SCOTUS Upholds Gay Rights - Another Victory To Celebrate
Surprisingly, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of LGBTQ Americans receiving protection from discrimination. Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss reasons for hope, reveal the history of the Federalist Society that has been shaping the country's judiciary, the story of political control no one wants to talk about, and Donald Trump's obvious failings.
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So this court saying for the first time ever that employers who discriminate against individuals simply for their sexual orientation or for their transgender status are in fact violating the law.
This was a ramp that had no steps, no handrail.
The president had on leather shoes.
Of course, he's going to take his time and go down and make sure that he doesn't slip.
I got it.
Nobody wants to fall down in front of cameras.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
As always, I am Nick Hauselman, joined by Jared Yates-Sexton, and we have another hopeful podcast for you guys.
It's the third one in a row, I believe, Jared, and it's kind of hard to believe after the morass we've had to pull ourselves through the last 50 episodes before this.
You make it sound like the people listening who haven't heard the past episodes should not go back and listen to those past episodes.
It sounds like it's some sort of slog or something.
We've been living in rough times.
We've been living in rough times.
And, you know, a moment like today, and of course what Nick is talking about, is a historic and long overdue ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States, ruling that LGBTQ Americans are protected in their employment and shouldn't be discriminated against.
It is not only welcome, but I would argue it's just momentous and amazing good news.
Absolutely, but it also is stupid that we actually have to waste the Supreme Court's time to make this clear to employers that you can't fire them if they're gay.
That is what's so ridiculous in 2020, that we have to actually legislate that.
And I will say, when you read the opinions, and it's like hundreds of pages of the dissent from the Supreme Court, the general gist I was taking away from it was that They kind of felt like this is not what they are supposed to decide.
And that's why they were dissenting.
And I felt like even Kavanaugh had paid lip service to the notion that this is a monumentous thing.
It's important to protect these people's rights.
But it just simply shouldn't be in front of the Supreme Court to decide.
It should be for Congress.
And that's what they were saying, and I'm waiting for you to now detonate all over me.
First of all, any time that anybody wants to talk sense about Brett Kavanaugh, my skin just sort of recoils and my soul wants to leave my body.
This is a situation.
I want to say a couple things because we're going to go a little bit deep on the Supreme Court and the way that the nation's judiciary has been rigged by the right wing in America.
But before we do, first of all, I got to give credit where credit is due.
Chief Justice Roberts, who continues to show himself to be not necessarily an impartial juror, but as close to impartial as you can possibly be.
Like if we lived in a sane America, Justice Roberts is the kind of Republican we would be having arguments with about, you know, the scale and scope of law and taxes and stuff instead of Trumpism and fascism.
Of course, Gorsuch weighed in on this thing.
So it's a very hopeful moment in that regard, but we can't let this moment, plus also the maelstrom of insanity that goes on in this country, to hide the fact that this should have happened a long time ago.
I mean, this should have been done.
This should have been sealed, signed, sealed, delivered.
But we also have to take a moment to point out that the reason why it hasn't been is the same reason why women aren't given protection under the law and aren't guaranteed equality.
And that is because the right wing in this country has been engaged in an excessively organized and successful fight against equality on all grounds.
And they do it to protect white patriarchal supremacy.
and heteronormative supremacy, let's throw that on there.
And they have succeeded.
They really have.
And it's watching these things fall brick by brick.
And I wanna point out, it feels like the day that gay marriage got approved.
It felt like a miracle.
It was like, I can't believe I live in a country suddenly that allows this.
And that's part of, like, what I would call left-wing melancholia.
This idea that progress can't happen in this country, but what we've definitely been seeing over the past couple of weeks, progress is possible once people realize their power and once they fight for it.
I mean, we can't talk about this thing without saying that, I mean, my God, how many people had to fight to get this done?
You know, this is a tremendous, tremendous victory.
Well, what's what's interesting about the Supreme Court and how this usually plays out in the past has been that the the judges that we all think are going to be really conservative tend to start to skew.
Well, I don't even want to say liberal, but sort of more practical, I suppose.
So Joseph, sorry, Justice Kennedy, Anthony Kennedy.
I don't think it's moving in that direction.
Reagan and ended up being one of the guys who always sided with the quote unquote like liberals on the court after enough time.
And I feel like Gorsuch is could seem to be moving in that direction, too.
And I don't think it's moving in that direction.
I think if you're smart enough to be nominated to the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh side, I think that there is this notion, except for these other assholes on the other side, like Alito and Clarence Thomas, when you actually have that kind of ability to analyze when you actually have that kind of ability to analyze and be that smart, it kind of makes sense to me that, yes, they're going to move into a direction that's progressive, right?
And if it's progressive, then it usually sits on the side of liberalism, if you will.
So this isn't necessarily surprising, but I do feel like it's stirring up the right because they thought they were going to have Trump in their pocket and they're going to be able to install all these judges and control everything.
In reality, we've seen this time and time again where they're not as conservative as you think they are.
So one of the things that's happening here, and you know, we could go rounds for hours about whether or not Supreme Court justices should have a lifetime appointment, but I will tell you one of the benefits of that is that the modern Republican dysfunction, the Republican Party's disease, which is trending towards fascism at alarming rates, A lot of it has to do with economic incentive and political incentive, right?
So like the Republican Party has gone further and further right because there is a market for this thing.
It's been there since the 80s and the 90s and has only grown with Fox News as you want to sell books, right?
You want to go out and you want to be a Rush Limbaugh type bomb thrower.
But also, the Republican Party, and we've talked about this before, sort of cannibalized itself.
