raid the mailboxes and they hand them to people that are signing the ballots down the end of the street, which is happening.
But I think we've been pretty clear on what I think the right approach is, which is that I don't think that Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth.
I think that's a kind of a dangerous line to get down to in terms of deciding what is true and what isn't.
One egregious example is when they try to silence views that they disagree with by selectively applying a fact-check, fact-check, F-A-C-T, fact-check.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the McCrake Podcast.
As always, I'm your co-host, Jared Yates-Sexton.
And as always, I'm joined by my loyal co-host, Nick Halselin.
It's going to be a podcast of hard truth today.
I feel it coming.
I feel like it's necessary.
I got some things to say.
I think Nick has some things to say.
America, unfortunately, has crossed the threshold of 100,000 deaths that we know of with the coronavirus pandemic.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump, as useful as always, Nick, has decided to fight the real enemy, which is Twitter.
And so we need to talk about that.
We need to talk about social media.
We need to talk about why we're in this mess in the first place.
But yeah, just buckle the seatbelts.
There's some hard truths coming.
Some hard looks in the mirror, Nick.
There are.
I mean, where do we want to start here?
Because I am mad.
I'm a little hot today, I feel like.
And I'm ready to go.
So where should we start?
Let's start with...
Just a total complete bullshit executive order that for those who I assume you're caught up on the news you're hearing this on Friday Donald Trump signed an executive order that basically doesn't really say Anything much.
It's hurried, like most of his presidency, and lackluster and ridiculous, but it's a reaction to Twitter adding fact-checking notes and flags to his tweets, which is apparently the most pressing matter in the country right now.
Well, okay, and what they're referring to is there's a statute that protects companies like Twitter and Facebook from lawsuits, you know, based on the content that they're publishing on their platforms.
So if they remove that, then all of a sudden they are liable for people to try and sue them, and that could be a big problem for them.
The President has no jurisdiction over this.
This is all Congress.
I would have to decide this as part of a law.
And I think the President even acknowledged that.
The thing that really is cynical about this is that they had already started this process a year ago, and as Trump is wont to do, he hip-pockets these things until the time when he needs to distract us from something else.
And this was as good a time as any to try and take away from what's going on with the pandemic and then throw it out there.
And plus, Twitter gave him some red meat by slapping this disclaimer on the tweet.
The thing I think that Twitter did was interesting, though, was they didn't do the Joe Scarborough tweets, which are filled with all sorts of rumor and… Well, it's slander.
It's slander.
It's slander.
It's ridiculousness.
And so I almost feel like Jack Dorsey, in some way of trying to ameliorate the situation, said, OK, we're not even going to touch that one.
We'll just throw this one on another one that is really clearly not right.
Maybe that won't even bother him so much that we can kind of go on our way and be back to normal.
And yet now it was like red meat in the water and this guy is really treating this, Trump is really treating this like it's an efface to the Constitution itself.
You know, I'm glad you said that you came in hot on this thing and I'm glad we're on the same page.
I assume listeners are on this page as well.
Like, this whole thing's awful.
This pandemic is just terrible.
I mean, it's constant trauma every single day and it's demoralizing and just soul-crushing.
I had a moment yesterday.
You know, it feels like most days I can just sort of exist.
You know what I mean?
Like, I check in on the people that I love and I care about and I'm able to exist and get what I need done, done.
But there's like moments where it's like a cloud moves, you know?
And like a sun ray comes through.
But it's the opposite of that.
It's white hot rage, you know?
And yesterday when this thing happened, when it was announced that Trump was going to sign an executive order, which by the way was when we crossed 100,000 deaths, right?
And it was obvious that what he cares about is he thinks he's the victim.
Right, he's the one who's being treated so poorly in all of this, not to mention the 100,000 people who have died unnecessarily and the rest of them who it seems like are now going to die unnecessarily.
I just got, um, I got so pissed off, Nick.
I just, I, you know, it was like, it was like a seeing red situation where it was just like, it's one thing to have to fight this thing, this pandemic and the political crisis.
It's another to have someone that's disgusting.
You know what I mean?
And what you just said is the extra layer on top, which is that Twitter had a PR crisis on their hands, which is that the President of the United States was using his Twitter account to float conspiracy theories about Joe Scarborough, saying that Joe Scarborough had murdered a young woman.
Joe Scarborough did not murder a young woman.
The widow of this young woman who died wrote to Jack Dorsey and said, please make this stop.
This is traumatic for me and my children.
And they had to do something, right?
And what would the right thing be?
It would be to say, you know what, you have violated our terms and services and you're gone.
But why won't they?
What do you think?
Why won't Twitter deal with Donald Trump?
Because I think there's a very strong solution in all of this and a reason for it.
Why do you think?
Well, I think there's above all, I think they just don't want to get involved, right?
They want this platform just to run itself the way it's going and get a lot of people interacting and figuring out ways to increase interaction.
Well, you take away Trump and you're going to remove a huge amount of interaction of which they depend on You know, let's just face it like Twitter itself as a business isn't really a great business because there really isn't anything any way to monetize these things aside from throwing in these these promoted tweets which I suppose are doing well enough where they're still in business and doing fine, but It's clear to me that the only thing that keeps them afloat is the level of interaction.
And with Trump, however you want to slice it, he is one of the highest interactors out there that generates so much traffic to the site that they certainly wouldn't want to put that in peril.
So let's get to some hard truths.
Let's be honest about this.
And by the way, I'm talking about a platform that more or less revolutionized my career.
Right?
My reporting would never have gotten noticed if I wasn't on Twitter.
Period.
And my analysis would never have gotten noticed if I wasn't on Twitter.
It occasionally does take people and lift them up and give them a platform.
Remember that?
We wouldn't have met.
We never would have met if it wasn't for Twitter.
So thank you Twitter on that end.
I know Nick Halsam and my life is richer.
But I will throw this out there.
It is an anxiety machine.
It's a horror machine.
Donald Trump, they're never going to get rid of Donald Trump because Donald Trump and them are in a symbiotic relationship.
He makes them a ton of money and having an insane incompetent president who does bullshit like throw out conspiracy theories helps them.
It helps their bottom line, right?
They know that.
Trump knows it, too.
This whole thing's a professional wrestling match.
