Did Trump Know Of Russian Bounty, And Would It Even Matter?
The New York Times reports that Vladimir Putin and Russia have been paying bounties to Afghanistan for the deaths of American troops, and the White House can't decide on an excuse. Did President Trump know or not know? Did he commit treason or is he just...such a child he can't be briefed properly? Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss yet another disqualifying scandal, as well as the problems with global capitalism and the potential for violence against protesters in the streets.
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The president is briefed on verified intelligence, and again, I would just point you back to the absolutely irresponsible decision of the New York Times to falsely report that he was briefed on something that he, in fact, was not briefed on.
President Trump tweeted overnight, Intel just spoke to me.
What specifically does that mean?
Who spoke to him?
Did that person, in fact, give the president a full briefing in that conversation?
I have no further details on the president's private correspondence.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Buckering Podcast.
I am your co-host J.D.
Sachs and I'm here with my loyal co-host Nick Halseman.
Good news everybody, we're back at full power this week.
Very, very exciting.
Less exciting is what we have to talk about.
We have to start with one of the more shocking scandals of a United States presidency that we've seen.
Maybe ever.
I don't know.
I've lost track of how to really rank these things, Nick.
So for those who are not familiar, just to get people up to speed, The New York Times released a very well thoroughly researched report that said that our good friend Vladimir Putin, our ally, Nick, our ally.
What a nice guy.
What a nice guy.
One of our president's best friends, or you know, the guy who holds power over him, has been paying bounties on the lives of U.S.
soldiers in Afghanistan.
And that Donald Trump has apparently... Well, we got to get to that.
He has either known about it and not commented on it, or the President of the United States has not been briefed on this major situation both are bad there's no good situation in any of this but um i don't know about you nick but um it it feels um what's the word what's the word where you betray a country and do that's right treason treason yes uh treason uh you know this is it's almost like
We don't have enough time to have another impeachment process, unfortunately, I don't think.
But this would have been nice if they could have somehow foreseen that COVID was going to happen and then this was going to happen.
They could have waited, put it all together and And have a nice impeachment trial that would probably have swayed somebody.
I know you'd argue it wouldn't have changed anything, and maybe you're not.
But at the very least, there's lots of time to have a Benghazi number of investigations into this, wouldn't you say?
Well, I mean, how many Benghazis are we up to for Donald Trump?
Only real.
I mean, Baker's dozen?
I don't know.
Listen, you know, I had a moment with this.
I don't know if it happened with you.
What I'm now going to refer to as a 2020 brain, which is where like a scandal breaks, and it's just like one of the most disgusting scandals imaginable, right?
And by the way, just just to put my cards on the table, because I, you know, I've spent the last couple of days on social media basically being told, what do you care about the troops?
You're Pinko Kami and you think that they're oppressors of the rest of the world.
Well, yes, I do believe that the United States foreign policy has been oppressive.
I'm also the grandson and son of veterans.
You know what I mean?
It's a ridiculous black and white assumption that you can't criticize US foreign policy, but also support troops.
That's stupid.
I support not putting Americans in danger for useless, futile reasons.
So let's just start with that.
But 2020 brain, this is like one of the most disgusting scandals ever.
And it happens.
And then you go a couple of days with this floating in the air and like, you almost forget about it.
You know what I mean?
Because it's just like, well, I mean, all these things, nothing ever sticks to this guy.
But then you forget like, He's legitimately, because he's like best friends with Putin and because they're authoritarians who are on the same page with the same sort of goals, which is dismantling their countries for parts and, you know, enabling oligarchs and their own power and profit.
You forget, I mean, it's treason again.
And sitting around with this thing, it's just like, when it pops up in your head, it's just the most like shocking thing you can imagine, really.
Well, let's pull this apart, because there's some moving pieces here.
They had captured, or actually, I'm not even sure they captured, but the intelligence came in, in Afghanistan, finding in these villages immense amounts of cash.
And I think, I believe it was U.S.
cash, which was like a real big red flag to them, because this kind of stuff is usually given out by us.
Not anybody else.
And they couldn't quite figure this out.
So they go and they start interrogating some of the Taliban that they've caught to find out, well, you know, where is this money coming from?
And of course, they report back that, you know, it's coming from the Russians and Putin is trying to pay them to, you know, take out, pick off American soldiers.
I mean, are you, we have to speed this point, Jared?
Yeah, I mean this is this is all dead on and also it's been confirmed at this point that at least one Soldier has been confirmed to have been killed for a bounty and by the way these are not When we're talking about intelligence officials, we're not talking about like Adam Schiff's best friend.