Fox News pushed Republicans right, and then that created the Tea Party, and then they had to absorb the Tea Party and move further right, and then Donald Trump, and they had to move further right until they're just off the radar insane.
The people who are on this court don't have to pander like that, right?
Unless they are a tried and true, just cruel asshole, and we're going to get into who those people are and why they're where they are.
They don't have to play that game, right?
Because they know that their legacies are going to be judged and they understand law.
But we do have to talk about, like Kennedy, and one of the reasons why we're in the situation we are.
And this is a little bit of a catch-up lesson for some people who might not understand this.
If you want to know what's happened in the Supreme Court and what's happening in America, and one of the reasons we got Donald Trump and the Republican Party is the way that it is, you have to understand the Federalist Society, which is a group that got founded in the early 1980s at Yale and the University of Chicago.
This is a group of people who decided that they were going to push American law in not just a conservative direction, but like an extremely conservative direction, right?
And they started pushing this idea of originalism.
I'm sure some of you still wake up screaming, sweating in the middle of the night thinking about Antonin Scalia.
And you know, that's what that monster was about.
It's the idea that the Constitution is not a living document.
It should still be treated the way that it was, which is actually bullshit because you can't.
You can't treat the Constitution like it was written at the moment because it was written in the 18th century by slaveholding elites, you know, and and this whole argument that you have to.
It just goes to all that we keep talking about, which is malleability of power, which is what these people were about, and they were willing to support anybody at any given time as long as it meant power.
The notion that you would treat the Constitution as a dead document is political.
It makes it political because then what the Supreme Court justices can do is what the Republicans can do, which is simply what you said, have a very malleable sense of what their ideology is.
They can decide at any moment at any time how they want to try and manipulate this notion to fit their preconceived notions of like politically how they want this case to go.
That's the problem with it and we see this in religion as well where you have people who want to cite the Bible and try and live their life like what the Bible outlines which is what the justification is for saying that you know homosexuality is wrong and we need to outlaw that and all these kind of things.
And yet they'll also be able to manipulate it in their favor when they want something they want.
So that's the problem with this.
It's just manipulated into however they want to adjust this is based on their political views.
And when you're that extreme and you're sitting on the Supreme Court and you have a lifetime appointment, This is where we get so concerned.
And obviously, we're really looking at this through the lens of Roe v. Wade, right?
I don't really know if anyone else is talking about... I mean, I know that this was very important to get this settled, as far as rights in the workplace.
But we're really looking at this, how is this going to affect the judging when Roe v. Wade comes back up and they're going to try and reverse this?
Which is really what this whole thing has been about, certainly since the mid-2000s, right?
I mean, even before then.
I mean, from the moment that Roe v. Wade was decided, it took a couple years, but it eventually became a political cudgel because they understood that this was a way that they could appeal to evangelicals to shore up their base.
Real fast, I want to go way, way back to the founding of the country when the Constitution was ratified.
I always like to tell people this because people don't know it.
It's not taught to us, which is the Constitution.
Technically, the people who made it, they weren't even supposed to make a Constitution.
They were actually in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation.
It just so happens that James Madison, who, by the way, his silhouette is the figurehead of the Federalist Society, right?
James Madison hangs out before everybody, sketches out a new constitution, a new government, and everyone gets there and they're like, are we going to do some work?
And he's like, I already did it.
Let's vote on it.
And everyone's like, we don't have authority.
He's like, ah, who cares?
So eventually what ends up happening when the constitution gets passed is you start having a group The Federalist, right?
Like James Madison and all the people.
So you eventually have John Adams who becomes a Federalist president.
John Adams was a crazy loon.
And this is why this stuff isn't taught in American history.
It's why American history jumps from the founding to, I don't know, like the Louisiana Purchase.
Right?
It just jumps right over this period.
Because John Adams basically takes a hatchet to the Constitution.
He starts taking away people's constitutional rights.
He starts booting them out of the country.
And the Federalists actually become defined by their fear of the other and a fear of loss of power.
So what you have in the election of 1800, they call it the Revolution of 1800.
It's where Thomas Jefferson wins, right?
and the Democratic Republicans take over from the Federalists.
And, you know, Jefferson's like, these people are power mad.
These Federalists, right?
And they need to go away.
They need to be done with because they are dangerous to the American experiment.
And one of the major defining problems with America is the fight between Jeffersonian democracy and the Federalists, right?
And we don't talk about that because those two things are kind of incompatible.
So you take Jefferson or the idea of freedom or democracy.
He always said that, like, the Constitution should be amended constantly or there should be revolutions all the time.
The Federalists wanted to hold on to their power.
In fact, quick little note just for trivia, The Supreme Court wasn't even supposed to decide whether or not laws were constitutional.
That actually came about in 1803 because of John Marshall, who was Jefferson's second cousin, who hated the shit out of Thomas Jefferson, and as a part of the Federalists, they wanted to rein him in.
And they wanted to make the government as a way to trap him, which if you followed any Democratic administration over the past few years, you understand.
But this is the long and weird history of not just the Federalist Society, but the Republican Party and American history, which is it's about people who have power, who want to keep power, and they'll do whatever they can to maintain it, which is what the Federalist Society and what the Republican Party is defined by. which is what the Federalist Society and what the Republican Okay, should we wrap up now?
Well, I just, I want to throw one quick thing out here.
And this is, this is unfortunately something I don't think people understand.
That's right.
The Federalist Society is not just a group of like legal people.
It's, it's a, it's more or less like a secret organization that isn't so secret that goes in and tells Republican presidents what to do.
Like, it's not like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush or, you know, Donald Trump, particularly, had any sort of idea about what they cared about.
You know, they might have, like, a weird little grasp on, like, you know, legal stuff.