It's a bunch of stamping of the feet and throwing fake punches, is what it is, right?
It's red meat for him.
It's red meat for them.
And meanwhile, Facebook's over here is like, we like Trump supporters a lot.
They are our main customers right now.
We will take Trump money as much as you want to shovel it to us.
The hard truth of all of this, that people at home, and this is what we're going to talk about a lot today.
This isn't really political.
This is post-political.
These are a bunch of entities and individuals and corporations that are fighting for money, profit, and power.
And what we're watching with Trump and Twitter right now, it's obvious that this is not healthy.
And in the economy, by the way, we talked about this multiple times.
Nick, what happens when a bunch of people get laid off and like millions of Americans file unemployment?
What happens to the stock market?
It's supposed to go down, Jared.
It's supposed to go down?
Is it going down?
No!
It was up 500 points yesterday.
I'm kind of checking it right now to see what it is.
Alright, so it's down 140 points right now, but you know, it hasn't really been anywhere close to matching what the reality is in our economy.
And then it's not supposed to, but it's supposed to.
It's not.
Theoretically, it's supposed to register the health of the economy of the country, and that's not what it does.
It's wired to profit off of human sadness and human misery.
And unfortunately, the major companies in this country and around the world, because quite frankly, they're not even like American anymore.
They're transnational countries.
They don't have any duty or honor or liberty, you know, patriotism.
They are wired to profit off of divisive things.
It's Les Moonves saying, Trump's not good for America, but he's good for CBS.
That's what we're looking at right now.
And until we diagnose that and realize that that's what's happening and how this economy works and we need to talk about the history and how it got set up and how it functions, until we realize that, it's not going to stop.
This isn't going to be handled today because Twitter puts a flag on a Trump tweet.
Right.
Well, let's watch the Dow in like two weeks because after the reopening Memorial Day, and I'm sure we've all seen the footage, there was no social distancing in so many places, no mask wearing, and now mask wearing has become this, you know, lefty pinko, you know, attempt to make a statement versus helping anybody or trying to mitigate this virus.
Can I ask you a question about that?
Yeah, yeah.
Personally.
How did that make you feel?
Because I know that you take this thing seriously.
You're quarantining with your family that you love.
How did that make you feel?
Watching America do this?
Oh, you know, I don't want to say it's anger because I truly care.
Those people are going to get sick and they're going to really be in for it.
Now, I do think that there is anger when I see the people blatantly flaunting it in their face and taking pictures where they're all over each other and making fun of the fact that, look, I'm breathing in his face.
Those are the moments where it's like, it's so conflicting because I don't want anyone to get sick.
But you're also like, you're asking for it and it's frustrating because that's going to make everybody have to stay in longer eventually.
And it will crater the economy ultimately if we have to go through a second one of these.
It's demoralizing.
Right?
And here's the thing.
We have been, for whatever reason, labeled a liberal podcast.
We're not actually liberal.
We're talking I don't even know what you would call us.
We're outside of that spectrum which we need to talk about in this podcast.
I don't believe in a flat spectrum, right?
Everybody's like, oh liberals want the economy to crash so blah blah blah blah blah or they want the virus to spread.
I don't want that at all.
I don't want anyone to get sick.
I wish this thing would go away and I wish I could go where I wanted to go and do what I wanted to do.
This has been traumatic.
For me, and I know for you, and for the people listening, this has been awful.
And having to sacrifice by giving up our lives, and then watching other people die, and then watching other people go out and make it worse, it's demoralizing.
Is that fair?
That's how I find it.
No, that's a great way to put it.
It's just deflating.
It really makes everything just seem like we are lost.
And so the moments I've been having recently of feeling like the country is lost.
We are just sort of adrift in a sea of whatever.
Those are the moments now when people are willingly flaunting The idea that they're going to get sick or they don't think they're going to get sick from this really deadly virus.
Just what does that say about it?
And it's also clear because there's now new reports and new analysis coming in that it is really one-sided here.
The people that are following or are not following the guidelines are people that watch Fox News and who are Republicans.
We can't even call them Republicans anymore.
We'll have to get into that later too.
They're not.
And here's the next hard truth about all this.
What you just said about America being lost, there's no other way to put it.
It's great content.
Right.
You know what I mean?
It's great content for cable news.
It's great content for websites, for newspapers.
I mean, there's a reason why subscriptions are up.
There's a reason why ratings are up.
The Fall of America is the most popular TV show you can find.
Right?
Yes.
But Trump loves this as well because it's a spectacle.
And you could tell it was a spectacle because he really put on the orange makeup today if you saw him on TV.
He looked like he was auditioning for the next Willy Wonka movie and it really was bad.
That's like, how can anybody take a guy seriously when he applies this kind of makeup on his face every day?
And again, it's the people that want to support him and love him, would ridicule people who would do what he does to take care of himself and his appearance.
It's crazy. - Well, people who voted for him, and again, these are hard truths.
We have to talk about this stuff because this is actually part of what's wrong with America.
People who voted for him, voted for him like a cable channel voting to have a show get a new season.
Right?
Like, whenever he was doing the spectacle going into 2016, people are like, I like that show.
I like having Trump on my TV.
Because they're not interested in walls.
They're not interested in draining the swamp.
They're interested in the spectacle.
Well, the problem is, and I said this before, and listen, this again, hard truths.
We gotta have them.
When I was reporting from the 2016 campaign, reporters and pundits were telling you when the camera went off, they didn't know what was going to happen when Trump lost and they were really not looking forward to it, right?
Because it's the rising tide raises all ships.
This country's addicted to him.
It really is.
They're addicted to the fear of him.
Like, what is he going to do next?
Right?
This morning, I don't know if you saw it.
I assume a lot of people did.
He retweeted a video which was this complete and utter psychotic asshole saying the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.
And then, by the way... Context awareness.
He did say, if you watch the whole thing, that he didn't literally want to die.
Bring me into context, Nick, because what actually happened is after he gave that bullshit speech, he then gave an interview to the Daily Beast in which he called Democratic governors and lockdowns traitors and that they should have to choose between a firing squad or a rope.
And the reporter said, are you considering violence as a method of protest?
And he said, well, everything's on the table.
Yee-haw!
And so then meanwhile, we have the idiot president retweeting this guy.