We're talking about died in the wall Like, a lot of these people are war hawks, you know what I mean?
Like, these are people who, like, are true believers in what the military does and what foreign policy is.
Multiple confirmations from multiple sources and multiple publications at this point have confirmed that at least one person that they know of has been killed for money.
At least one, and chances are many more.
So here's the thing we have to decide because, you know, clearly there's a, we've seen the reporting that's never been disputed.
So I'm taking it as fact of how they deliver the presidential daily briefing to the president, which is now the presidential weekly.
Right.
With his name as many times as possible.
So he doesn't lose attention.
Yeah.
So yeah, it's a presidential bi-weekly briefing.
It's not even a briefing anymore because he doesn't read anything, he simply has to be presented orally with a report.
Doubt for certain lockdown fact that they will withhold Information from him when they glean that that will make him upset primarily about Russia that was written in 2018 in the Washington Post never disputed and It makes it certainly a lot of sense to me because you hear how he behaves in the White House And you know he would just wig out when he hears these things about Russia so I would imagine that what happened was they probably buried in the report on page 50 or 60 and
Knowing he'd never read it and they simply didn't present it to him when they were speaking to him during these briefings.
First of all, this is Cold War-level shit.
You know what I mean?
This is proxy warfare, is what it is.
And it should not... For people who aren't necessarily familiar with history, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners are, you need to understand that Afghanistan has been the site of a lot of this stuff.
Actually, if you want to go back into the 1980s, one of the things that finally brought the Soviet Union down was they went into Afghanistan.
And let me tell you something.
It's not good to be an occupying force in Afghanistan.
It doesn't work out well for you because the Afghani soldiers are really, really tough and it's rough terrain.
It's a rough place to go fight a war.
Well, if only we would have learned this any other part of the world, too, while we were doing these.
While we were having all these proxy situations.
And the U.S.
went into Afghanistan and gave, you know, these insurgents, they gave them weapons and training and intelligence in order to destroy, you know, Russian troops and Russian things.
Which, by the way, not that that ever had consequences or led to any problems for us or anything, but that's neither here nor there.
We might recognize a name or two in there.
Uh, there's a couple names that, you know, they go through.
We can't keep track of these things.
But again, this is Cold War-level shit, is what this is, right?
The idea that intelligence would have to bury this, and by the way, what you just did was very charitable, right?
Like, what you just did was, like, the best possible reading, which is, it was really deep in the briefing, and Trump, you know, had his 15th Diet Coke of the meeting, and just started to nod off and he picked up his phone and he started retweeting white power memes like we all do that's a charitable reading right but let's also let's pick apart the charitable and then let's go to the possible things that might have happened here the charitable reading
this is a grown-ass man the man in his 70s who wants to be president which by the way right before we started taping reports are starting to stream in that gop insiders are like we don't think donald trump really wants to be president anymore and the numbers are bad so he might just drop out You know, like a child who loses, you know, doesn't want to play with his toy anymore.
Which is how they're treating him.
It's like there's an unruly toddler.
Well, he doesn't like to do that, so let's just work around him or whatever, right?
He's a grown-ass man.
He's the President of the United States.
If they can't brief him on Russia, which is on the record, that they have had to just not brief him on one of the U.S.' 's main antagonists and foils in the world, which makes me and you and every one of our listeners in the United States of America less safe.
That's patently absurd.
The second thing, and this is probably even worse, is that he probably was briefed, did nothing about it, and is now just straight up lying and is just hoping not to get caught in the lie.
Wait a minute.
He didn't do nothing about it.
He went and invited Russia to join the G7 on United States soil.
He said, Putin, come on over.
Wait, hold on real fast, Nick.
Isn't there a real possibility in the timeline of all this that he also was trying to get the Taliban to come to America and hang out with him at Camp David?
Absolutely, that is part of the timeline.
That is a possibility in the timeline we're dealing with.
We don't even know what happened.
That was something, and by the way, this is another one of those 2020 brain things.
A lot of people have forgotten that.
He wanted to be the person who ended all of the hostilities over there.
He just wanted an award, right?
This is why he asks Everybody to, like, put him up for the Nobel Peace Prize.
He wanted to be the person who brought in the Taliban.
So that's another reason that he might not have wanted to have anything to do with this.
He might have won an award.
He might have brought in somebody who is engaged in a bounty for U.S.
soldiers' lives with Russia and has buddied up to both of them.
Real quick question, Dick.
Why would a person who is President of the United States of America and has taken an oath to protect the Constitution and also look out for the safety of all of us, What mindset would have to be there for that person to engage in everything that we're talking about right now?