But, like, groups like them and the Heritage Foundation, whenever, like, Reagan or Bush or Trump got elected, they came in, they're like, here's your operating manual, here's how you run the government, just go out there and shake people's hands.
And that's how we got here.
And if anybody has, maybe you don't follow the right people, The Federalist Society people today, and this is a reason for Hopenick, they're pissed.
They are pissed off because Roberts, who is a Republican nominee, and Gorsuch, who is a Republican nominee, went against this thing.
And their masks have fallen off.
They want a theocratic, Christian, conservative America.
And that was dealt a major blow today.
And they have all... I mean, if you pay attention to the right people, they're like, why in the hell did we ever support Donald Trump?
Because that's the one reason these people supported him.
We'll get judges.
Well, they got judges.
And look what happened.
Well, let's just point that out.
Like you said, it's their judge.
Donald Trump has no conception about what a judge is, who they are.
Never even cared.
He's like, when can I get my money?
When can I start doing all the graft?
When do I get to get behind the wheel of a truck?
Yeah, I want to get in front of a fire truck on the lawn.
So that's the thing.
They can't be mad at Trump because they're the ones who picked it.
And he's the guy who's like, whatever, yeah, let's nominate him, no problem.
That's what's horrible about this whole thing.
It's not even horrible.
That's what's so dumb about the federal society in general is that they don't even understand that they created this.
And it's just it's just frustrating because I can remember in the mid 2000s like during the you know the Iraq war stuff where that you know the drumbeat got louder for like these out-of-control judges you know they're legislating from the bench that was like the big you know phrases that you were hearing from the right and how they were so determined there was books being written about it and just demanding And this is the beginning of where we got to where McConnell, I think it's his proudest achievement is that he's going to have, you know, whatever.
And by the way, Trump keeps lying about the number of federal judges he appoints.
It's way off.
It's like, I think it's 200.
He keeps saying 300 or something like that, if I'm not mistaken.
And it's like, if we're not careful, though, he's going to get another bunch in there.
And if he wins, he will get to 300, no problem.
And which, by the way, I mean, that makes me nervous.
Does he think that he's going to win again and get another four years, get another 100 judges in there?
Is that why he's already talking that way?
They are.
Well, it's the one appeal that he has.
He can't handle a pandemic.
He can't handle an economy.
Get me back and I'll get more judges.
And this is a warning that I want to throw out.
And again, this is a podcast of hard truth.
Democrats and liberals have sort of given up a lot of the organization territory that Republicans have won.
Because what you just said is right.
Not only do they have control of the Supreme Court, theoretically, They have the federal judiciary.
They have all these state positions.
They have done that work.
And I don't know about you, Nick.
I don't want to dedicate my life to judges.
Otherwise, I would have been a lawyer.
But, like I keep saying in this podcast, and people keep asking us, what can we do?
Well, I keep talking about grassroots, bottom-up over top-down.
You have to stop worrying about just the presidency and senatorial races and congressional races.
You have to start working on the local level.
You gotta run for stuff.
You gotta work local to get local people elected.
And on top of that, it doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or a Liberal.
You can be a Republican or a Conservative.
You have to take that party back over.
You have to comply if you don't want to burn it to the ground and start over.
You have to reform it from the bottom up because that is a sick fascistic party.
So if you care about this stuff and you care about like if you want to have wins like today, you have to go out and organize on the same level that these people have been because these people are the ones who are working while you're asleep.
You know what I mean?
They're the ones with the connections.
They're the ones with the deep pockets.
They're the ones who are working and, you know, running around the world making this stuff happen.
And meanwhile, while the rest of us are just like, I don't know, I don't know anything about this judge I'm voting for or whatever, that's like real stuff.
That like determines life and death.
It determines, you know, if you want to talk about law enforcement and stuff, the judicial system is just as rotten to the core.
And it's because we've conceded so much of it to the Republican Party and the people who understand that's where real power comes from.
It's been their power base for decades now.
Yeah, and we also keep seeing that Trump is nominating judges who aren't qualified.
Their rating, I mean, again, the rating from the Bar Association apparently doesn't hold much water these days anyway.
Oh, they don't care.
Yeah.
But you like the thing.
And I think that's what we need to do.
At some point, if we ever do our homework podcast episode where we discuss what needs to absolutely change, I don't like the way we appoint our Supreme Court justices now anyway.
I just feel like it's too much of the power of the president to simply pick somebody – We need to have some other method, at least before he does that, to get them to that level where they are qualified.
Kavanaugh wasn't qualified.
I don't think he was rated very highly at all, from the bar at least.
And it would be nice to figure out a better way that's a little bit more democratic than what they have now.
Considering they are weighing in on so many laws now and changing things.
And by the way, thank God that they do.
Because if the right wing, or whatever we want to call them, conservative judges had their way, then we probably wouldn't have had integration in schools.
Right?
They would have said, no, it's not for us to decide.
Oh, wait a minute.
Am I going crazy?
The Supreme Court had to decide that, right?
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
And then Kennedy sent him in, right?
Remind me now.
My mind is going crazy.
No, they held up segregation and they held up unequal rights over and over and over again until they eventually didn't.
And they eventually ordered, you know, the states to desegregate and the schools to come together, and that separate was never unequal, or separate was never equal, right?
And you're exactly right.
That would never happen now.
And what you just said about Kavanaugh and the Bar Association, which, if you really want to talk about the Federalist Society, this is how gross of a group they are, right?
They have basically said, oh, we reject the bar, right?
Which is kind of like rejecting, I don't know, Fauci or the WHO or any of these groups, right?
We reject your reality.
You're not impartial.
You are fake news, right?