And everyone's just like, and here's the thing, Nick, we're talking about it, right?
This is the hard truth, right?
Because one of the things is, and again, we got to be honest or else we're not going to be credible.
One of the reasons people come and listen to us is because we talk about the stuff other people won't talk about, right?
We have the conversations other people won't have, so we have to be honest and do housecleaning.
One of the reasons why a bunch of people come listen to us is because there's a crisis.
Right, there's something going on and people it's I used to tell people it's like when you're in a bar and someone dangerous is in the bar comes in you keep your eye on the person who's dangerous in the bar right you don't turn your back on them Right.
You don't turn your back on Donald Trump because every day is a horror show and this country is in an addictive situation with him and our businesses are set up to profit from him.
These are problems.
Those are real issues and that's part of the reason we're in the situation we're in.
I don't know if we need to add any more to that, and this specific thing.
Here's the thing, and the danger is underlying, is that what he said in the tweet that set him off, and by the way, setting him off, the reaction is so ridiculous compared to what they did, it reminds me of the movie Dumb and Dumber, when they're playfully playing in the snow.
Have you seen this movie?
I love Dumb and Dumber.
And so, and she like, you know, tosses a snowball, kind of hits him in the chest area.
He gives her a look like she blindsided him with a bat to the side of the face and then just slams her in the face with a snowball as hard as he could, knocks her over, which by the way, is one of my favorite parts of the movie.
I just can't stop laughing at that.
But that was like the overreaction to this.
And again, he hip pocketed this because he needed this reaction from what's going on with COVID-19.
But man, is this like, he must be just, you know, wetting his pants in excitement because finally he gets something that he can really, you know, twist everyone's knickers in a bunch over, especially because it is Twitter.
And so it.
But the underlying fact, though, let's get back to that, which is what he said in the actual tweet, which was trying to smear the entire California ballot initiative of how I live in California, we've been mailing in our votes for a decade with no problems whatsoever, no evidence of voter fraud at all.
And I even got into it on Twitter with a guy who was like, he believes, and Trump said today, I don't know if you saw, he described this notion of kids And I don't know why he's following kids around, and that seems weird to me, but he says, kids will stick their hands into people's mailboxes and take out these ballots and then, I guess, give them to somebody else who's then going to, you know, fill it out as they deem and then turn these things in.
That is the real danger here, that people are going to believe that.
And then lost in all of this grandstanding, that's what he's spreading.
Well, that's what they're trying to do.
I mean, this whole thing, and it goes back to Twitter, it goes back to Facebook, it goes back to all this, and I throw this word around, and I wanted to talk about this on the podcast because it's important.
I throw the term post-politics around all the time, right?
I need people to hear this.
When I say post-politics, what I mean is that we're living in an era where people are trying to get beyond politics, right?
So when I say to you, politics, it means You and I are two separate people.
Maybe we have separate beliefs.
We now have to sit down and figure out a way between the two of us in a society to make the country work, right?
We have to figure out a way to make the country better where we can both live in it.
There are a lot of people who aren't interested in that anymore.
They're interested in things called a liberal democracy.
They're interested in managed democracy, which means they're not interested in having free and fair elections.
Right?
They want to have the illusion of elections.
There's a reason why Vladimir Putin is re-elected God knows what, like every couple of weeks or, you know, for the past 20 years.
They want to have the illusions of elections while meanwhile taking away actual elections, right?
That's what Donald Trump is interested in.
In all of this, yeah, they don't want to have people actually voting freely and fairly because who loses in free and fair elections, Nick?
The people.
Oh, I'm sorry, in free and fair elections.
Damn, you got me there.
The Republicans.
Yes.
Republicans lose in that.
And that's not even a partisan thing.
Republicans will tell you that.
Their own strategy memos admit when turnout is high and elections are free and fair, they lose.
There's reasons why they do gerrymandering and all that.
But here's the thing, when they wanted to bring democracy to the Middle East, and Egypt was going to adopt this, the people in Egypt, or the powers that be, looked at this and said, oh my god, they're going to let us put in elections, and we're going to be able to run these elections, and it'll look like democracy, but we'll just end up having even more control, and then we'll have more respect from the rest of the world because of this weird word we're using.
That's what they did, and that's what they have now.
It's worse than a fascistic government there.
And guess what?
That's where we're going now as well.
That's the same road, and under the guise of fairness.
If I hear Donald Trump complain about fairness again, I'm going to lose my mind.
Because the guy has nothing about fairness, and he doesn't care about fairness.
And it sounds like a little five-year-old on the playground who, you know, is getting something taken away from him.
And he's talking about fairness.
It's the most ridiculous argument.
And yet it's, man, is it getting a lot of traction.
Well, all you need to know about Donald Trump and the idea of fairness is that he believes that Fox News is usually fair, but it's recently been not fair.
I mean, that's really how his mind works.
Like, that's not posturing.
That's actually what he believes.
And we've talked about it before.
He wants a North Korean-style state propaganda channel.
He wants to be worshipped as a living god.
That's actually what he wants.
Well, the problem is, and this goes back to it because one of the things that we've talked about now is we've talked about Facebook, Twitter, Donald Trump, right?
The problem with all of it, they're on the same level.
They're doing the same thing in a post-political world, right?
And this is post-Cold War because we used to have nations.
Right?
America and Russia were jockeying for who controlled the world.
And for anybody who wants to learn about this, one of the first things you need to do is you need to read an essay by a guy named Francis Fukuyama, who was a neoconservative, wrote this thing called The End of History, basically said America won the Cold War, all conflict is over.
America is just gonna control the world for the rest of history.
So there is no history.
Which was bullshit.
It wasn't true, right?
What happened was when America won the Cold War, even though I don't know that you can actually win a Cold War, I actually think that mortal blows were suffered by both sides and we're currently bleeding out.
What ended up happening was corporations and people Started becoming larger than nations, right?
Like we can't... What happens right now, Nick, if we tried to tax as America?
Like, I don't know, let's say we got somebody even further left than Bernie Sanders as a president, right?
And that president came in and used the bully pulpit to say we have to tax Apple.
Right?
We are going to tax Apple, and they are going to pay their fair share to have schools and roads and programs.
What would Apple do, Nick?
They would, I guess, leave the country?
