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June 2, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast

01:21:49

Trump Goes FULL Authoritarian

As the protests stretch on, co-hosts Nick Hauselman and Jared Yates Sexton discuss the murderous rhetoric from Donald Trump, Tom Cotton, and Mark Esper, the complicated origins of the people's rage, and welcome disinformation and extremism expert Melissa Ryan to talk about misinformation during a crisis and what to expect going forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	Hey, everybody, something a little different.
	We Nick and I taped our usual episode, a really good episode.
	You should keep listening.
	Great conversation with Melissa Ryan and a good conversation about what's going on in the world and the analysis that.
	Unfortunately, you're going to listen to prove to be correct and true.
	We predicted that Trump was going to lash out and lead to the moment that has happened.
	Unfortunately, later in the evening after taping the podcast, all hell broke loose as Donald Trump Staged a photo op wherein protesters were roughed up shot with rubber bullets and tear gas so he could look strong out in public after leaving his bunker like a coward and And then went to a burnt up church and held up a Bible which we need to get into the meaning of that But we had we had to address it right now
	Absolutely.
	In fact, as soon as we stopped recording and I turned on the TV, I was just standing there dumbfounded.
	Even though we did sense that this was going to happen, but I don't know if I could have sensed that what they were going to do was schedule a speech for him with no questions afterwards, a very short speech which he barely could get through.
	Wow they're flash-banging a crowd to get out to get them out of the way so he can literally walk out the front door to the church which is like never happened and I actually was gonna mention this notion of you know Nixon in the midst of all the tumultuousness at 4 in the morning goes and hangs out with a bunch of the You know, the college students who were at the Washington Memorial and ends up having a discussion about, like, Syracuse football.
	It was the most manic, strange thing that ever happened there.
	And so you have to wonder, like, if it's some sort of echo of that, too, where he's now going to, because, you know, Nixon walked there as well.
	But anyway, it's insane.
	And these are all these steps that are just making it worse.
	And we knew that this was going to make it, what was going to make it worse was this whole bunker thing.
	And when people found out that he was sent to the bunker, and I mentioned this, you'll hear it in the pod, what his reaction was going to be.
	Clearly, this was out of that, was that he needed to do something to change that narrative of him hiding and cowering in a bunker.
	Yeah, that's the word, and we talk about it later on the podcast, which you should totally listen to.
	You know, Trump is a terminally insecure, fragile man, and the moment that it was discovered that he was a coward hiding in his cowardly way, something was going to happen.
	I was tweeting about this earlier today, that he was going to lash out.
	I didn't know if it was going to be today or the next couple days.
	I have to say I'm so sickened by all of this.
	Of course, the speech that we're dancing around was Trump basically declaring martial law without declaring martial law, saying that he was going to send US troops into cities to quote unquote dominate.
	He also mentioned another time that he was going to protect people's Second Amendment rights, which was an obvious dog whistle to his supporters that maybe they should pick up arms We also talked about that earlier, predicting it.
	It's an escalation in a situation that has been escalating for a while.
	Not just these protests, but the moment that Donald Trump decided to run for office and formed a fascistic movement around him.
	We're watching a budding authoritarian is what's happening.
	And listen, maybe he'll be stopped.
	I don't have a lot of faith that he will be.
	The parties have not shown the ability to stop him.
	Maybe the revolution in the streets will do something about it, but this is a budding authoritarian and you need to be aware You can't hide behind laws and precedents.
	This person doesn't care about them.
	And laws and precedents are social constructs that are only as strong as our ability to fight for them.
	He's not going to be pinned in by the Constitution.
	He's not going to be pinned in by law.
	He's just not.
	Well, we know this because we have William Barr, the head of the Department of Justice, on his side.
	In fact, he talked about in his speech to the governor how he's going to quote-unquote activate William Barr.
	And I don't know what that means, how you activate it.
	And he is standing side by side, shoulder to shoulder with him.
	And you have to imagine this is what's going to happen is what we saw in the Nixon administration where they had spies and they had people undercover who were infiltrating these groups of people who simply want to protest and make their voices heard, a complete abuse of power.
	And when you have a guy like Barr who was willing to prosecute anybody who can do this, and we have Trump calling for ridiculous prosecutions for 10 years for protesting or whatever they're saying they're doing is outrageous, but yet realistic in terms but yet realistic in terms of what could happen.
	Those things all could come true.
	Yeah, we need to, um, speak in a bar and infiltrations.
	I believe the infiltrations have already happened.
	I mean, um, the stories have already been out there that Eric Prince has been using his mercenaries to infiltrate groups and, you know, go after them.
	I'm sure that's also played a part in the protest, although that hasn't been confirmed yet.
	So allegedly, um, one thing that we need to talk about with this, um, it's not as simple We talk all the time about how conspiracy theories are oftentimes a flattening out of truth to lead to simplistic explanations.
	It's not just that Trump and Bill Barr sat down and were like, how are we going to lead to an authoritarian state?
	That's not what's happening.
	There are a lot of interconnecting things here.
	There are a lot of fascists who actually want fascism.
	There's Donald Trump, who is an authoritarian in nature.
	Bill Barr is a Dominionist.
	And for people who don't know, these are Christians who Believe that it is their God-given duty to take over the world in the name of Christianity That the world will not be correct and ready for the second coming of Christ or the kingdom of heaven on earth Until they take over the country and the world They have intersecting goals.
	Consolidation of power.
	And this is something I was screaming about online and people need to know about.
	And I've talked about it on here, but our audience is growing, so we have to go into it.
	Everyone was mystified when Trump went to the burnt church and just held up a Bible.
	That's all he did.
	And he declared himself the president of law and order.
	I have to tell you, as somebody who grew up in white identity evangelicalism, the message was loud and clear.
	He is declaring to his followers and what I call the call to the shining city white identity evangelicals that they are now engaged in a holy war.
	And that the protesters and liberals and the deep state and whoever you want to talk about are evil.
	They are evil and they must be dealt with and it is their godly duty to take care of them.
	This is the kind of shit that Bill Barr believes in.
	It's the kind of shit that Mike Pence believes in and Pompeo believes in.
	This is unfortunately a merging together of disparate interests that are all interested in power and they are.
	Unfortunately dedicated to the idea of a white Christian ethnostate like if you if you've seen The Handmaid's Tale.
	That's what this is.
	I mean that that that there's a reason that that that book is so prescient and so meaningful.
	That's what these people want.
	They really do and it's where those different intersections meet is where you find fascism and unfortunately that that's what we're looking at and people need to get aware on this because it's it's happening fast Nick.
	Well, by the way, we're lucky that it did take him as long as it did to get these people into the positions because imagine if he had picked Pompeo right away and he had picked Barr right away, this would all have been unraveled way earlier.
	So we're in some sense lucky that They came along a little bit later so that, you know, if we can have a free and fair election in November and get them out of there, then we can at least limit that destruction because they would have had at least another year to implement this stuff.
	And it seems clear to me now when you're watching this, especially like with the protests we're seeing outside the White House, this is just, this is not about, it's clearly grown above and beyond George Floyd.
	This is all about what Trump has been doing to the country.
	I'm worried.
	I have kids.
	I would not be surprised if now we really start seeing the protests, right?
	I would imagine that it's going to ramp up over the next week and we'll see more and more organization, more and more people out there.
	I'm worried.
	I have kids.
	I don't feel safe going to these, but at some point if we can figure out a way to make this happen where there's enough people and we all have the right intentions, that will start I don't know what he's going to do, but I think the American people have a chance now to really show how they feel en masse, and that will actually have an effect.
	How long have we known each other, Nick?
	Probably since like 2016.
	Yeah, for about four years now.
	We started talking when I was covering the Trump campaign and, you know, we had some good conversations and we eventually decided to do this thing, try and do some good.
	I've talked a lot about the danger of Trump and gathering fascism and authoritarianism.
	I didn't want to be right.
	I didn't.
	I tried to put stuff out there and let people know what I know and what I've seen.
	I didn't want to be right.
	I don't like this, man.
	I don't like this at all.
	Everything's been coming true.
	Everything's been happening according to these cycles that you see in history.
	I need people to understand this because I assume most of our listeners are Americans.
	We've been raised up to believe that shit like this can't happen here.
	You've seen scenes like this on the news, usually like in Block C or Block D, right?
	Country X over the ocean, you know, fifth night of riots, the presidential palace locked down, you know, he's crushing his dissidents, all of this.
	It's happening here.
	It's happening here right now.
	You can't take anything for granted right now.
	And that sounds terrible.
	You need to be very, very careful.
	You need to take care of yourself and your families.
	You need to prepare for this stuff.