Which is just a continuation of the modern problem.
Meanwhile, what kept Kavanaugh What kept his nomination going?
It was a handful of Republican senators who knew full and well that he was a sexual predator and a disgusting human being and shouldn't be on the court.
But what were they afraid of?
They were afraid of not getting re-elected.
They were afraid of being primaried.
They were afraid of their fundraising drying up.
Or they were afraid of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, a fascist, putting the full spotlight of the eye of Sauron on them and their safety And, you know, their way of life being destroyed.
And that's the problem.
Because what you just said, it kind of gets boiled down to this.
What we're talking about right now is a really sick system.
The American political system is really sick.
And, you know, coronavirus is just making it obvious.
You know, this is a hopeful episode.
We're trying to maintain it.
Coronavirus is growing.
And basically everyone's just throwing up their hands like, I don't know, what do you want me to do?
Our government doesn't work.
It's been rendered completely impotent and it's been bought and sold.
So what we're seeing right now is the government doesn't really work.
It's a really sick, infected body.
And whether or not we need to change it based on I don't know, term limits, or whether or not the president should be nominating them, or how many votes should have to do it, or whatever.
That's a different story altogether, but it's just sick.
The body as it is has been pushed to the point where it goes back to the common denominator we're always talking about, which is you can't have shared society and shared governance if you don't have shared reality, and if everybody isn't playing by the rules.
And that goes to, like, McConnell.
I mean, there's no reason why Mary Garland is not on the Supreme Court right now, except for McConnell was just like, well, what are rules?
Right.
What are rules?
But that's the key thing I think where the progressives on the court have to take into consideration that you're right.
It's a complete, it's frozen.
Congress will not get anything done.
McConnell will not take any bills.
How many bills have they sent over to try and become law?
Hundreds.
And so you have to imagine that Sotomayor and all the other judges are like realizing this is why they have to do this because they see nothing is going to get done in the Congress anyway.
Somebody has to step in here and do something.
It does.
I'm glad that you brought up Merrick Garland only because it's been gnawing at me that somehow McConnell had enough foresight back in around this time in 2016 to not go through with the process and wanting to wait.
At that time, though, it was so clear that Hillary Clinton was going to win.
It was kind of dumb.
And I think that's why everyone sort of shrugged because we were like, all right, well, Hillary, we'll just we'll just put him up and he'll get nominated instead.
How did he know?
I mean, you could just tell me, oh, it's just part of the gridlock.
He's just going to try and delay it as much as he can just for whatever.
But I don't know, man.
It always rang strange to me that he somehow knew that they were going to be able to take that election.
You know what I'm saying?
I don't want to get into the weeds on any kind of conspiracy, but it just seems strange to me.
And I'm wondering if there's evidence now about what they're talking about that indicates that they think that Trump's going to win again in the same kind of way.
Well, you know, I've been thinking about McConnell and institutional Republicans, you know, your Paul Ryans.
I think with Trump, I think at least Paul Ryan assumed he was going to lose, right?
How Mitch McConnell felt, I mean, he held his card so close to his chest, we have no idea.
But I think for a lot of these people, they saw Trump as, you know, it's like putting on a jacket.
I think he holds his chin really close to his chest.
I think he holds everything.
And, you know, it's like putting on a jacket that you haven't worn since the year before and you find like a $5 bill in it.
You know, it's found money, is what Trump was.
And I think for a lot of them, that's how it worked.
In this case, and here's where we go from hope to hope to caution.
We, the numbers look really good right now.
They look really good.
Biden is up in most swing states.
I mean, you have, God, I think I saw the other day that Arkansas is considered a toss-up right now.
He, in like generic swing state balance, he's up 14, right?
It's also still June, June 15th, according to my calendar, but what is time?
Who knows what's going to happen?
Who knows where this thing's going to go?
Who knows what all is going to happen?
And this is where the caution comes in.
Today's a big win.
Today's a huge, huge victory.
And I have to tell you again, I've said on this podcast, American politics, particularly for a progressive or a liberal or somebody who wants progress or liberalism, It is a heartbreaking endeavor, so enjoy the wins where you can get them.
But we're not good at processing wins, right?
We have a tendency sometimes to take our eyes off the ball.
It's not the time.
We have a movement that's developing.
We have a fascistic president who, if he gets in again, it's not just the judiciary, it's the rule of law in general.
So that's the caution.
This is a big win.
This is a thing to celebrate.
But it's not over.
Not even by a long shot.
So this is all sort of making me think about what we're doing with these protests because it's really strange the idea that we're protesting against an entity that is directly on the ground at the protests who are supposed to keep the peace and keep these people safe.
And it's a it's not often that we see that like that, you know, if you want to see protests against, you know, Trump in front of the White House and the cops are on the periphery and they're just keeping the peace.
But this is in your face at the cops themselves.
And I think it's stirring up a lot of these issues that we're seeing that do tend to talk about power and who has power and how we're supposed to handle these things.
And on Twitter, that long thread of examples of hostility and overstepping their bounds with the cops and being way too aggressive and violent with citizens, that thread is over like 500 tweets now, when it was like a couple hundred when we talked like a week ago.
And that's what's so concerning to me about this is that it's like that's getting out of control as we progress into the summer where we're going to see a lot more of these protests.
We um so again like the the the main narrative that we're given is that this is about George Floyd's murder um but actually who can actually keep track of uh how many murders there's been since then or how many assaults there have been since then it's it's an almost impossible thing and You know, everyone tried, and I talked about it on here too, everyone tried to be like, OK, well, we had this uprising and now it's George Floyd's funeral and now we're done, right?
That's how the media tried to play it, like the normal sort of narrative that it is.