Or no, they would lobby to stop it, I suppose.
Is that what you mean?
They would lobby it to stop it.
I mean, God knows how much money they would pay to lobby that, right?
I mean, we saw what happened with insurance reform.
And if they weren't able to stop it, They would say, buy America, later, right?
All of these companies that are transnational.
I mean, by the way, Facebook, while we're on the subject, Facebook is over in China, right?
And by the way, what did Zuckerberg say about Facebook?
It's all about freedom and openness and all this.
He went over to China, which by the way, had a lot of money to give him.
And they were like, can you help us like stop human rights over here and censor the internet?
And he's like, absolutely!
No problem!
I'm more than happy to help with that.
These companies aren't interested in anything besides profit and power.
And in that way, they're just like Donald Trump.
They're playing a different game.
Politics is gone.
They're in a post-political era, and the rest of us are talking about ballots.
We're talking about reform.
We're talking about the House and the Senate.
America isn't even America anymore.
It's a landing station.
It's an incubator for these people.
Right.
I mean, I think the government is just one big pile of money.
Right?
That's pretty much what it is.
And then everyone is just battling for their little piece or their big piece of this big pile of money.
And I'm actually thinking about this because I feel like we talked about this with Terry Canfield last week with the notion that, you know, it comes down to if you think that the government should be helping people or if you think that people need to help themselves.
Wait, but Jared Kushner told us the federal government shouldn't hand over their life-saving supplies.
That's the federal government, Nick.
They're a different entity.
Yes, that's the deep state right there.
That's the deep state, baby.
You know, like, so when the aliens come and, you know, try and destroy everybody, those people get to go into one bunker.
It's going to keep them safe, and then they're going to have to populate themselves again, the world.
But nonetheless, so the key here is, if you had, if those are the two sides, You know, whether or not you think that the government should help people, again, making it fair, there's that word, versus they should just step back the other way and that you should have to figure that all on your own.
And as the current conditions apply, can you ever have, are those two groups ever at a possibility to come together to do anything anymore?
Well, let's talk about, again, it's a hard truth show.
We got to do it.
I'm sorry.
It's the day to do it.
So let's talk about hard truth.
So what you just said is exactly right.
There is an argument about whether or not government is supposed to help people or whether or not government is supposed to, I don't know, being a clearinghouse for corruption, right?
We can sit here and talk about on this podcast that we believe that the government, you know, has sovereignty from the people and should help people, right?
It should.
That's what it exists for.
Well, here's the other problem.
This is our truth, too, and we have to talk about it.
There are a lot of people who say that they believe that because it's financially... It's good for them financially to say that.
So, for instance, today I was talking about it on Twitter, right?
So, all these corporations, and I'm sure that you've run across them, too, they have a lot of really good mission statements.
Oh, yeah.
Well, do you remember Google's first tagline?
Go ahead.
Don't be evil.
Don't be evil.
And by the way, it's supposed to make you think about Google.
And you're like, well, Google's not evil!
Look at the colors!
Right?
Meanwhile, this is true.
This is not conspiracy theory.
This isn't tinfoil hat shit.
Google is like building an AI program to beat all AI programs in order to like basically control the functions of society.
It's a Westworld situation.
That's not a joke.
And there probably are marketing all the info they have to different people and different entities, too.
Oh, it's incredible.
So then you have, and again, it's like Facebook, right?
Like, look at the colors, Nick.
And they are all about openness and diversity and free speech and transparency.
Meanwhile, they're over here working with China.
Well, here's the sad truth.
And this is something that Americans have to have to deal with.
And maybe some people will turn off the podcast after I say this.
And I'm sorry, because I hope you come along with us.
But here it is.
There's a reason why a company like Nike Who, by the way, has constructed one of the most lucrative, sweatshop, exploitive labor systems in the entire world.
Fair?
Okay.
We can, yes.
Yes.
Well, depending on what standard we're talking about of living, right?
Right, okay, but there's a reason why a company like Nike will go into other countries and exploit labor and pay them less than minimum wage and, you know, because they're international, right?
There's a reason why they would sign someone like a Colin Kaepernick.
It's supposed to tell us this is a company that cares about liberalism and progressivism.
And if you wear Nike, it means you believe these things.
Well, guess who engineered that entire thing?
Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who decided that you can sell products to people and it is a psychological statement about who the person wants to believe.
So now we're in a situation where it's like you have Twitter and Facebook or Trump or whatever, and we're not even actually talking about politics anymore.
We're talking about a manifestation of who I am and what I believe about the world, right?
Like, if I were to say to you on a spectrum, where's Twitter?
Where would you say?
In terms of politically?
Yes, if politics was a flat spectrum, where would you put Twitter?
And by the way, another reason to watch YouTube, because you can see the hand gestures and all sorts of things that Jared's doing with me right now.
I don't know, like, okay, where would I put it on this, like, in terms of... Y-axis here?
What are we talking about?
Yeah, would you put it left, center, right?
Oh, I see what you mean that way.
No, Twitter is clearly left.
Twitter's left.
Where would you put Facebook?
Right.
Okay.
Well, I would put them center right.
Center right.
Because they still have, like, we're still on there to, like, make sure we know people's birthdays.
You know?
Yeah, I guess.
And then meanwhile, it's like white supremacy memes and, like, cesspool shit.
Right.
And then where would you put Donald Trump?
Right.
All the way through.
Right.
Okay.
But that's not even true.
Because that's like a two-dimensional projection.
And that's not how it actually works.
They're actually swimming in the same pool.
They're just jockeying for positions.
And they're like, oh, you're a lefty.
We'll come over here to Twitter.
Oh, you're over here.
Come to Facebook.
And it's just this game that has nothing actually to do with our actual reality.
So we're even fighting about stuff that Has nothing to do with what's actually happening.
It's such a mess.
Right.
Because here, political discussion should be, you know what, we need to get these roads fixed.
And we got to stop cops from killing people.
And we need to figure out how to make sure that the lake doesn't keep getting polluted by these companies.
Like, that's what politics should be.
Should be.
Right?
And again, that overarching theme is like, how can we help people?
How can we make lives better in this country?
Wait, the argument isn't Nike's or New Balance?
Is not.
Right?
But that's what it gets turned into.
Right?