	You need to call it out where you see it.
	But you also, you need to be aware that we're treading into some really deep water right now.
	And I don't say that to be alarmist.
	I say it to be informative because it's happening.
	It's happening right now.
	I agree.
	Well, hopefully things will change sooner than later.
	And why don't we go right to the podcast?
	Yeah, we'll get into that.
	So we've got a, I think, pretty good podcast after this and a great, I know it's a great conversation with Melissa Ryan, who I think is more important than ever to listen to hear what she has to say.
	We will be back.
	Hopefully we don't have to do an emergency podcast later in the week.
	We will be back on Friday as scheduled.
	Maybe we'll have to do this again.
	I hope to God we don't.
	Everybody stay safe, all right?
	He's hiding in a bunker and he is embarrassed that people know that.
	So what does he have to do?
	He has to sick police on peaceful protesters so he can make a big show of being, you know, the little big man.
	If it wasn't so dangerous and disgusting, it would be funny because it is so low rent and just sad.
	Time that more people stood up and said something because this president every day and I've said it from the beginning the man is a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, a xenophobe.
	You've hung up in jail for 10 years and you'll never see this stuff again.
	And you have no idea, no doubt.
	Time that more people stood up and said something because this president every day, and I've said it from the beginning, the man is a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, a xenophobe.
	He's got to go.
	Hey, everybody.
	Welcome to the Muckrake podcast.
	I'm your co-host, Jude Yates-Saxton.
	As always, I'm here with my good friend, Nick Haussleman.
	Rough few days.
	No other way to put it.
	Rough few days.
	The protests continue in the wake of the murder of George Lloyd, unfortunately, last night in Louisville, Kentucky.
	David McAtee, a 53-year-old black man shot and killed, murdered.
	There seems to be no end in sight in terms of escalation with police.
	And then today, our president, Donald Trump, who turned the lights out at the White House and has been hiding in a bunker and threatening to sick people with vicious dogs and ominous weapons, and we gotta talk about this whole mess, is making things worse.
	Republicans are making things worse.
	Everybody is making things worse because this is the worst presidential administration imaginable at the worst possible time.
	Nick, how are you doing?
	I am worried.
	And part of it is living in Los Angeles, the traditional areas that would normally see a lot of civil unrest are completely calm.
	And it's the places that have never ever seen this kind of thing.
	You know, near the Grove, which is a very wealthy, nice area of L.A., and then in Beverly Hills, of all places, where there's looting.
	It's one of the reasons why it simply feels different, but it's really just confusing.
	It's really just confusing to me because there's so many things.
	The Venn diagram here of all the overlaps, it's almost like it's one of those perfect storms that it's hard to even fathom how this all happened all at the same time.
	Yeah, I should have mentioned also, we've got a really good interview at the end of this podcast with misinformation expert Melissa Ryan, who I think is very illuminating, particularly right now.
	We're in a moment of crisis, and every moment of crisis breeds disinformation and misinformation.
	There's so much happening right now, you know, and it's it would be bad enough and we talk about it on this this podcast all the time.
	It'd be bad enough if we were just talking about how to reform policing.
	Right, that would be a debate all in and of itself.
	It's a major societal problem that needs addressed.
	That would be one thing that we could do and have an argument about, but that's not what's happening, right?
	On one hand, you have people who are, they're tired of the bullshit.
	You know, they're tired of living in a society where running down the street or standing outside of a business means that you get shot or your neck crushed.
	And then on the other side, Who knows what's happening in the shadows?
	As we reported on our emergency episode on Saturday, we have extremists trying to make things worse.
	That has been proven and has played out in cities across America.
	On top of that, you have Trump loyalists and Trump supporters who, I don't know if you saw, I posted this, they're talking about whether or not George Soros created this thing and whether there was actually a murder in the first place.
	There, you know, we have The President of the United States got on Twitter, like always, and declared that he was going to declare Antifa a terrorist organization, which isn't an organization at all.
	And he's now running around screaming about Antifa, which is loosely defined as, well, I mean, it's an anti-fascist philosophy, but it's now loosely defined as anybody who disagrees with Donald Trump is now being treated as a terrorist.
	It is.
	It's really overwhelming and infuriating.
	I think that's the other thing to mention here.
	It's just it's really disgusting.
	Oh, what's really disgusting is the call that Trump had with the governors today.
	We really haven't parsed that out at all.
	And as it's coming out, the transcript, the audio is actually leaked.
	I'm very anxious to listen to it.
	But, you know, with the reporting coming in and what he actually said, this is the itchy trigger finger moment when you get very concerned.
	And we just saw it in Louisville last night anyway.
	And you start thinking, like we mentioned in the last pod, the echoes of Kent State in 71.
	And it would be really easy, especially with the rhetoric.
	It's all military rhetoric.
	It is all – and he's all – he's exoriating these governors to become tougher.
	When I can tell you right now that every one of these protests that worked out well, the cops took off their battle gear, put it on the ground, and marched with the people and took a knee with the people.
	Those are the protests that you see that were really kind of productive and made the point they needed to make and kept everybody on the same page.
	And behaving isn't the right word, but certainly keeping the peace.
	This is completely ridiculous.
	And, you know, I keep thinking about how we saw a few weeks ago these, you know, these armed militia men who were taking over government buildings and screaming in the policemen's faces.
	And they didn't do anything.
	And then you cut to any amount of montages that you want to see edited of just completely ridiculous, harsh treatment of people who are just minding their own business on the street.
	It's such a dichotomy.
	And it just it feels like we're reliving the 60s all over again in 68.
	But It's not because it's worse.
	First of all, white supremacy is a hell of a drug.
	Second of all, let's set the scene for why the call happened.
	For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Donald Trump had a call with the governors today.
	Let's talk about why it happened.
	As protesters gathered outside of the White House this weekend, President Donald Trump, the manliest man in all of America who's, you know, having photoshops of him on Rocky's body and people having these fantasies that he's like some sort of a warrior, was shaking like a coward.
	In a bunker.
	Right?
	He was too afraid to face this thing.
	Turned off the lights at the White House.
	Refused to say anything about it.
	Refuses to make any sort of speech.
	Which, by the way, I'm glad he doesn't make a speech.
	Because he'll make everything worse.
	Anytime he opens his mouth, he makes things worse.
	He's an embarrassment.
	But this guy, he does this.
	And I saw this coming because I wrote a book about masculinity and how this stuff works.
	And this guy's an authoritarian.
	He is an insecure coward.
	And I knew immediately he was going to lash out today.
	So he gets on a phone call with a bunch of governors.
	He starts calling them weak.
	He says they're being laughed at.
	He says constantly you have to dominate these people.
	He's talking about American citizens, by the way.
	He says that they should be thrown in prison for 10 year sentences.
	Right?
	Meanwhile, the Secretary of Defense, this little sniveling, bootlicking coward, says that we have to dominate the battle space, right?
	Which, I don't know, America, I guess, is the battle space now, right?
	Then, and by the way, if you have kids listening, if you're just hanging out with kids, like maybe put earmuffs on, let's talk about fucking Tom Cotton.
	Let's talk about Tom Cotton.
	Let's use no quarter on Tom Cotton, shall we?
	By the way, we had Ross Barkin on here earlier on in the podcast a couple months ago, but what is time?
	And Barkin was like, you know who I have my eye on to be a real fascist-like president?
	Tom Cotton, right?
	So Tom Cotton, Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas, decides it's a good time to get onto Twitter and he says, Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight.
	If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let's see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they're facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.
	We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction.
	He then says, Again, fuck Tom Cotton.
	I'm just throwing that out there.
	And if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cavalry, 3rd Infantry, which by the way, he loves doing this, right?
	He's just a militaristic fascist.
	Whatever it takes to restore order, no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.
	What's no quarter mean, Nick?
	Well, it's basically a war crime that's banned in every army manual that you can find.
	And by the way, are you aware that Tom Cotton served in the army?
	Yeah, absolutely he did.
	He's talking about shooting Americans.
	He's talking about killing Americans, is what that senator is saying.
	Which, by the way, we have to talk about this.
	I understand that him and Trump are just posturing, because they're terrified little insecure wimps, is what it is.
	And they're out there posturing.
	I mean, this is what Ted Cruz does all the time.
	Right?
	Ted Cruz comes out and he's like a little worm.
	Please let him.
	He's not running.
	Oh my god.
	So all these people get out in the posture and sure, they're saying it is empty words.
	But are they empty words, Nick?
	No.
	I mean, they're not empty words.
	As we saw last night.
	Once one person is killed, these are the words that are now inspirational to these people.
	You know, there's no coincidence that journalists are being fired upon.