Meanwhile, the other night I turn on and I live in Georgia, down the street and exit I pass all the time, a Wendy's is on fire because Rayshard Brooks was murdered there and in just a senseless murder, a stupid murder.
All of a sudden, it becomes very, very clear to anybody that it shouldn't be.
I mean, it's like it's 75 to 80% of Americans now get it.
This group is supposed to be, we treat cops like they're like a priest class, right?
Like the moment that you become a cop, You are dedicated to law and order, Nick.
And like, you are no longer a human.
You are a tool of law and order.
And that is the only thing you're dedicated to.
But it's not.
A lot of these people go into law enforcement because they want to be oppressors.
They want to be punishers, right?
They want to go out and put people in their place.
And here's the thing.
This isn't new.
America was founded on this concept.
Again, one of the reasons why James Madison was there creating the Constitution in the convention hall was because the Articles of Confederation weren't putting down rebellions, right, of poor people, of oppressed people, and they needed an agreement between the North and the South on slaves and on white supremacy.
That's why that document got created.
From the very founding of America, this has been the truth.
This isn't just about a murder.
It's about oppression.
And it's about, it's about reaching a fever pitch.
Like there's a point, I mean, I've quoted a couple of times on here.
You know, there's the old poem.
It's like, there's some shit I will not eat.
And people aren't going to eat it anymore.
They're not going to just sit by and let this be idle.
And unfortunately, we are going to see more of this stuff because they can't help themselves.
The eyes of the world were on American police and they killed a person.
You know what I mean?
Like they couldn't even, they just couldn't even help it.
But to unnecessarily kill this person.
And unfortunately we're going to see more of it.
And as this campaign heats up, there's going to be a lot more tension.
And God, I hope there's not going to be more bloodshed.
But it feels almost inevitable.
Who knows what it's going to be.
A couple of things.
First, the video came out.
Someone had a cell phone video.
Isn't it convenient that the body cams both fall off in the struggle so you don't really see the most important part of this?
And then they don't really show in the cell phone camera either exactly what happens.
But, you know, I mean, obviously, it doesn't need to be said.
They had his license.
They had his car.
He runs away.
They just go get him.
It's not a problem.
They can't just shoot him in the leg, I guess.
This is all part of the training that they need to be, you know, tore down.
They had, you know, a long conversation that was very calm before leading up to this, where, you know, he was drunk and he pulled the car over because he knew he couldn't operate the car.
And then to watch them, you know, So I've written about this, but I haven't talked about it on the podcast, so I'll go ahead and I'll say it here.
in the field, which he could have denied.
And then the way they kind of quickly try and grab him and arrest him without explaining anything.
It's just wrong, it's all bad.
And you have to imagine that someone's gonna watch that from the police department and say, "No, that's exactly how we train them, they're fine." - So I've written about this, but I haven't talked about it on the podcast.
So I'll go ahead and I'll say it here.
When I was 24, 25, I was in graduate school.
I was in a really bad way.
Like a terrible, terrible way in my life.
And I was having an existential crisis and a personal meltdown.
And one night I had way too much to drink and I was driving home from a bar and I got pulled over by a cop.
I got Caught dead to rights drinking and driving and it could have ruined my entire life.
And let me tell you what happened.
That cop came up to my car and asked me to come back to his cruiser.
And sit and talk with him for awhile.
I went into the front seat of the cruiser and talked with the cop for a couple of hours and sobered up and then he reminded me that I had a lot to lose and I had a bright future ahead of me and then he followed me home to make sure that I got home safely.
Wow.
Now, now, here's the thing.
No molesting or anything?
That is white privilege.
That is white privilege.
You know what I mean?
Oh yeah.
That is, that is, that is the, and by the way, it is such a weird thing to talk about because on one hand, that person took mercy on me and that affected my entire life, right?
I would never drink and drive again.
That's it.
And right then, all of a sudden, my life started getting better and more in focus.
So that was a mercy.
But also, that's white privilege defined.
That would not have happened if I was a young African-American man.
Like, this person, and I watch it, and, you know, people... God, it's what Fox News makes all their money doing.
They're like, well, he shot a Taser at him.
It's a Taser!
He actually didn't even like fire it at them.
It wasn't like he was gonna hit them.
He just fired it wildly as he ran away.
He lives in an America where he sees black men murdered.
So he tried to get away.
You know?
That's not how policing should work.
That's not how America should work.
And it is...
It is as clear cut and obvious that this is wrong and we all have to start looking at our own privilege and we all have to start understanding with some empathy and we have to get creative.
We have to understand that's not the way policing should work and that's not the way society should work.
Let me ask you this.
Why didn't the Tamir Rice murder spark the kind of riots or the kind of protesting we see now?
Why do you think that that one, because if we don't remember, it's a kid on a playground.
Cops pull up, and we have it on video, just like we have, you know, the other stuff.
They literally, I mean, it was in 10 seconds, right?
Pull out, shoot him.
Boom.
Dead.
Why do you think that that was?
You know, I, there was...
There's a whole host of things.
I mean, that's the other thing.
We can't actually even talk about this out in public or on the news because it feels like it's, it feels like it's not proper.
But this would not have happened if it wasn't during the presidency of Donald Trump.
If it wasn't happening in the age of social media, particularly where it is right now, or during a pandemic.
You know, the United States government failed... is still failing everyone and is aggressively failing everyone.
We're all pissed off about it.
Injustice is obvious.
Donald Trump is a racist asshole who can't help but spew white supremacist propaganda every time he opens his mouth.
And, you know, I'm sorry, but all this stuff... There were days there where you couldn't get away from George Floyd's murder.