It should be, how do we make education better?
How do we take care of our infrastructure?
How do we get health care in this country?
And instead it's this bullshit.
Republicans don't care about abortion.
Republicans don't care about, what do they believe?
Social conservatism?
Well, I mean, not at all.
Do they care about fiscal conservatism?
No.
No, they don't care about that at all.
They don't care about any of this stuff.
It's just cudgels.
It's just a thing to bring up to win an election.
They're not interested in any of that.
Right.
I mean, you know, that runs the gamut from abortion, yeah, to all the different conservative notions they try and advocate for, they don't actually adhere to in their own lives.
And, yeah, it's... I'm not even sure... Wait, wait, but they're for the troops, right, Nick?
They take care of the troops after they come home from battle.
Oh, gosh.
By the way, why can't that be fixed?
Why has this been such a... And by the way, both parties, no matter who, cannot figure out how to properly help veterans when they come back from serving.
It's just the most... Well, they're used up.
They're used up.
That's the problem.
They've already served their purpose.
Why would we take care of them now?
Because they don't actually believe the bullshit that they're spewing.
Right.
Right?
Like, okay, here's a quick question.
What party mentioned 9-11 for, I don't know, 10, 15 years in every speech?
The Republican Party.
What party stood up against giving first responders benefits?
The Republican Party.
It's not real, they're not, yeah.
And the thing with like even that was it was such a small drop in the bucket of like whatever money they could have allocated.
And again, it's kind of like the Kaepernick thing in a way where how much more goodwill could they have engendered by just doing that, right?
Or just even if they were like, clearly most of the country does not like what Trump's doing with the pandemic and what he does on Twitter.
And I'm sure the senators and Republican congressmen would probably get a lot of goodwill by, like, calling him out, and, like, making a statement, and having some morals and some standards.
Even when, in the back room, like, hey, don't worry about it, Donald, I'm gonna go let you up for a minute on, you know, on the news, but don't worry, I got your back.
Even that would be the game they could play.
And they don't.
And again, we said this before numerous times.
Somebody else who's worse than Trump but doesn't behave like him is studying this and is going to realize how to do this properly.
And then we're really going to be in a lot of problems.
Oh, I mean, they're reverse engineering this.
I mean, there's so many people out right now studying this who understand.
Because again, we said it in these exact words, it's like the velociraptor in Jurassic Park, right?
They kept testing the fence.
And then they found the way, and that's what Trump is.
He flails against the fence.
We've talked about this before.
It's like the velociraptor in Jurassic Park, right?
Trump flails against the fence to find his weak points.
And he's exposing all kinds of things.
This executive order is useless.
It's impotent, is what it is.
It's a symbol.
But do you know what it shows?
It shows that people are willing to let people go after corporations and First Amendment rights.
It shows that.
It shows that there is an opening.
The same thing as Trump going out and, you know, retweeting this guy saying, you know, the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.
People now know that's acceptable.
You can do that.
Like, that's something that you can do.
He's paving the way, and unless all of us start waking up from this dream that we're in, and these illusions that we're in, those people have an advantage.
Because all they have to do is wave a flag.
I mean, that's Trump, like, grabbing the flag and holding it.
As long as they use those symbols, they'll be fine, but we have to recognize we're doing some stuff that is, like, not real.
We're talking about not real things while, like, very real things are happening.
And okay, let's talk about some symbols that are very real.
And it's wearing the mask, right?
It's become a symbol.
And you see Laura Ingraham going... She's got... There's something... She really doesn't like masks, man.
I don't know what it is.
She hates... Well, she hates it.
You know what it's like?
Remember in the movie The Jerk?
We're going to pull them all out today.
He hates these cans!
Yeah!
He's standing in front of these oil cans at a gas station and a sniper is trying to shoot him.
And he's concerned that someone doesn't like these cans that are behind him.
Hates these cans!
Now, did you hear what happened in the Pennsylvania legislature, where a state representative discovered that there was a number of Republican representatives who all had COVID-19, had tested positive, and didn't tell anybody, and were still without masks moving around in the space, potentially affecting and infecting people actually on the other side, too.
I'm not sure if anything's going to happen about this, but the Twitter thing was really damning and called for all those people to resign.
And it's all in the name of like owning the lives or like showing that like this isn't really anything to be worried about.
But you know at some point someone will most likely be prosecuted or sued for attempted manslaughter by coughing in someone else's face on purpose if they have the disease.
That'll happen.
And unfortunately, we don't like it when things double back and, you know, create new meaning.
But that's the exact same thing we're talking about.
Like, the people who are out at, like, the Ozarks and partying, right?
And, like, wearing American flag trunks and, like, not social distancing and these people you're talking about, people carrying guns or whatever.
It's the exact same thing we're talking about.
They're performing.
They are projecting to the world what they want the world to see, which by the way is what Donald Trump is.
Baseline level, right?
He's a very sad, pathetic man who wants everyone to think he's very successful and smart.
And he's not.
And so it's everybody projecting these things going back to, you know, this idea that these psychological appeals by like Edward Bernays or the corporations that sell us things we don't need.
People are constantly performing this stuff and now men who know, and that's what this is all about, Men who know that a mask could save their lives or other people's lives don't want to wear a mask because it would mean that they're afraid.
And what are men afraid to admit?
That they're afraid.
And so as a result it just continues and continues and continues and it's a bunch of fictions.
And that's the biggest problem.
We're not talking about reality.
We're not fixing reality.
We're not doing what we talked about which is I have a difference of opinion.
You have a difference of opinion.
How do we have a shared society and a future?
Right.
That's what politics is.
Instead, we're talking this psychobabble bullshit that is just a mirage.
Right.
It has nothing to do with actually living in a society.
Yeah, I mean, I have a friend, Ben, who distilled it.
This is now a couple years ago, before it's gotten as bad as it is now, where he would say, it's like, listen, both sides of the aisle can agree that there should be taxes.
Now we gotta figure out, well, how much?
Like, at least we can kind of, you know, we can arrive at some point where we can agree on... By the way, I'm not even sure that point anymore.
I almost feel like this notion of taxes in general is like crazy talk to the right-wing people.
But at least there's some notion of like that used to be the thing.
Okay, we have like some basic stuff we can agree with.
Now we have to kind of negotiate what that is.