	Do you think?
	I don't think it's coincidence.
	Wait, are we talking about enemies of the people?
	Is that who we're talking about?
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	You know, who have clearly displayed, you see the videos, they're filming them getting shot at, nobody else around them, they have the camera crew, they have the microphone, they have the credentials, and they're being arrested, they're being knocked down, they're being harassed, they're being shot at.
	It is insane.
	You know, a lot of these protests, like Ali Velshi, you watch MSNBC, there's nobody within hundreds of yards of him, and they shoot him with rubber bullets.
	We've seen people, I think I've seen at least two reports of people losing an eye by getting shot.
	Or no, one was losing an eye by getting shot by a rubber bullet, the other one was getting the guy shot in with a canister, the tear gas canister, like in the face from point-blank range.
	Um, and these are the things, this is the direct result of what we're hearing.
	Let me just say this really quickly about the, because you mentioned twice, uh, Trump in the bunker.
	It's the worst idea you could do, because what does that do to a guy who's already mentally ill?
	It just completely adds to the paranoia, and it completely adds to the agitator that's going to be going in his brain where he feels like, oh, he's being rushed to a bunker because, I mean, listen, those people are not getting anywhere near the White House.
	There's no need.
	This is not a 9-11 attack where they're gonna, you know, do something serious from whatever.
	This is, you know, protesters who, again, he described what would happen if they breached the wall, but this is not a thing they have to worry about him putting in a bunker, yet it just continues to amp up his insanity and his mental decline.
	Well, let's talk about why he got rushed to a bunker.
	And that's great.
	Let's get into that.
	I want to talk about Roger Ailes for like two seconds, right?
	So, Roger Ailes is the absolute scuzzball sexual assaulter who founded Fox News.
	And over time, so he starts Fox News, and he's basically like, okay, Fox News, our profit is going to come from putting right-wing propaganda out there, right?
	And eventually, Barack Obama comes on the scene, and he's like, okay, we're going to now frame Barack Obama as a Muslim traitor out to ruin America.
	Well, a couple years later, guess what happens?
	Roger Ailes starts believing his own bullshit.
	Right?
	He like starts building bunkers.
	He starts building safe rooms.
	He starts telling people that he truly believes that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim traitor looking to destroy America.
	You know why Donald Trump got rushed into a bunker?
	Because these people live in an alternate paranoid reality.
	And that's how we get to this point.
	This is the reason why you have... I'm sorry, but law enforcement in this country right now is an occupying force.
	They are out there fighting American people as if they are enemies.
	And they are not enemies, they are their fellow citizens.
	All this stuff started, well it started, I mean, the founding of the country, but you know, let's fast forward a little bit.
	All this stuff started when we started talking about real Americans, right?
	Real America knows this, and meanwhile you got everyone else over here, all of a sudden it's red versus blue, all of a sudden it's like you have these people, you have, you know, liberals, whatever.
	It's dehumanization, is what it is.
	And there are people right now, and I've been seeing it all over social media, including people that I know, people that I love, talking about if somebody dies in this thing, if some more people get shot, probably wouldn't be the worst thing, right?
	They truly believe that.
	Yeah.
	Well, they also believe that it's coming to them.
	Yes, they have it coming.
	And we've talked about this with the Cult of the Shining City stuff, right?
	They truly believe that a lot of these people are evil.
	I've seen people relishing the idea of throwing liberals in prison.
	And I want to throw this out just to make this out there for everyone.
	When I was reporting in 2016 from Trump rallies, that's what people were telling me.
	I can't wait until we lock these people up.
	I can't wait until we execute these people.
	And meanwhile, All this stuff plays into it.
	Like, if you truly believe that Antifa, which isn't a group, right, but a state of mind, being anti-fascist or being anti-Trump, if you truly believe that makes a person a terrorist, what do you do to terrorists, Nyx?
	Nyx, what do you do to terrorists?
	You kill them.
	Yeah.
	Well, right.
	You kill them.
	I mean, listen, we've heard that rhetoric since 9-11 where people just want to kill all the Muslims.
	Just kill them all.
	Let's get rid of them and then we won't have this problem anymore.
	It's literally what, like, that would be a, you know, in the same notion of let's just let this COVID wash over everybody.
	Let's all just die out and we'll be done with it.
	Like, that's...
	Well, Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz says we should kill all the terrorists and their families.
	Oh, right.
	Well, Trump has said that too, I believe.
	Sure.
	Exactly.
	And that's the mindset, right?
	Because when you reduce it down like Trump is doing, and like Cotton is doing, and man, Cotton's disgusting.
	Just a disgusting person.
	When you do that, it makes murder Ethical.
	Right.
	Right.
	He must have seen some things while serving.
	I don't know.
	Because, you know, here's a guy who went to Harvard and it was from Arkansas, which, listen, there are, you know, Bill Clinton came from Arkansas.
	But something, you know, but by the way, I believe if I'm not mistaken, that your friend and mine, our Secretary of State also went to Harvard.
	Oh, they all went to Harvard.
	They all went to Harvard or Yale.
	And here's the... Harvard makes mistakes, too.
	Oh, my God.
	We talked about this... Man, again, what is time?
	We talked about this on Friday.
	These people are performing.
	Like, Tom Cotton knows better than this, unless again, like Roger Ailes, he's actually started to believe that he is the person that he's pretending to be.
	Like, he knows what he's doing, he knows what he's saying, and he knows that he's building a character.
	That he's building, like, later on, that's how you become president, by the way, is you build a character, right?
	Right, right, right.
	Like, right now we have Donald Trump, billionaire mogul, versus Uncle Joe, right?
	You build up a character that end up clashing against each other.
	He's building up a fascistic character, and he knows it.
	And to go on and do that, I mean, that's what happens on Fox News, and it's what happens with the right wing.
	But they're escalating this thing.
	And if this ends without MAGA people in the streets confronting protesters, I would be shocked.
	Right, without question.
	Yeah, because you hear, so there's this rumors like they're going to hit the residential areas next, right?
	And then you see all these responses on Twitter from the gun-toting AR-15 people saying, yeah, go ahead.
	I can't wait to see you guys in our streets.
	I got 10 magazines.
	I got my, I got three pistols, the whole thing all ready to go.
	Here's the thing we have to, I want to talk about, because this is really what was bothering me more was, okay, You know, we have looting and rioting.
	You have a sense that there might be people taking advantage of the situation.
	They want some shoes, they want some computers, they want some clothes.
	Now, to me, that kind of thing, you know, this sort of millennial, let's live out some GTA in real life for a few, you know, for a night.
	But this is clearly a dangerous situation and we are now seeing this over multiple days.
	So, to me, it cannot simply be these opportunists, which is almost like what the government wants to sort of portray them as.
	These are just liberal, you know, whatever people just trying to out to, you know, enrich themselves with some stealing, right?
	This is not.
	There is a seething rage underneath this thing that would compel people night after night and day after day.
	And by the way, we're seeing looting during the day.
	This is also unheard of.
	This is always like, okay, peaceful protests at night.
	I mean, at daytime, normal people.
	And then at nighttime, you know, they do the martial law and, you know, whatever.
	People are going to do some really weird shit.
	But this is unprecedented.
	We have never seen this like this across 40-plus cities in the country at the same time.
	So I'm really kind of confused by the whole thing because this is what they're preying on.
	Is it Antifa?
	Is it the white supremacists?
	Are they these millennials who just want to have some weird experience?
	And it's probably a mix of all of these things.
	But the bottom line is the only way to stop this is to have leadership and not to bring in the freaking army.
	I find it so telling, the people who, when you want to talk about racial justice or reforming law enforcement, they immediately pivot to looting.
	As if as if for whatever reason a financial a petty financial crime is somehow or another tantamount to murder right or or Ethnocide right like there's a meme going around and unfortunately, I've seen it in my family and my you know Circles and it's like a picture god.
	It's oh just made my stomach turn thinking about it and it's like George Floyd being murdered and on top and it's like if you're not okay with this how are you okay with this or this is no better than this and it's looting and it's predictably you know african-american looters which is a white supremacist meme that is making the rounds right now by white supremacist groups that are you know pushing people more and more towards open blatant uh racism and white supremacy um
	There's a couple answers with all of that.
	First things first, you brought up Grand Theft Auto.
	I used to play Grand Theft Auto.
	I used to love it.
	And I had this moment once, for those who haven't ever played it, it's just this free roaming kind of game.
	There are missions or whatever, but there's free roaming parts.
	And if you want, you can carry out a mass shooting and see how far you can go with it.
	And everybody who plays it does that at some point.
	And then at some point, I was in the middle of playing a game and I was like, what is this?