You just couldn't.
Why wouldn't it piss you off?
Why wouldn't it want to make you get out there?
But yeah, the timing, unfortunately, was right.
And America works and fits and starts with movements and protests.
And this one just ended up.
It was all these different things coming together.
I mean, I think that is a lot of it.
But I also do feel like leadership is a really important part of all of this.
Who was in charge?
You know, this was 2014 when Tamir Rice was shot and killed under Obama.
And we now have... So I think that what that says is, based on the reaction we have today and this past couple weeks, that so much of this is against Trump.
You know what I mean?
So much of the foundation of this is fueled against what he has done and what people are recognizing he has made normal.
And you pointed out on your Twitter feed every day and in threads and how deeply rooted what he is doing and how it signals people and how it's changed.
And certainly the black population in the country in this country sees it clear as day and understand how powerful that is and why we need to do something to stop this now.
So I feel like that's really the reason.
And it's really heartening that gives us hope right this is where we are because at least we now have a movement that can rally behind biden and just to get him out plus the never trumpers who also want to be part of this to some degree um but it also makes me wonder you know i i can't i wake up every day just thanking god that we haven't had an international incident we've really had to deal with yet and hopefully we'll make it till november without having to deal with you know
i'm talking about like a provocation from north korea or anything in iran and they tried a little bit but that you know can you imagine what would happen based on how he responds to what we've already had here that's you know it's been already so terrible That's what makes, keeps me up at night.
You know, I've been doing research right now on a project and one of the things I've been having to do recently is really research the rise of far-right white supremacist terrorist groups around the world and movements, you know.
Trumpism, what's happening in Brazil, what's happened in Hungary, obviously what's happened in Russia.
This is a situation where right now there's a far-right white supremacist president, and if it continues to look like he could possibly lose in November, you know, when the stars are aligned and when you have a worldwide movement in alignment like that, a lot of the times if they think that they're gonna lose power, they'll do something.
And that's whether or not it's, you know, creating a crisis or capitalizing on a crisis or forming some sort of, I don't know, an axis.
You know, it happens.
I'm worried about that.
And I will say just to bring this back to hope and again back to a word of caution.
The hope here is that Donald Trump kind of drug white supremacy in America's problems out in the open.
You know what I mean?
Like just him being president and being so obviously incompetent and terrible has made all this stuff very evident and very easy to grasp and understand.
Yeah.
If he gets beaten in November, that doesn't mean this is over.
And I'm sorry, it just, it doesn't.
It doesn't mean that in January, if he, if he either gets carried screaming and kicking out of the White House or if he leaves, you know, and goes and starts Trump News or whatever he does, just because Joe Biden or somebody else takes the oath of office doesn't mean that America's ills are cured.
And people need to understand that, that this is a, again, today's a big victory.
In the past couple of weeks have been big victories.
It is a long and arduous path to make this country anything approaching human and fair and good again.
And you know, unfortunately it is.
It's founded in a lot of misery and bloodshed and sacrifice, and we just we gotta keep our eyes on the prize.
The only problem I have is that, you know, Biden is not that guy who is going to spearhead a radical, you know, tearing down of the police system we have now.
And which is, I would argue that people, I think a lot of people would agree that that's what we need to do.
And he's not that guy.
He is going to display lip service to, you know, some reforms and pass a couple of things here and put some lipstick on it.
But that's the problem is he's not that guy.
So we're already talking about four years until or whatever he's done.
before we can really get into the meat and bones of, you know, reform and change.
So we're getting late in the podcast.
So this is the point where we can get deep in the weeds about something and just sort of, you know, intangible.
There is a part of me that actually gains a little bit of hope from that because we've talked about it, about these protests in this movement.
One of the reasons it is so successful is because there's not necessarily a figurehead.
It's just sort of spontaneous and everywhere all at once, right?
Again, it's grassroots bottom up.
If Biden gets in and if this movement or whatever you want to call it continues, it'll be a counterbalance.
And because what's happened is Democrats and Democratic leaders have always defined what the left was when in fact they're mostly center-left or centrist, right?
I mean, there's a couple of liberals out there who like pull it farther left.
Maybe the movement is the counterbalance.
to someone like a Biden or a traditional Democrat.
So maybe all of a sudden the Overton window or the spectrum starts moving a little bit.
And who knows?
I mean, movements birth leaders.
We don't even know.
There might be people right now who are already considering running for Congress or the Senate or the presidency eventually someday out of this because people in moments of great upheaval, what you end up finding is you find leaders like Martin Luther King or John Lewis, right?
All of a sudden you start realizing that you are putting through a trial of fire the leaders of tomorrow.
So there's hope there, but there's also a fear that goes to what you were just saying, which is if all of a sudden it becomes, you did it, we won, the struggle is over, everything's fine.
That doesn't do anything, right?
That actually just puts like the stamp of history on it and then we move forward and the problems just continue, which they can't.
They just can't.
But there were other candidates where we could have said, you know, we won and this is great and we are now going to go on a path that's going to really, you know, radically change the policies that need to be changed.
Biden is not that guy.
And I was even arguing, OK, let's just get him in there.
We'll have the way station in between the Trump and then the radical change we need.
But, you know, we've seen that these leaders in the past has always felt like they need to be radical just to barely inch it forward a little bit.
And we don't have that even at this point.
So that's that's the concern.
I would make an argument here because one of the problems that we've had in modern American history is we just assume that every presidency is a major presidency.
You know what I mean?
It's like every new president is going to define the new era.
And actually, the presidency is littered with people who either played a minor role or were sort of forgetful, right?
That you sit down and you try to name all the presidents and you get to like, I don't know, 30.