I think this all ties into, and then getting back to the big tech kind of thing, is that there is this notion that humans in general gravitate towards divisiveness.
They like conflict.
And the scary thing about a Facebook is that they've now quantified what that divisiveness is and have been hoarding all this information secretly to then flip it around and then monetize it.
And I think that's another really scary issue about this, because it is really, when you get to that level of AI, you don't know what they're doing.
It's hard to even call it out and figure that out.
Well, because it works on the exact same things that we've been talking about, right?
It's like, if people aren't aware, I mean...
Cambridge Analytica, we can argue about what it did to the 2016 election and how it affected it.
But here's what they did, and here's how they worked.
It was through psychometrics.
It was looking at people and saying, okay, so you say that you are a fan of the Duck Dynasty.
Right?
So like, if you go on Facebook, and this is the ingenious part of Facebook, you tell Facebook exactly how to market to you.
That's the grand illusion of Facebook, is that it used to be they would just throw commercials at you on TV, and you would just be like, well maybe I'll go eat there, maybe I won't, maybe I'll buy that, maybe I won't.
Now, you tell Facebook what you like, right?
And it's hidden behind the idea of I'm expressing myself and who I am.
No, you're expressing your marketing preferences, right?
So if, and it was one of those things where Cambridge Analytica figured it out.
If I said that I like Duck Dynasty, who was I probably going to vote for, Nick?
Trump.
I was probably going to vote for Trump, right?
And by the way, I'm not immune from this.
I assume you're not immune from this either.
We all participate in this and that's one of the problems is they're ingenious.
They figure and the algorithms that they work with are so much smarter than most people.
And by the way, it helps that most people don't think that marketing works on them.
They don't think manipulation works on them.
American exceptionalism says, I can't be gotten by advertisements.
Well, I used to be like that, and now all of a sudden I'm like, man, I've been walking around wanting Arby's.
What's going on here?
It's like, oh yeah, that's right, Arby's has been on the Roku lately.
Yeah, but no, it's even worse than that though, because it went from you're telling them what you want, and then they'll serve it up.
They're telling you what you want.
They have now flipped it around and now, like, for instance, if you ever spend any time on Instagram, Instagram's listening to you.
I swear to God, we've done this several times with friends where you start talking about something and then you'll get an ad for it.
And it's listening to you.
And so out of that, they're going to start serving you things that, like, you should want if you didn't think you wanted it.
And then you do and you get it and then it keeps building from there.
So, I mean, this is where we're at.
This is why it's not a political culture anymore.
It's not a democracy.
It's not a free, open society.
We're simply consumers.
This is what we are, and this is the question of how long can this go on, because it's just sort of the same thing that happened to Rome.
You know, in their version of the antiquated way, not the whatever word I'm looking for, but they became sort of fat consumers and the fall of Rome ensued.
Well, and I wanna throw this out, and again, trying to bring this thing home.
Are you, you're a Coke guy, right?
You're Coke over Pepsi.
I am.
Yeah, I am too.
But I just kicked my Coke habit, so.
Oh, well, I mean.
It's been two whole weeks.
Hats off.
I'm sorry to bring up trauma.
I know it's been a hard run here.
So, I will throw this out there.
So, like, I come from a Coke family.
That's just, I was raised, and by the way, one of the reasons why I probably prefer Coke over Pepsi is because my family drank Coke, right?
And by the way, like, I, listen, like, I'm just, I'm just laying my cards on the table because I want to be honest, and it's a hard truth podcast, all that stuff.
So, like, I just drank a Miller Lite.
Do you know why I drank Miller Lite?
Because my dad drank Miller Lite.
Ugh, I'm sorry for you.
But, no, but here's the thing.
I am now sufficient, I am now sufficiently middle class, but I grew up rural and poor, So, like, when I drink, like, a shitty beer, it's like, oh, I'm just like my parents and, you know, living through hard times.
But that's true!
When you're hanging up a General Lee flag.
Thanks, I appreciate that.
But it is.
When you really look at it, it's the psychology of it, right?
And if you look at like a Coke versus Pepsi, you're not going to turn a Coke drinker into a Pepsi drinker, and you're not going to turn a Pepsi drinker into a Coke drinker, because it's an expression of self.
And what you're talking about, which is exactly right, is talking about where do we put tax dollars?
Where do we put public energy?
How do we figure out to move forward?
You can look at statistics And make those decisions.
But you can't make those decisions about Coke and Pepsi.
Because they're expressions of yourself that you're projecting into the world.
And this whole notion of voter fraud is not based upon statistics like you should be looking at.
No!
It's based upon this Coke versus Pepsi feeling.
I got into it with a guy on Twitter two days ago about it.
He just feels like it's going to be a massive voter fraud.
And so it has to be.
It will be.
And you don't understand, Nick, you know, when he's yelling at me about it, like, what's going to happen?
And I keep trying to tell him, we've looked into it.
They study it all the time.
And it never results in anything much at all.
In fact, they had that Kobach, you know, Do you remember when Donald Trump, after the election in 2016, said that there was voter fraud?
enough evidence of it at all anywhere.
They were looking for it.
So let's throw this out there because our listeners need to understand this.
Do you remember when Donald Trump, after the election in 2016, said that there was voter fraud?
Do you remember that?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, because Hillary beat him by three million votes.
So Hillary beat him by three million votes.
How many votes did he say were fraudulent?
3 million.
Maybe 3.1 million?
Right, right, right, right, exactly.
The reason is because Trump, who by the way, it's like an Ouroboros, he's just swallowed himself.
He's so far in his delusions that he can't work outside of it.
His mind can't understand that he would lose a popular vote.
So obviously there was fraud, right?
And that goes back to it.
It's like, okay, like again, and I know that this, this boils it down, but we need to think about it this way.
If you are like a Coke loyalist, you know what I mean?
Like your family, you've seen these people.
They like collect Coke stuff.
You know what I'm talking about?
No, so substitute LeBron, if you want.
okay yeah yeah no that's exactly right it's all these dichotomies you're exactly right so like let's say that you are like a diehard coke person like you have like coke plates and kitschy coke stuff in your house coke clocks all this stuff and you were brought out into public and you watched um what what was it the pepsi challenge Isn't that what they called it?