	Do you know what I mean?
	Like it's some sort of terrible internal thing.
	Like why would I even be okay doing this in a virtual world?
	Like what's that say about me?
	And a lot of people Uh, they act out fantasies of, you know, whether or not it's breaking the law or being part of something like this.
	I mean, I don't care if somebody goes in and steals a pair of shoes.
	Like, it looks bad or whatever, but we also live in a society that is completely made Conspicuous consumption and economics and excessive capitalism one of its defining characteristics.
	I think it's also a real problem that we we've now made protecting private property of corporations.
	Much more important than brutalizing people, traumatizing people.
	I mean, you have an entire generation right now who's in the street who's going to remember getting shot at by police with pepper balls.
	And by the way, I gotta tell you, I was at a riot at the inauguration in 2017.
	And there was a riot in DC that I found myself in the middle of out of nowhere.
	I'll tell you what's not fun.
	What's not fun is having flashbangs thrown at your feet.
	What's not fun is, you know, like, non-lethal weaponry being used against you.
	Like, there are people who are going to be walking away from this thing harmed.
	People are going to die.
	And meanwhile, everyone's worried about Old Navy.
	You know, Old Navy's fine.
	Well, they have insurance.
	And here's the thing, if you are, there's a lot of reasons to be disaffected and to feel marginalized in this society in the last 20 years.
	Easy, right?
	From the state of the economy, from most kids who have graduated college in the last 20 years, to the things that we see with the cops abusing black people and everybody, all people of color.
	The list goes on.
	So, if you're thinking that you have no voice, we can't seem to make an effect change, well, the one thing that will catch people's eyes and will make a statement is the looting and is the destruction.
	Because they probably feel like, you know, I can go march, and I can get on TV and say, hi mom, and that's all really well and good, but we know that no one really responds to that.
	So, that's sort of the frame of mind I feel like there must be a huge segment of people who are like, this is our way to make our point.
	There is no other way.
	I mean, this is how we've been doing it, and this is how most civilizations have done it this way, where you have to have a lot of civil unrest.
	And the looting thing, though, is really frustrating, because when you do see these big, big, you know, even the Walgreens or the other, you know, big stores at Target, they all have insurance.
	They'll all be back and running within a couple days.
	They'll be restocked.
	So that's why it's like, OK, if you look at it from that point of view, yeah, there's no reason why you'd ever want to resort to the kind of violence and, you know, police tactics that we're seeing.
	But here's the thing I'm worried about is you're going to now start seeing citizens take it upon themselves to protect these businesses with their semi-automatic weapons and dressed in their cosplay.
	And bows and arrows.
	Did you see that?
	Yes.
	Okay, if you didn't see this, everybody listening, a guy in, where were we, Arkansas again?
	I think, I want to say it was Salt Lake, wasn't it?
	No, Salt Lake City.
	We won't make a joke about that.
	But anyway, Salt Lake City, he gets out of his car, gets his bow out, a big-ass hunting bow, gets an arrow, loads it.
	I think he got one off before the crowd rushed him.
	And I don't know how he survived that, by the way.
	That would have been the first casualty, without question.
	I can't believe he survived.
	The cops actually backed up and let the crowd destroy his car.
	And then they interviewed him later, and he seemed mystified.
	It was the craziest.
	This guy, obviously... As opposed to being in jail, by the way.
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's what's going to happen if this thing continues.
	And I don't see any reason it isn't because, again, Donald Trump is throwing gas on the fire.
	He just is like they're not there.
	People need to understand.
	And I have to say watching mainstream sort of cable news cover.
	This has been a mixed bag.
	Yeah.
	Like, it's very obvious that the people get it to a certain extent, right?
	Because the story isn't actually that there are riots happening across America.
	It's that law enforcement is brutalizing Americans right now.
	They are... law enforcement is rioting right now.
	They are destroying people.
	And if you don't see that, you're not looking for it because it's there.
	I want people to think about this.
	For a person, a younger person, or even an older person, whatever, someone who's gone through a lot of this stuff, or someone who's just going through it, like, I have to tell you, for me, I'm in debt right now because of my student loans, because I did what I was supposed to do, and I've been successful, but it's still like this weight on me, right?
	Imagine someone like me who hasn't necessarily had all the breaks that I've had.
	Let's say, I don't know, because they're black or they're a minority, right?
	They're out in the street.
	They're carrying around a ton of debt.
	They have no prospects whatsoever.
	Maybe they have no chance at education.
	Maybe they live in a part of a town that's crumbling because no one will take care of them.
	And everyone always tells you, left and right, there's no money.
	Right?
	We can't help you.
	We can't.
	I mean, my God, you have to go back to work at Subway because, you know, the economy will crumble.
	We can't possibly help you during a pandemic.
	Meanwhile, here comes millions of dollars.
	of of of armored vehicles you've got people marching down the street in tactical gear with every weapon known to man in a police state and all of a sudden it becomes very clear where the money has been going right and where the actual money is and why do they have all that stuff they have it for i i gotta say this and this is important and people aren't gonna like it but i'm gonna say it
	They have it on one hand because America is a militarized state and they had to do something with all of the hardware.
	And when they weren't necessarily fighting wars, they gave it to law enforcement.
	The second reason is because liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans have always known they can score political points whenever they want by appearing tough on crime.
	This is a bipartisan problem.
	But it has mutated and gotten worse, particularly as the right wing in this country has gotten more paranoid and dangerous.
	But this is a massive, massive problem and it's why it's one of the main reasons why this country is in the sad state that it's in right now.
	Without question, yes.
	The surplus that gets handed down needs to be stopped.
	They have to not let these cops play.
	Again, it's a version of cosplay for them.
	To, like, dress up like soldiers, you know, in some sort of Gestapo-looking thing, or SS.
	And, you know, go down the street.
	When we see the complete... It almost empowers them.
	I guess it does.
	Now that they're behind this little...
	It's like this robot, you know, RoboCop kind of a thing.
	And the training that we see goes out the window.
	Or whatever they're being trained is completely wrong, and we need to fix that.
	Some of the training, some of the training, I've been doing research on this, Nick.
	Some of the training is infuriating.
	We're talking about people.
	And by the way, you're talking about a lot of people.
	I know some police officers who do it because they literally want to be productive members of society, right?
	They actually think, and this is the way law enforcement should actually work.
	It's community policing, which is...
	You know, I want to go out there and serve people and make things better, right?
	I want to protect people.
	Instead, we also have a lot of people, a lot of white supremacists, and also, going back to what we talked about this weekend, white supremacist terrorists who are involved in law enforcement, who, they want to be the punisher.
	You know, they're running around with death's heads on them.
	They're running around in fascistic, chic clothes, tactical, cool stuff, right?
	They fetishize this stuff, which, bring it full circle, it's like Donald Trump.
	It's a bunch of insecure cowards who seek power through fascist iconography and action.
	And so you have a really terrible setup, and meanwhile you've got All kinds of people who are like getting in their face like you're a warrior.
	You're out there to be a warrior.
	Make sure it's their lives and not yours.
	You're the last line before anarchy and death.
	They're coming for your family.
	They're going to come kill and rape your family.
	Well, of course you're going to shoot people.
	And who have you been told the enemy is?
	Black people, right?
	They're dangerous and they're not Americans.
	Right?
	They're not real Americans, and George Soros is paying them, and they're being manipulated by the New World Order, so you might as well go out there and fire the first shot.
	And that's the bullshit that all this is operating on, and until we realize that's the actual problem, we're not going to solve it.
	Well, okay, let's talk about that for a second, because what Trump is advocating for, as far as you can't appear to be weak, you gotta stomp them down right now, the context he's discussing this in is the notion that it'll be solved overnight.
	You do that in a few hours, it's done, it's over, you never have to think about it again.
	That's the context that he's coming from, the background, his prism of looking at this.
	When in fact, nothing about what happened in Minneapolis, or across the whole country in countless versions of this, gets solved Tomorrow, or next month, or next year.
	And that's really what is so frustrating about this, is that they just don't even have a sense of... It's so myopic.
	It is so uninformed.
	You know, it almost kind of reminds me of like, not to bring up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but like, the bottom line is, when you hear the rhetoric of that, all I hear is saying, okay, you simply want this conflict to go on for the next 500 years.
	Fine, if you want to feel that way, whatever, just understand it, own it, that you are not going to change anything.
	And this is the same bullshit now, where it's like you're not going to get any effect, any change, by putting a boot on everyone's head and stomping down until they're within an inch of their lives.
	That's not going to change this, and yet that sounds weak.
	You know, that's all these, you know, words that Trump loves to use about being tough and all these things and, you know, quote-tweeting Q and talking about strength.