And you're like, "Oh shit, there's a bunch more," right?
So could he be that?
He could.
But there's another thing that could happen here too.
Nobody thought when Lyndon Baines Johnson took the presidency that he was suddenly going to be the champion of civil rights.
Nobody thought that he was going to spearhead like one of the greatest progressive experiments in American history.
Now, could Biden do that?
I don't know.
I really don't.
I know that he knows literally everybody who has ever served in the history of the Senate and Congress.
So could he be a great dealmaker or a bridge?
I don't know.
He possibly could be.
And, you know, LBJ went into office as like a Southern Democrat, and he came out as a long-haired hippie who lectured on his porch about civil rights and progressivism.
So I don't think we know yet, but there's hope there.
And God knows we got to get this asshole out.
Well, it's funny that you bring up LBJ and his long hair as he kind of did a Howard Hughes on us by the end of his life.
I believe.
Does that let us start talking about the dementia that we're now seeing in clear sight with Trump?
Can I just say I'm glad people are talking about it finally?
Yeah, well I've been showing a lot because I'm into biomechanics, I'm talking about basketball stuff, and you can see in his movement pattern how bad it is.
If you weren't on social media at all this weekend and didn't notice, they had his speech where he drug everybody to graduate from West Point.
First of all, he couldn't drink a glass of water with his right hand.
These are red flag, you know, sirens blaring kind of stuff.
And then for him to get down a ramp, which then of course they cut to Biden two years before just running up the ramp no problem at all like a spry chicken.
He's not well.
Now, we also remember six months ago, although it seems like a year and a half ago, he was rushed to Walter Reed.
And they never explained what that was about.
And so there's all sorts of stuff.
And hey, listen, the armchair psychologists, psychiatrists, whatever, neurologists are out there, want to talk about dementia or whatever, syphilis even, stroke.
You know, stroke kind of feels like maybe that's sort of what happened maybe, but either way, this is the problem.
We saw this in a West Wing episode where there was extreme legal ramifications for people that knew about the ailment and hit it.
I think people might argue that, let's just say he has whatever he has.
The circle of people that know this is probably pretty small, I would think, but I don't know.
It's pretty loose, undisciplined in there.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was over a dozen people that knew this, including, you know, the family.
Now I'm not even sure what kind of legal ramifications there are, but it seems like that would open up a whole Pandora's box where the 25th Amendment needed to have been invoked and they didn't do it.
Real fast, so much of the reason why people are afraid to talk about this is because Donald Trump and the alt-right and right-wing conspiracy theorists were saying left and right that Hillary Clinton Was mentally and physically unwell, right?
And which is what they do.
They poison the well so you can't actually talk about it, right?
They throw it out there and they're like, oh, this is crazy.
And all of a sudden you sound crazy if you talk about it.
Real fast, there's historical precedent in this.
Everybody knows about FDR, obviously, you know, having to use a wheelchair.
Also, John F. Kennedy, if you weren't aware, was physically debilitated and was on a ton of drugs because he was just racked in pain constantly.
The third part of that that most people don't know that I didn't know until I was doing research on my book is that Woodrow Wilson, after he had a stroke, was debilitated completely and that his wife took over as President of the United States.
So, which is a weird moment in American history that most people don't know about.
There's precedent for stuff like this.
Wait, don't overlook, Eisenhower had a stroke as well, and Nixon, I think, pretty much ran the country the last year and a half of that presidency, too.
Well, I mean, Nixon ran the presidency for the remainder of his presidency in an alcoholic haze, ordering nuclear strikes that, you know, that basically, well, not basically, I mean, his entire administration had to ignore in small silent coups.
Um...
Who knows?
I don't know.
Trump looks bad.
Trump looks really, really bad.
And I know that when he has a problem or an insecurity, he projects it on everybody else.
He's a criminal, he calls everyone else a criminal.
You know, he's weak, he calls everybody else weak.
And apparently he's sick and he calls everyone else sick.
I know that I'm glad that finally the Washington Post and the New York Times are finally broaching the subject.
That we've all seen that this is a person who is unwell.
It's just yet another reason to get him out.
It just is.
And, you know, like, there are plenty of people who have had strokes or suffered maladies who, it doesn't mean that they're not worthy and they're not good people or maybe they wouldn't even be good leaders.
It's the fact that this person has to lie about it.
You know what I mean?
Like, we cannot be trusted to be honest.
Matter of fact, if he came out tomorrow and said, I had a stroke or something went wrong with me, his numbers might even jump.
You know what I mean?
Just to have a moment of, like, humanness to him.
But it's the fact that he can't even be honest about what's going on in his life.
We can't trust him to be square with us.
And on top of that, we're not the only ones talking about this.
Every other country in the world is having meetings about the fact that he's unwell.
Like, there it's not even a question.
We're sitting here sort of like, you know, wringing our hands, don't really want to talk about that much.
Everywhere else in the world they're strategizing based on the fact that the President of the United States is unwell.
Well, he made the mistake of tweeting about it.
So he now extended the conversation.
And by the way, he basically now has opened it up for questions.
And if they don't ask it, it's the first freaking question, whenever that happens next, it'll be outrageous.
And basically, it's something to the notion of, Mr. President, do the American people need to know anything about your health that you are not telling us?
Like, something like that would need to be the question.
Now, he's gonna lie, but that's okay, because when it does come out, That's when the congressional hearing is going to start happening, and you can start holding people accountable eventually.
And if you get them on the record as lying, then they acknowledge that they knew it was wrong, and that the truth was something that would have made them look even worse.
So, yes.
So this this is the thing that he tweeted and this is the thing that we have to talk about all the time because it's one of the defining things about Donald Trump.