Which is like where like it was a hidden, you had two cups and you didn't know which you were drinking and you expressed it, right?
And somebody goes up there, someone you don't know, and they drink it and they say that's what I prefer and all of a sudden they pull the box up and it's Pepsi.
Your immediate response is that person's in on it.
Right?
That person is a Pepsi employee.
And that's a plant.
Right?
Because what happened is your view of reality just got interrupted.
And you can't, because otherwise you have to go home and be like, do I want this Coke clock anymore?
Do I want this, you know, polar bear race car anymore?
My family collected this junk.
And like, do you know what I mean?
Like all of a sudden, like the sense of self doesn't work.
Cognitive dissonance throws it out.
That's why we're where we are.
I think I must be something very special because I was raised on Pepsi in the bottle.
I was allowed to drink it when I was like seven for breakfast because my grandparents had a store in the depression and I don't know when the store when I visited in the 50s Uh, they must have taken all the extra inventory of which they were just, I'd never seen, in their closet in this little apartment they had all these different Pepsi bottles and they would let us take them home and I would drink them for breakfast.
Uh, and then I'd switch to Coke.
Now here's the thing, you want to get really nefarious.
Do you remember when Coke changed the recipe?
Yes.
There is a conspiracy that they did it on purpose so that they can then repackage the original Coke.
If I'm not mistaken, it still says, it doesn't say Coke Classic on the can, but doesn't it say like original taste or something like that?
They still have something like that on the can and that might have been a huge thing.
Like it was stagnant sales and they couldn't quite get a jump and this thing gave them a huge kick in the butt and they were able to, you know, overtake Pepsi no problem.
There is a fascinating.
OK, I was trying to find it.
This is one of those things for people listening.
So like taping a live podcast is like.
Balancing on a wire sometimes like you gotta find stuff real fast, right?
You gotta make the connections do it.
I was so hoping I was going to find this.
This is an excellent article.
It's called New Coke didn't fail.
It was murdered.
This was published in July of 2019 by Mother Jones.
It is a.
Fascinating article and it was basically about how in taste test everyone loved new coke But there was a conglomerate of people who were so offended by coke change against formula if you had to guess real fast Nick What part of the country do you think was angered by New Coke?
South.
It was the South.
And what happened was the South was like, no, you will not take our Coke.
Because it's a cultural battle.
Because it's a cultural battle.
Yeah, because Georgia and Coke, wherever you are, right?
It's where Coke is, right?
Right!
Oh, oh God!
Like, if I was allowed to travel and the country wasn't on fire, I could go to Coke World right now in Atlanta, right?
Like, the South was like, how dare you?
And they were like, we will never drink this.
They protested it.
It was a very Trumpian moment.
That's a great article people should read.
But it goes back to all that we're talking about.
I mean, it's like, if you don't know, if you're listening to this, I actually have a very big YouTube channel where I cover the NBA.
You brag.
I have a song.
I have this hype up song I use for most of my videos and it's like a big beat drop and it's all whatever.
Whenever I change it and do another thing I just get a stream of comments.
I hate it.
I was so upset.
By the way, I'll get a comment saying, please change your music.
I can't take it anymore.
But I'm like, I can't because whenever I do, I get, you know, so many comments for the same kind of reason.
It's like I've basically programmed them to like that song and want that song and need it.
And then when you don't give it to them, they feel shortchanged to the point where they want to yell at you.
And this is part of what we're talking about.
So like for instance, you know, and by the way, we're so glad you're listening and that the audience is growing and the support is growing and we're so pumped about it.
But part of the reason is, and I'm sure you've read these articles too, where they talk about podcasts.
People form relationships with podcasts, right?
It's like it's in your ear.
It's very intimate.
You get to know the people involved.
You start to care about the people involved.
Well, you start to identify with it.
And all of a sudden, if a song changes or something like that, like, it could be disastrous.
The whole point of it, what we're talking about here, is that so much is happening unconsciously.
And that unconscious operation has screwed up this country on a major level.
On a major, major level.
To the point where we're not talking anymore about you have a difference of opinion, I have a difference of opinion, what do we do with our tax money, right?
And what do we do as a country and inspire?
Instead, I'm sorry, Nick, we're talking about Obama performing a coup.
We're talking about Twitter stifling First Amendment rights and none of it's real.
It's professional wrestling.
It's Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Randy Savage fighting over Miss Elizabeth and the WWF title.
Like it's just performance art and people figure out ways to get you upset.
It's Macho man yelling at Hulk Hogan in an interview, and then the two of them grabbing a lobster dinner after the match.
Like, these people are fighting over money and power, and politics is just the arena.
They're trying to get past this.
Trump, Twitter, Facebook, Big Tech, none of- Putin, by the way, we have to throw that out there.
None of them are interested in politics.
They're interested in what happens beyond politics.
What happens when you and I stop voting or start voting the way they want us to.
And what happens when we're no longer a roadblock.
An impediment to what they want to do.
That's what's happening.
Right.
And, you know, getting back to the article that you'd share with me about the end of history, there is a concept there that I think I understand as far as once the world kind of lost this communist versus democracy battle, and like, you know, for the most part, we have democracy, like that seems to be the ruling, you know, And by the way, I'm not even going to say that's the best way to rule a country, or sorry, to run a country, whatever you want to use the word.
But I do understand that maybe it's that lack of tension, right, that maybe doesn't keep us on our toes anymore.
Maybe the Cold War did something to our politicians back then.
Because you would probably have to argue that during the Cold War, you know, you did have The sad truth of all of that is the Cold War was used by people looking for an advantage in American politics.
those people are still only on one party and the other party just wants to obstruct and can't govern.
And, uh, there's something interesting there.
The sad truth of all of that is the, the, the cold war was used by people looking for an advantage in American politics.
So like, for instance, after world war two, um, America was completely changed by the new deal.
They were, they were changed, you know, by FDR's, uh, politics and, and the social safety net.
Right.
And so Republicans decided they want to get rid of all those people and started calling them communists and started coming after them and harassing them.
So like that stuff has always been used against them.
But the really, really dangerous thing, and I pushed back against this earlier this week, We're delusional thinking we won the Cold War.
It's like two people fighting to the death, and one of them dies, and then the other one walks off with internal injuries.