	It's the opposite, and it's simply never going to change the situation, and it will ultimately backfire on the Republicans too, but they don't seem to care.
	So the route that you're talking about, trying to solve this by putting your boots on the necks of people, which is what's happening.
	It happened last night.
	It's happened for the past few days.
	It's going to happen tonight.
	It'll probably happen tomorrow.
	Do you know what they're doing?
	The end goal of that, if they're successful, right?
	The end goal is to crush the will of the people.
	It's to create a society where people are afraid to speak up against oppression.
	That's the only goal in all of that.
	The other problem is what we talked about the other day.
	It's the Coke versus Pepsi idea.
	Right?
	It's people arguing about their identities.
	So, like, for instance, one of the things that's happening right now is anybody who has any sort of a platform where they're talking anything about these protests being valid, they're currently being reported by a bunch of people as being members of Antifa.
	I've been quote-unquote reported multiple times today.
	Listen, I've never been an anarchist.
	I've never been involved in an organization like that.
	I've never gone to a riot and broken out windows or whatever.
	But because we now live in a culture war, everything is Coke or Pepsi.
	Everything is white or black.
	It's either Black Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, right?
	And when the cleavage between those is so severe, You actually start looking at it as the other person is an enemy.
	And when you look at it like that, there's no way to deescalate.
	It would be a lot better if we could look at statistics and make...
	Actual educated discussion.
	But we can't because pieces of shit like Donald Trump and the Republican Party, which is a fascistic movement, they can't win elections.
	They can't win discussions.
	They have chosen every alternate reality for their own political purposes and profiting, right?
	They can't fight with actual statistics anymore.
	So they make up ghosts.
	They make up these illusions that they can fight.
	And the problem is, going back to everything that Trump and Cotton and Esper had said, when you start talking like this, people listen.
	And when people listen, and they believe it, and it becomes part of themselves, they go out and they kill.
	And that's what's happened here.
	That's why George Floyd died.
	It was white supremacy and this alternate dimension where people are your enemy.
	That's the only reason you kill someone like that.
	It's cruel and it's murder.
	And you do it because you think they're your enemy.
	Are you aware of who Trump had a call with just before he got on the phone with the governors?
	I'm very aware.
	So what's worse about this whole thing is that we have to find out that he gets on the phone and has a conversation with Putin from the Russians.
	They don't even tell us.
	Our American counterparts do not say anything about this call.
	There's no notion of a call record so that we could actually confirm what was said or not.
	It lets the Kremlin sort of dictate what was said in the meeting or not.
	You have to imagine that this whole tough guy stance comes from his inferiority complex about speaking to Putin just before this.
	They don't hide it anymore.
	They don't hide it anymore.
	So I wrote about this today on Twitter.
	If you want to go take a look, I did a long thread on this.
	First of all, Vladimir Putin, you know, who bounces around on specially trained horses while, you know, beefed up on steroids shirtless in order to You know, sort of hide his insecurity.
	He's the exact same sort of species as Donald Trump.
	I say this all the time.
	Authoritarians are inherently insecure.
	That's why they're authoritarians.
	They can't handle criticism.
	They can't handle dispute.
	And so they have to crush the world, however they do.
	It is not great that America and the situation we have right now mirrors in many ways the way that Putin broke the will of the Russian people.
	Particularly, and by the way, stick around for this conversation with Melissa Ryan, who is fantastic.
	You know, through misinformation, through societal discord, through culture war, through all of this posturing, macho bullshit, fascistic underpinnings, That's how this stuff works.
	It's how it always works.
	It's how every fascist totalitarian state gets constructed.
	All of this stuff is paint by numbers.
	As Melissa says, you can predict it.
	They've all run by the same playbook.
	They just have.
	And that's what's happening right now.
	And that's the thing I want to say about all this.
	It's frustrating, and it's going to piss you off, and we're all tired, but you got to keep going.
	Because this thing...
	Again, that's the only end point.
	They break your will.
	They break your will and they make you live in fear.
	And that's the only way these people win.
	That's their only end point, their only goal.
	You might remember that, you know, when we first started the podcast, I kept railing on this notion that the only thing that made me feel good about the election in November is if we had some sort of million-person march from the mall to the White House and really just show solidarity.
	I guess you be careful what you wish for because we're kind of getting that now.
	I didn't and I never felt great about like when we had piecemeal all around the country like little you know here in LA and then in Chicago wherever they have it like you know the 5,000 people here.
	It needed to be something in one spot and one big mass you know exclamation point.
	But I got to tell you this sort of feels like the bizarro version of that now.
	And, you know, the thing that's really crazy about if this continues, and it seems like we're going to continue to have more of this, it's so dangerous for people to do this.
	And yet they're still willing to.
	That is what Tal talks about, how angry they are.
	Yeah.
	You know, I was thinking about this today and listen, I haven't talked about Nate Silver on this podcast because I refuse to talk about Nate Silver.
	I actually, I think he's, we can, you can talk about statistics.
	I think that he is just a useless toad.
	I really do and I think he is just, his punditry and analytics or whatever and this whole idea that politics is a game that you win or lose, it's such bullshit and it's done such damage.
	Nate Silver yesterday said something that, I had to put my phone down.
	And I don't do that very often.
	I, you know, most of the time I go ahead and press tweet, you know, but this one made me so mad.
	He's like, oh, in a couple of weeks, liberals will tell you that coronavirus didn't spike because of protests.
	And it's like, no, we understand that it will spike because of this.
	You're actually taking away from people the courageous part of this, which is they're out there, by the way, in masks, by the way, Right?
	In mass protests, in masks, during a generational pandemic.
	They understand they're taking their lives into their own hands.
	It just so happens that this moment is important enough that they have to do something.
	And people, and this is the other part of the media, and I have to get this out there and gotta get it on the record.
	They're not just protesting that George Floyd was murdered.
	They're protesting generations worth of oppression and racism and prejudice and terrible law enforcement prejudice.
	They're also protesting the fact that Donald Trump is a symptom and not the disease and that the disease has to be addressed.
	I mean, that's what it is.
	It is a revolutionary moment, and I feel like people are afraid to say that, but you're right.
	This is a moment that has to be addressed, and it doesn't matter if it's in the middle of a pandemic.
	I mean, what is the old poem?
	It's like, there's some shit I will not eat, right?
	And this is it.
	There's some shit we will not eat.
	Right.
	And by the way, I didn't even mean it was dangerous because of coronavirus.
	I meant it's dangerous because they can get killed.
	For sure.
	shot, lose an eye, get injured.
	I mean, we've seen footage, I'm sure we all have now, of a couple different cop cars, one in L.A. and one in New York, driving into the crowd fast for 10 feet.
	That kind of stuff is crazy.
	Now, I guess if you want to make it feel like they must feel like they're under siege as well and things are going to happen.
	And it might not necessarily be this fault in that moment, but that's what happens when you have these situations and they don't know how to de-escalate them.
	And then you have a president who is dog whistling this stuff.
	And we know that while the protesters are not going to listen to that, because they're clearly protesting for a reason, it's the cops who are, you know, as a Absorbing all these things, and it could be subconscious, it might be conscious, and either way, this is what you get.
	I do need to give a shout out to Miranda Yaver, who is a political scientist at UCLA, because she tweeted yesterday a fabulous way to wrap this all up, and where we are, and what we're living through.
	She says, quote, you know, I always wanted to know what it would be like to simultaneously experience the Spanish flu, The Great Depression, the 1968 mass protests, all while Andrew Johnson was president.
	That is what we have!
	And that is why it's going to get worse.
	That's the other problem with how this whole thing is.
	We understand that, and we keep saying this, but it's true, Trump's behavior will continue to get worse and deteriorate as the pressure of, certainly the election and him losing it, continues to mount on him, and certainly as the unrest continues to build, because again, he's in that bunker.
	That just continues to add to his agita, and this only ends in a couple different ways.
	All of the things that you just said, it is important to mention.
	They are separate but interconnected problems, and they are separate but interconnected outcomes, right?
	There's a reason why people are out in the street, and it's because America has stopped serving the people.
	It just has.
	Our government has been bought and sold.
	Our economy has been rewired to serve only a precious few.
	The pandemic was completely mishandled because of the economy, but also prejudice, and also because our politics is bought and sold.
	And Donald Trump, again, is the symptom of all of those things.
	We have so many problems in America that have been booted down the road and or have been moved around and screwed up and just all messed up to the point where like we can't get past this without dealing with it, right?
	All of the symptoms are coming forth because the disease has been ravaging us for so long.
	That's why it's hard.
	That's why it's complicated.