So here's the tweet after he which by the way if you watch him going down the ramp it's not that crazy.
I mean he struggles and he's obviously a little afraid of it because obviously it's documented he's afraid of stairs.
He tweets out completely out of nowhere in the night without any provocation.
No one's talking about that ramp.
Nobody, Nick.
Nobody has made like a really big deal out of it.
Everyone's talking about the water.
the weird way they drink.
Okay, fair enough.
Yeah.
So he says, the ramp that I descended after my West Point commencement speech was very long and steep, had no handrail, and most importantly, it was very slippery.
The last thing I was going to do is fall for the fake news to have fun with.
Final 10 feet, I ran down to level ground.
Momentum.
Can we just talk very quickly about how pathetic he is?
He's pathetic.
He's an insecure, pathetic, pitiable person, which is who he is.
It's who these fascists are.
They're just really sad, pathetic men who have to pretend like they're tough.
They can't show weakness.
And that's what's wrong with this person.
He overcompensates.
He has no ability to have empathy for anybody else.
And it's all because he's just a shell of a person who's terrified of being exposed.
Period.
Yes, that's well said.
And you know, even when, just really quickly to tie that up, when he started, it was a specific day, all of a sudden, out of the blue, when they were running, when he was running for president, he started to talk about Hillary saying she didn't have the stamina, right?
It was just a weird phrasing and whatever, and it was like, did they focus test this and how did they come out?
And like you said, it's generally a projection.
But it never really made sense to me, almost to the point where, yeah, did they break in to her doctor's office, get some sort of files, couldn't quite acknowledge exactly, but they wanted to plant that seed and that's where they were.
Is he projecting because he knows it's him, but he has stamina because he just takes a lot of Adderall?
I mean, I don't know.
So unfortunately at that time I was listening to a lot of Alex Jones and paranoid right-wing podcast and videocast.
So one thing that people need to understand and we can talk about this a lot more particularly as events transpire.
I mean leading up to November we're going to talk about this.
They focus test it there because you know Alex Jones wasn't afraid to do that.
He was like oh Hillary Clinton's dying and her brain fell out the other day and she's still walking around because she's Satan's bride.
And it worked.
It picked up a ton of traffic.
And so what the right wing, particularly the Republican Party, does, they try it out in the conspiracy realm.
And when it works, they buff it up and they move it up the line.
This is how they end up using the New World Order, the Deep State, all that stuff.
They try it out there.
If it works, if it plays, they go forward.
So that's where that thing came from.
Right.
Although, I mean, listen, I just don't trust any of that.
I feel like it could also have come from the knowledge they might have done.
You know, we know that LBJ broke into JFK's doctor's office looking for the Addison's disease evidence.
You know, ironically, they became, you know, partners on the ticket.
But that's how, you know, I think that's the other thing is not to start a whole new conversation at the end of this podcast.
But, you know, I think that people might have an image of politics in the past as being something a lot more noble than it really was.
It's shocking.
ever been.
And even from the very beginning, and we saw him, like, even if you want to go see Hamilton, you get the idea of how bad it was then.
And so this, none of this should be surprising.
That's the other problem is how we're founded, how this works.
It's actually kind of a, it's kind of amazing that this experiment is lasted as long as it has and gotten anything done.
It's shocking.
And in going back to the story that I was telling earlier about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, like the constitution was ratified and America was founded and everyone's us like let's never have political parties.
Let's just all get along and do what's best, which, by the way, was so that the wealthy and the elite would just share power.
If they fought against themselves, their power might eventually fall apart, which is what happened.
It took one presidency.
Nick, one presidency and then the next it was just like, I am striking down the Constitution.
I will spite my enemies.
I mean, people have been accused of being bigamous.
They've been accused of being murderers.
They've been accused of everything, traitors, everything under the sun.
The history of America is not as noble as what we've been taught.
You hit the nail on the head.
It's been a problem, and it's been a problem for a long time, which brings us back around to the point.
You can get rid of Trump, but it doesn't make everything better.
It gets a madman out of the office, and we can actually start doing some of the hard work, and hopefully the fever will break, but no, this thing's been going on for a long time.
Are we going to win the Senate?
I think there's a real possibility that they win the Senate.
Yeah, and I shouldn't say we, the royal we.
You do, okay.
I mean, that's the other thing is, it's like, and listen, I love the idea of balance of power and having like, you know, a Democrat in the White House and then the Republican Senate or whatever.
That seemed to always give us some moments where there was balance and we can get some things with compromise, but not anymore.
Drive the Republican Party into the sea.
It needs to go away.
And again, maybe that's a complete raising.
You get rid of it.
You start a new party.
I mean, the Federalists went away, right?
The Whigs went away.
Maybe they go away because they've reached a terminal point.
Or, you know, grassroots...
Changes it from the outside in.
I would love to be having these fights with the Project Lincoln people and the Never Trump Republicans.
I would love it if we could get back to having fights about taxes.
Although they would have to get rid of the racist dog whistles that they've been using their entire lives.
But that's a subject for another show.
Alright everybody, on that note, we're going to get out of here.
Thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us.
As always, we appreciate you like crazy.
This show is growing by leaps and bounds.
We couldn't do it without you.
If you want to support us, all you need to do is go like, subscribe, share, comment, all that stuff.
Just tell people.
I have to tell you, I've been noticing a lot lately people just saying, hey, I'm telling my friends that this is one of the few podcasts that you can go to for actual decent conversation.
We appreciate it.
We're so, so thankful.
This thing is growing like crazy.
So thank you for your part in that.
As always, outside of this, if you want to follow Nick, you can find him at CanYouHearMeSMH.