Like, we were both hypocritical, right?
So Russia's all about, like, communism, or the idea that they're all in it together.
Meanwhile, they have a class system that's hidden, you know, where, like, the party members have more than everybody else, and if you want to talk about Orwell or whatever, you know, Animal Farm, whatever.
So they're over here and they're not actually true to what they want to say they are.
Meanwhile America's talking about liberty and democracy while overthrowing countries and undermining elections and pushing propaganda and coups.
We both betrayed our principles and the Soviet Union went away and we were like yes we won everything and now it's time to shape the world and all the corporations are like Thanks for the step up, man.
We really appreciate all the tax cuts.
We appreciate hypercapitalism.
We've got it from here.
And so now they don't have to be here.
They don't have to pay our taxes.
They don't have to help with anything.
And meanwhile, we're stuck in permanent austerity, unfortunately.
Right.
And then I don't see this, you know, especially the way we're spending money now with the deficit, you know, that whole like your grandkids will be paying for this is really, really true at this point.
And it's primarily because the Republicans have continued to sell us this idea that, oh, they'll pay for themselves.
The revenue never adjusts for what we've lost in income on taxes.
And we've seen that when there's a sweet spot for taxes that are higher than they are now that end up causing everybody to have better lives and the markets work better and the economy works better.
Yeah, it's not rooted in numbers.
It's not rooted in facts.
It's just like what we do in the NBA stuff when we finally started having all this explosion of analytics.
The analytics.
We started to realize.
And people, by the way, would gravitate toward that.
People in the south gravitate toward it.
And the north doesn't really matter geographically.
And probably doesn't matter necessarily.
Oh, you know what?
It probably does matter the way they vote in some respects.
I will say that the real hard-headed people on the coaching side who don't want to change generally are really religious or are in the military.
It's a weird thing.
I check and I look and I'm always like, hmm.
So nonetheless, the point being that there's this rejection of what the reality is when we have quantifiable numbers for this kind of stuff.
And, like, the voter fraud is the real big key here is no matter how much you say, there's hardly any voter fraud.
But what we really have a problem with is disenfranchising people.
We can't get that argument to catch.
And then they continue to insist because they imagine, again, it's maybe like Stand By Me.
They imagine these kids with bats who are just knocking, you know, the mailboxes off the thing and then going in and grabbing the ballots and then, I don't know what, filling them out and turning them in.
Oh, I gotta throw this out there because I had the best laugh of all time.
So the guy that was yelling at me for the voter fraud thing was trying to conflate identity theft and voter fraud.
He's like, "Clearly, because we have identity theft, it's such an easy leap to say we'll have voter fraud." And my wife and I are sitting there laughing because we're like, "Jarred, why would you have identity theft?
What's their main motivation there?" They want my money.
And how would you possibly get anyone's money by stealing someone's vote?
By the way, I'm a liberal arts professor, so good luck getting any money out of me.
I'll just throw that out there.
But what you just said is also telling, because let's go with two other things.
One, the Democratic Party is incapable of carrying out a conspiracy.
They can't.
It's such a dysfunctional organization and group of people.
They can't hold a meeting, much less a nationwide conspiracy.
Number two, this country doesn't have a problem with a lot of people voting.
The problem in this country is they can't get people to vote.
They can't get people to care about the election, much less people defrauding the government.
It's an insane idea.
It doesn't exist.
And you're exactly right, but it's a conspiracy.
Which is why, and people need to understand it now, if there's an election in November, if Donald Trump gets beaten, What makes anybody think that he's gonna pay attention to that?
What makes anybody think that he's gonna respect the sanctity and sovereignty of an election?
You need to understand that.
Like, it's not the way this thing works.
And in this fantasy... Because, okay, so that would be November.
So you'd have the rest of November, you would have December, and then part of January.
You'd have two and a half months.
I mean, maybe he'd just go golfing every day if he'd be lucky, but no, I think you're right.
imagine what those two and a half months would feel like?
Can you imagine how that would work?
What that would be like? - I mean, maybe he'd just go golfing every day if he'd be lucky, but no, I think you're right.
He's laid the groundwork to contest the results because mail-in voting is clearly a fraud.
And that's gonna be a real, real problem Because you're right, he might try and establish some commissions to be looking into this thing and that would drag out and they'll have to go to Supreme Court.
I mean, you're right.
I'm actually a little bit more worried about that now based on how they're arguing these things than I was a few weeks ago when you were trying to insist that.
I don't think they're going to move the election.
I think the election is in stone to date.
But I think that's their attack is that they're going to simply just contest the results.
I have no idea what's going to happen.
But I do, and again, to bring it full circle, I do know what happens when a Coke person and a Pepsi person look at the same thing.
It's identity.
It's projection of identity.
And by the way, you know this.
It's like, what is Twitter?
Bringing it all full circle.
I like this movie.
Well, I don't.
Well, cool!
Like, what's this conversation now?
Do you think you're gonna win this person over?
That's what drives Twitter.
Oh, I love the Lakers.
Well, I don't.
I love Michael Jordan.
Well, I love LeBron James.
Where are we going?
What do we do here?
Because that's not a conversation that leads anywhere.
A conversation that leads somewhere is, I don't agree with you politically.
You don't agree with me politically.
How do we get roads?
Right.
How do we make sure our bridges are safe to go over?
How do we get health insurance?
But that's not the conversation we're having, and it's not the conversation we've been having for decades.
It's really terrible.
All right.
And listen, I have to say real fast, we're going to wrap this up.
We're going to do the usual spiel because we have to do the spiel.
I really appreciate people going on this little journey.
It's not an easy thing to talk about.
You know what I mean?
Like examining who we are and why we do the things we do.
Talking about hard truths, we have to.
We just have to because the time is too dire not to.
But we thank you for coming along.
We appreciate you way too damn much.
Y'all are great.
The support lately, the sharing, all of it.
You know, we keep getting asked, what can you do to help?
We don't need money right now.
We need likes, subscriptions, sharings, telling people about this thing, comments.
These things help.
They honestly do.
And that's why we're calling for them.
Please help us out.
We appreciate you so much.
Until next time, Nick is at Can You Hear Me?
SMH.
You can find me at J.Y.
Sexton.
Yeah, stay safe, everyone.
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