	America doesn't solve its problems.
	And eventually when you don't solve your problems, they all come together at once.
	And it just happens to have escalated all at the same time.
	You have to hope that just enough places can get the right training for the police that we have one of these things every, you know, there's enough distance in between them.
	Because that simply doesn't feel like we're ever going to have a moment where we don't have these kind of senseless killings.
	Right?
	It just doesn't seem possible.
	Now again, we live in a society where shit happens, right?
	Horrible things happen all the time.
	The religious people are always, you know, trying to, you know, use God as a rationalization for all these different horrible things that happen.
	But, you know, it's so systemic.
	It happens too many times.
	And I feel like even the best possible scenario in the way this is set up, you're going to have it.
	And the only hope can be that maybe we can keep this from happening in greater years in between.
	But it happens what?
	Once a month.
	Right?
	Something crazy like that.
	Often more than that.
	Yes.
	So it's like, that is really where we're at.
	We're at the point where we've turned into Republicans, where we're looking at the least worst possible outcome and then trying to crow about that and be happy about that when we need solutions.
	And again, doesn't it seem as simple as they just need to change how they train cops from day one?
	I've got a lot of solutions on this thing that we might get into in a separate show.
	I actually think, on one hand, I think liberals need to start Going into police forces and law enforcement.
	That's really interesting.
	And just because it's one of those things.
	It's a weird thing to talk about.
	But you know, we have this thing where like, well, that's the type of person who becomes a cop.
	We have to change that.
	Right.
	And we have to organize.
	We have to.
	There's large things we have to work against the atomization of society where we're viewing everybody as enemies.
	We have to organize at a local level.
	We have to change our entire philosophy about what crime is.
	Because what happened, and this goes back to Nixon, and actually it's been in America for forever, but in the modern era this goes back to Nixon, we look at crime as if it's a symptom of bad people.
	It's not.
	There are so many studies and experts that show that crime is a really multifaceted, complicated thing.
	Why do people commit crimes?
	It's not as easy as saying there's some bad dudes out there who need taken care of, right?
	It's it's a. It's a rejiggering of the philosophy of how life works and how societies work.
	And until we start addressing those things, there's just not going to be a lot of progress.
	Well, I'll tell you, whatever percentage of the country that is will never listen to this podcast again when you say stuff like that, you know what I mean?
	The notion that, oh, there could be other factors involved besides you chose to do something really bad and you deserve to either get shot or killed or incarcerated is so anti-American to them.
	And again, you're right.
	Because what is the goal?
	Is the goal to reduce crime?
	Well, if that's the case, look at all the different programs that have been put into place that you're referring to that actually help communities.
	And that's what reduces crime, not the fear of getting arrested.
	Clearly, that's not strong enough.
	at this point to stop criminals from doing things, right?
	It's the fear of getting arrested that doesn't do much, because they're still going to do it because of their desperate situations, which can be ameliorated by certain programs.
	And that's the whole point that we're missing here.
	And I feel like because of this toxic masculinity notion, and what Trump even says about strength and repression of these people, they're just not set up to be able to handle the truth.
	Okay, I have to say a couple things.
	First of all, we also have to address the problem of white supremacy.
	I mean, that's a massive part in all of this.
	I mean, you know, that's the conversation through all this.
	But there's also the next thing, which is an unpleasant thing to talk about.
	We have to make a decision, and this is one of the reasons we're in the position we are.
	We have to look at the numbers and understand, because this is something that was understood and was decided.
	We have to understand that it is more beneficial to society to spend our money and use our resources to make society better.
	That's a better choice than to spend your money on mass incarceration and on you know.
	The entire criminal justice system and and so like that's part of the problem is that we've turned it into an economic discussion for Punitive but we haven't turned it into an economic discussion in terms of why it happens and when we look at it through that lens These people are criminals and the and that's the thing.
	They're not people who commit crimes they are criminals and if you were a criminal you need dealt with and Right?
	And you're an enemy of society as opposed to a member of society who has actually been failed by society.
	And that's tough medicine, but it's true.
	That's that's what's actually happening.
	And then if they happen to be in prison, it fails them there as well.
	Whereas there's another that should be just on the next level of being able to get through and to help and support and transition back to society.
	And yet instead, it's it's a hellhole that continues to continue the cycle.
	It's really horrible.
	And that's going to take, I don't know, a century.
	That's going to take decades and decades of the perfect leadership to be able to affect that change.
	You know, we're going to go to Melissa Ryan here in a second, and I really hope you stick around and listen because I think it was a really great discussion.
	But, you know, we're talking about really large things that seem immovable, but I want to leave people with a little bit of hope.
	I don't know about you, it feels a little bit like public perception on this thing has shifted in the past couple of days.
	And you're hearing a lot of people that maybe you wouldn't have expected who are like, yeah, maybe the police shouldn't kill unarmed black men.
	You're hearing people say black lives matter and they're like, I finally get it.
	I get it that you can't get to all lives matter until you admit that black lives matter.
	It's a step-by-step process.
	You can't just jump over this thing as if it's not a problem.
	I think, and this is like the 60s, which we've talked about a lot, watching it on your TV every night and watching what these people do to the people in the streets brings it home.
	It brings it home.
	And so there is a part of me, and I told myself I wasn't gonna go through this podcast today without saying it, I have hope.
	I do.
	And it's a big, large problem.
	And people like Trump and Cotton and Esper and all these monsters, they're not helping.
	But I have hope today.
	And I really hope our listeners do, too.
	Yeah.
	The juxtaposition of these militaristic-looking cops doing horrible things in the streets with the voiceover of Trump and even Cotton.
	They released one yesterday that's really powerful.
	That kind of stuff is really going to hit home.
	I agree.
	That is one thing that's going to hurt him severely, I think, as we go forward toward November.
	And he's a coward.
	He can't help but be cowardly.
	You know, turning off the lights at the White House.
	I mean, it just, it writes itself.
	So, I have hope and, you know, we're gonna go talk to Melissa Ryan.
	She's gonna talk about disinformation, misinformation, you know, what to expect from the Trump campaign going into 2020 and how they're trying to destroy reality.
	So, stick around.
	Melissa Ryan is next.
	Hey everybody, we have a real treat today.
	We're incredibly lucky, particularly in the moment, to be joined by one of my favorite people on the internet, Melissa Ryan, editor and founder of Control-Alt-Right-Delete and CEO of Card Strategies, an expert in misinformation, disinformation, and extremism.
	Unfortunately, this is one of the more important topics.
	an American society right now.
	I just want to start off the discussion, Melissa, and ask you, as somebody who traffics in this stuff and examines this stuff, how are you feeling about the current moment?
	Obviously, we're in a moment of great crisis.
	There are a lot of different competing things happening here.
	When you look at the landscape and you're looking at this American crisis right now, what are you seeing?
	What are you feeling?
	How are you reacting to this?
	Well, I mean, I think it's a mixture of sadness and anger and frustration.
	And I think it's also a moment of inevitability.
	I mean, you and I have both been on this studying disinformation and extremism and authoritarianism.
	And I think anyone who's in this space all the time Sort of felt the inevitability of eventually, you know, there was going to be a breaking point.
	You know, when you have a president whose goal is to preserve white supremacy and break democracy at all costs, eventually things are going to break and reach a boiling point.
	And I think what worries me is I guess I don't see how we have a de-escalation with a pure absence of national leadership.
	Melissa, I have a question for you, because we were really, I was frustrated on Saturday that we didn't sort of predict that Antifa would become the big blame of what's going on across the country.
	You know, we do a pretty good job, actually, of sort of figuring out what they're going to say.
	So I guess my question to you is, does it do anything to be able to predict ahead of time?
	Does it take away any of the power and make a difference when you have all this misinformation, if you can predict it ahead of time and say, oh, this is what Trump's going to say?
	Does that matter?
	I mean, I think the Antifa stuff is particularly relevant.
	I actually just wrote a report for Right Wing Watch, and we talk about tactics that the right are going to use in 2020.
	And demonizing Antifa, socialism, and leftism is a big one.
	So the thing is, like, the narrative changes, the moments change, but their playbook doesn't change.
	So I think it's actually really helpful.
	To understand sort of what they go back to time and time again so that as a consumer of information you start to recognize it It's like oh, yes, that's what's happening You know, of course, they're going to demonize Antifa.
	Of course, they're going to you know harass a Twitter employee It's really important to educate yourself and start to look for the common patterns and behaviors because they don't vary much No, and I you know, this is one of the things I've been I've been wrestling with over the past couple of I was gonna say days Melissa, but it's actually years of I mean, let's, let's be honest.
	Let's call it what it is.
	And it's, you know, it's like one of those things where back in 2016, it was the summer of 2016 when I started hearing rumors of, you know, collusion with Russia and the possibility that, you know, you don't have to talk about conspiracies.
	You can just talk about symbiotic relationships and parallel relationships.
	And whenever I was like just telling people that this was happening it was just the immediate well these are alarmist conspiracy theories and while we're talking about all this stuff it it seems well it doesn't seem it's true Trump and people like Trump I feel like they hide behind the idea of normalcy bias like the idea that They're like people would never do these things.
	It's so outrageous that somebody would ever try and do this or that the president would vilify.
	I mean, we're going to talk about it later on the podcast.
	Antifa is not a group.
	It's not actually an organization.
	It's it's an idea.
	Right.
	And so, I mean, it's outrageous.
	And on its face, it sounds crazy to say the president is blaming a fictional conspiracy for things that he's done.
	And it automatically sort of gives everything sort of a greasy film, right?
	To even have a discussion about what's going on.
	How do you counteract that?
	What have you found works?
	How do you sort of take the poison out of the water?
	Yeah, I mean, on Antifa, particularly, what I do is I ask somebody asking me about it to define what Antifa is.
	And I have done this, by the way, to a sitting congressman on a stage we were sharing.
	And that tends to, like, change their brains very quickly, because they realize that they're talking about an enemy where they don't really understand.
	And then you can start to talk about, you know, what realistically anti-fascist activists are and what they're doing and what they're not.
	So anything to sort of like break that pattern and ask people to actually think about the thing that they're saying.
	That doesn't necessarily work in all instances, but I find with that one in particular, it works pretty well.
	Well, real fast, Nick, I just want to throw this out there that like so I have a lot of family and a lot of people that I know who are Trump supporters.
	And I've always told everyone that there's two ways you can go about a conversation with a Trump supporter.
	You can either trade headlines, right, and slogans, or you can have a conversation about what's underneath them.
	And usually that sort of breaks, it doesn't break the fever, but it starts.
	Is that sort of what you found?
	Yeah!
	Yeah, and I think also appealing to folks' self-interest.
	I think one mistake that progressives and people on the left make all the time is they, you know, they appeal to a higher moral ground.
	And it's not that folks, our relatives who are on the right, don't think of themselves as moral people.
	It's just their morality is different and centered on different things.
	So before I did this, I was a political strategist.
	And you see over and over again that when you appeal to folks on a moral level on the right, you actually make them often more ingrained in their beliefs.
	But when you use sort of Republican talking points of like, these are patriotic Americans, this is, you know, this is an attempt at conformity or having the American dream, you tend to tend to get harder.
	That said, it's just so much harder now because folks are so ingrained than it ever was.
	You know, I'm from Kentucky.
	I have quite a few Republican relatives.
	My family's, I think, about half Republican, half Democratic.
	And I mean, conversations that I have with people, things I see my own family share on Facebook that I couldn't have even imagined four years ago.
	I also think it's okay just not to engage or just tell people why you're not going to engage with them on this conversation or draw a moral line for our own sanity. - Well, I'm kind of curious.
	It sounds like in order to combat disinformation, you need to take deep dives into that world, right?
	And sort of figure out, well, what is the truth?
	So, you know, to combat this notion that it's Antifa or it's not Antifa, I suspect that you probably have a lot of evidence that does point to other groups that are involved in what's going on across the country now.
	Is that safe to say?
	Um, so I as part of my task this week is to dive into it.
	I was actually offline for much of the weekend, so I haven't had as much chance to dive into it.
	And I'm always very careful until I have information myself or until I have enough secondary sources that I trust not to jump to my own conclusions.
	I think it's extremely possible Uh, that white nationalist groups are, um, exploiting the protests.
	But I also think we have a white supremacist president and we have a police force that have shown themselves to be, uh, white systemic in nature and systemic issues.
	Uh, so, you know, white supremacy absolutely plays a role in this protest.
	Uh, I can't personally say what white nationalist groups are or aren't doing, so I'm happy not to have an opinion on that until I've done the work myself.
	So I'm sure you're familiar with Steve Bannon's quote, flood the zone with shit, right?
	The idea, and it's sort of like a different version of, you know, it's, I mean, Russian propagandists and technologists who, you know, create like postmodern, weird political theater to the point where people lose faith in anything being true.
	And It's a fear of mine and I assume yours and everybody probably listening that we're hurtling towards an era where nobody will know what is true at any given moment and so it just sort of breaks the will and the idea of shared society.
	Do you have hope about that or do you have thoughts about how to combat that?
	Like how is this sort of a thing?
	How do you deal with it?
	This is like a new kind of an enemy.
	Yeah, I mean, I think one of the biggest misconceptions about, you know, Bannon and Trump and these folks who are currently in power, helped Trump get into power, is that they're trying to change people's minds.
	And like you said, it's flooding the zone.
	It's trying to make it so we don't trust anything that we see.
	And at a certain point, it becomes easier just not to think about it rather than trying to parse truth from bullshit.
	I think what gives me hope is that we, you know, They've been doing it a while and it seems to be less and less effective.
	I think a lot in particular about the last few weeks leading up to the midterm elections where you'll remember Trump's language got insanely racist, insanely violent, an escalation beyond what we had ever seen.
	I sat at home terrified of like, oh, we're going to lose so badly.
	And then, of course, you know, Democrats won the House overwhelmingly despite this.
	So I think there is, I hope, I believe there is a limit to how much and how often this works.
	I also think, you know, there's something to at a certain point, you just want the chaos to stop.
	And it's becoming so obvious who is causing the chaos, no matter what we're dealing with.
	You know, Trump pathologically has to make himself at the center of it.
	And so you start to have if he's going to be the face of everything, then you start to have someone to blame.
	So that's what what makes me hopeful.
	You know, one of my big concerns as this continues to have civil unrest across the country, and they're talking with such military terms now from Trump and from Cotton, that, you know, we've seen this in the past.
	This is not some sort of irrational fear of, you know, an itchy trigger finger and something really going wrong.
	And I'm kind of curious if you feel that the truth can get obscured really quickly, like by the government, what really happened if, God forbid, something like a tragedy does happen in one of these protests.
	You know, how quick and how what should we expect on that front, do you think, as far as what's going to end up being rewritten or written as far as what really happened?
	Yeah, I mean, again, the rights playbook doesn't change much.
	So I think they're going to continue to demonize leftist groups.
	They're going to continue to incite violence.
	They're going to continue to have their same interpretation.
	I think the one thing that's interesting, and I don't want to say funny in this moment, but at the same time, you have the Trump campaign that I think...
	So, I have something I've been curious about for a while, and I would be interested to hear your thoughts on it.
	on black men for some time.
	So it's been sort of interesting to watch them thread that needle that they wouldn't have bothered with two years ago. - So I have something I've been curious about for a while and I would be interested to hear your thoughts on it.
	I wanna know who it is that this stuff works on.
	Like who it is, like what is the individual, What is, because I know, I know for my family, um, it's when they're suffering.
	It's when they look for this stuff, you know, when their lives are in trouble or they're, they're, they're suffering sort of things.
	Um, I'd be interested to hear who the, the, the true believers, because I mean, like you said, like the, the language that Trump uses activates like people who are very unwell.
	you know, and we'll go out and send out pipe bombs to people or go and shoot up a Walmart or something like that.
	Um, who, who are these people in your experience?
	Who are the ones that are, because on one hand it's to sort of dissuade everybody, but on the other hand, it is also linked up with certain people.
	Who are those people do you think?
	Yeah, I mean, I think it's important that Trump didn't come out of a vacuum, you know, Trump tapped into a resentment that was already there.
	I mean, for me, it really comes down to people who were were angry and are still not able to get over the fact that we had a black president.
	You know, and I've been I've been working in politics a long time.
	And, you know, after Obama got elected, you know, you immediately go into, you know, the Tea Party movement.
	You know, even Palin before during the campaign, that's just been stoking this racial resentment.
	And I think that's really what it comes down to at the core of it.
	I mean, I think you have some spokes that are probably in anti-democracy.
	For them, it's not about race, it's about an appeal to authoritarianism.
	But really when you look at the vast majority of people politically, that seems to be the tipping point. - So I don't know if you do any kind of historical context in your work, but have we really not gotten any farther than the Southern strategy in Nixon?
	Doesn't that sound exactly like what was going on 40 years ago?
	Yeah, again, the tactics really don't change much.
	I'm going to probably say that three more times in the interview.
	Wow.
	You know, you mentioned the thing about interpretation and how, you know, like, for instance, Fauci had been talking about whether we should go back to school or not and whether they can open.
	And so, to me, it sounded like he was saying, you know, we really can't make a decision that's going to be important.
	But then you hear the right, and they think that he had said, open the schools.
	It's time now.
	They have to go back to school.
	It's perfectly safe.
	It's very strange, right, when you can hear the same words from the same person and it comes out so completely different.
	And I suppose that's something that you must encounter all the time.
	It's been fascinating to watch Trump work against his own administration and the coronavirus in particular, because I feel like what happens is he starts out, you know, trying to be one way and then quickly like he can't help himself.
	He reverts back to, you know, what he always reverts back to.
	But, I mean, he sat at a press conference and told us the CDC wanted us to wear masks while in the same sentence saying, I'm not going to do it, but you can do it if you want.
	And he works against his own administration.
	It's so funny.
	I love that they're still going on about the deep state three years later.
	It's like, you're in power!
	You are the deep state!
	I just had a moment where I was like, I forgot about Dr. Fauci.
	That's how much time is just accelerated right now.
	Oh my god.
	It's crazy how coronavirus has gone from being the only thing in the news cycle to yesterday and today where there was hardly any news about it.
	Yeah, I was taking a look at it today and it was just like you can you can see the spike.
	I mean, you know, and it's just it's spiking.
	And unfortunately, I think the protests are going to spike it as well.
	And, you know, the lack of the reopening bullshit is going to do it, too.
	So.
	Maybe it's not enough time to do it, but I was hoping that you could give a forecast, so to speak.
	Like you said, I think they're really predictable.
	Unfortunately.
	When people ask how you predict things, I'm just like, they don't hide this stuff.
	It's the same movie over and over.
	What do you forecast is going to be...
	Over the summer into November, what do you see the narrative being?
	What do you see the sort of trends being?
	So we can look back on this and just be like, my God, this was very, very obvious.
	Yeah, I mean, I think in terms of types of disinformation to look out for, the big one's going to be voter suppression.
	2020 is a turnout election, and Trump's base isn't going to be enough to help him cross the finish line.
	They can't win a free and fair fight.
	That's gonna be disinformation.
	It's going to be legislative attempts, court attempts.
	They're gonna do everything they can to suppress the vote.
	Specifically, they're going to be targeting black voters with voter suppression.
	We saw this in 2016, Trump's campaign manager actually bragged about running voter suppression ads on Facebook, so they didn't exactly hide it.
	The same claims of rigging and voter fraud.
	Again, we saw this in 2016.
	Trump was saying for weeks that the election was rigged and if he lost, it wasn't going to be a real loss.
	And even after he won, he claimed that there were all these illegal ballots and voting that happened despite the fact that there was no evidence of it.
	Conspiracy mongering.
	You know, Trump just last night retweeted a QAnon activist yet again.
	Conspiracy theorists are just, you know, they are a part of Trump's base and he knows how to appeal to them.
	He's also very good at not necessarily endorsing Q, but sending them enough breadcrumbs and signals.
	He has a very interesting relationship with conspiracy theorists that could be its own podcast.
	Race baiting.
	We talked about this a little earlier with the 2018 election.
	I expect to see a lot more of that cycle with Latinos.
	It'll be interesting to see how much he does towards African-Americans because, again, the campaign is making an effort to get the black vote.
	Reproductive health disinformation.
	This is one we don't talk about enough.
	You saw it happen with the Kavanaugh hearings.
	And really, after the 2018 election, after they didn't do well with immigration rhetoric, they pivoted almost immediately to disinformation about abortion and that video of the governor and claiming he was for infanticide.
	And finally, we talked about this earlier, but demonizing Antifa, socialism, and the left.
	They are going to make anyone of their political opponents the enemy.
	So, you know, just expect a lot of that as well.
	And the dehumanization that comes out of so much of that, whether it's race fading or demonizing folks on the left, they do it with journalists as well.
	And those are, you know, the broad theme of tactics that we're gonna see in 2020.
	I have a question.
	I'm wondering if you've thought about, as far as going into the future, is there anything from like a lawmaking standpoint that we can do to ultimately, once and for all, sort of try and prevent certainly a guy like Trump from being able to get back in office and do what he's doing, and then, you know, anybody else who wants to manipulate it and not sound like a crazy madman on Twitter?
	And let me add to that, because I was going to ask, if you were in charge of social media and you were going to fix it there, like if you could answer that too, like how do we, how does, and by the way, they won't because they're financially benefiting from it, right?
	That's their entire profit structure.
	But if you, if you were the disinformation czar, what, what, what, what gets done?
	What do we do?
	You going to nominate me for that in the next administration?
	Absolutely.
	There's no nomination.
	You just got to get in there.
	That's the way it works.
	You heard it here.
	Yeah, I mean, broadly, I think democracy is broken.
	We're going to have trouble for years because the one thing that the Trump administration has done really well is appointed as many crazy right wing judges as they possibly can.
	So that's going to make this extremely difficult.
	I think two things that are going to be important fights.
	One, abolishing the Electoral College.
	Uh, because that is just, you know, it doesn't reflect the majority on how we elect the president.
	I think the other is really looking at expanding voting rights, uh, fighting back, uh, against voting rights and, and voting suppression.
	Uh, that's going to be the biggest fundamental reform.
	Uh, after that, I think we really have to look at our, our campaign finance system.
	Uh, again, this comes from working in politics before, but the amount of money that goes in into political campaigns on both sides and The amount of coordination that's allowed is insane.
	So I think that's going to be very important.
	On social media in particular, regulation is definitely coming, assuming we have a democratic administration.
	One thing that really concerns me is I think the social media companies have been two steps ahead.
	They're already thinking about lobbying for the next administration.
	Facebook just started a group Uh, for lobbying for themselves against regulation.
	And frankly, and this is going to get me in trouble as a former Democratic consultant, but they have very chummy relations with Democratic consultants, uh, who are going to, uh, assuming we get a big majority in November, who are going to take a lot of credit for that win for the online ads that they run, um, who I think are going to be doing some, uh, you know, free lobbying for Facebook as well.
	Um, so I think we really have to like regulation is coming.
	It's just thinking about how to make sure that the tech companies don't write it in full.
	I'm actually less worried about what specifically the regulation is and more worried about how many opportunities do we give Facebook and Google and Twitter to water it down at every opportunity.
	Shit, she's got my vote, Nick.
	Good, mine too.
	Can I vote twice?
	All right, well, everybody, we've been talking with Melissa Ryan, editor and founder of Control-Alt-Right-Delete and CEO of Card Strategies.
	Thank you so much for coming on.
	Where can the good people find you?
	Yeah, well, Control-Alt-Right-Delete is a weekly newsletter that covers all things disinformation and extremism, and you can find that at Control-Alt-Right-Delete.com.
	You can also follow me on Twitter.
	I'm at Melissa Ryan, and Jared can confirm I tweet a lot.
	Good stuff.
	All right, thank you so much, Melissa.
	Thanks for having me.
	So that was Melissa Ryan, and it was a fabulous conversation.
	I hope you guys got a chance to really just absorb what she was saying.
	And yeah, again, provide some hope, I suppose, to figure out what we can do and what we can put into place to prevent this from happening, to move forward and get progress on, you know, getting to a better government.
	So it's nice when you have really smart people who have been looking at this for a long time and can give us insight like that very clearly.
	And hopefully more of her will be more of her to convince people.
	Yeah, you know, what I found particularly interesting about the conversation is when you talk about disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, it feels so large and nebulous that there's nothing you can do.
	You know, like a toxic gas, you can't grab it and, you know, you can't grab a tear gas canister and throw it back at the cops, right?
	I thought that was really, really good, and I was so happy to have Melissa on there.
	So thanks for coming on, Melissa.
	As always, everybody, we are so grateful that you come and listen to this podcast.
	We're trying really hard to put this stuff into context, trying to fight this really, really awful thing that is happening, and I hope you'll continue joining us in that fight.
	We have a lot of people asking what they can do to help.
	We're not taking donations.
	We're not taking any of that stuff.
	If you can, please, please, please like, subscribe, comment on this thing.
	I know that sounds just tertiary, but it actually helps.
	And everyone, by the way, I'd be remiss if we ended this without saying it.
	People have been helping us in huge ways.
	This podcast is growing by leaps and bounds, and we're very, very happy about it, and we're so glad that you're here.
	So please, like, subscribe, comment, all that good stuff.
	If you want to follow us on social media, my friend Nick here, Nick Halsman, is at Can You Hear Me?
	SMH.
	I am at J.Y.
	Sexton.
	We will be back.
	Hopefully we don't have to do an emergency message again.
	My God, if we could avoid that, that would be fantastic.

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