What is the psychological profile of a person like that?
I think it's called a hostage.
It's crazy!
This person doesn't care about America whatsoever.
It is the most dangerous, destructive, narcissistic personality you could ever imagine as President of the United States.
And it's what we're watching here.
It is beyond disgusting.
Oh and that's the thing is every intelligence officer or anyone who served in the CIA they're coming out and really upset about this as well because again it does put everybody at risk especially the troops and we're going through this whole thing about how the troops are so important and how he defends them And yet, over and over again, there are so many instances where he doesn't give a shit about the military.
He doesn't want to do anything to keep them safer anyway.
And so, again, the only thing you can take from this is that he is being held under some sort of spell by Vladimir Putin.
Even the thing with Khashoggi, when he was murdered and he just simply shrugged his shoulders on that and didn't do anything, I don't think we would ever expect that.
He covered it up!
It wasn't even that he didn't do anything.
He helped cover the whole thing up.
It's incredible.
Yeah, and all for money.
All for some sort of deal he was trying to do.
And we keep seeing it with China.
We see it with Russia.
So this is why he never should have been elected in the first place.
Why many people had already seen this was going to happen.
And that is what's so frustrating about this.
It's not making any waves.
You know, politically, really, for him.
It's very strange.
Although I suppose you could argue that his poll numbers are, like, dipping and going down.
But I don't think he, by the way, to address the point you made earlier, I don't think he has any intention of, like, bowing out of the race or blowing it up sort of on purpose or subconsciously to lose.
I think, again, he is so concerned with being prosecuted that he thinks he needs to win.
I think that is the main thing.
And we've talked about this on prior podcast where I think if he got some sort of agnewish deal, you know, that was like, we will not prosecute you if you don't run for reelection.
I think he would blow out of town so fast.
Trump is, for anyone who's ever done this, somebody you play video games with or you play a board game with or you go out and you play basketball with and you're beating them so badly that at some point they just like throw everything down.
They say, I didn't want to win anyway, and then they, like, stomp off.
I mean, that's who Donald Trump is, right?
And I'm sure that if he could do it without losing face and going to jail, I'm sure he would walk away from the whole thing.
I just, I want to make this very, very clear.
I don't know if people have stuff on Trump.
I've certainly heard rumors of that.
I've had people come to me with what they think is evidence of it.
I don't know.
Hey, I'm a responsible journalist as well.
That's all I'll say.
2016 was a hell of a year for me.
I'll just throw that out.
That was an odd year for me with a lot of stuff coming my way.
But, I don't know if there's blackmail, I don't know if there's mob ties, I don't know if it's financial, I don't know if it's just that him and Putin have the same authoritarian worldview.
I mean, authoritarians find each other like, you know, magnets and steel.
They love each other because, you know, they're all these really, really fragile, brittle, authoritarian, insecure, you know, man babies.
And they all find each other and they work for each other time and time again.
I don't know exactly what's happening.
All I know is that we can never, first of all, we can never call the Republican Party the party of national security again.
They have just failed time and time again.
And by the way, we can spend the rest of the podcast going over one case after another.
We can start with our good friend Ronald Wilson and just go, you know, selling arms here, doing this here.
The times that they've put people's lives in danger without the needs that they need, without, you know, any thought about what might happen to them.
They don't pay for their health care when they get back here.
They don't take care of them.
They use them and abuse them and throw them out.
The Republican Party cannot be known as the party of national security anymore.
Number two, anybody who has any doubt about this, look at it on its face.
Look at the evidence.
Donald Trump doesn't care about troops.
He doesn't care about America.
That's just the bottom line of this thing.
He does not actually care about America beyond what it can do for him.
Oh god.
Or pro-life!
Let's do that!
It's all these things that they just continually say are their principles, but they're not true.
They're political cudgels.
They don't actually care.
Like, we've talked about this before a little bit.
They don't actually care about abortion.
They know that it wins elections.
They know that it raises tons of money and it creates a dichotomous divide, right?
They don't actually care about lives.
They care about what it gets them.
They care about power.
That's what this party's all about.
Well, let's discuss a little bit for a second about why would Putin do this to his good buddy Trump, okay?
Why would he be paying his soldiers or, you know, paying the Taliban like this, a bounty?
You know, I don't think that the Taliban needed a lot of incentive To shoot at the United States troops anyway, right?
But I'm kind of curious about that.
That would be probably a Republican talking point.
No, by the way, no one is arguing this yet, but I suspect that they would.
But, you know, if, oh, if they're such buddy buddies, then, you know, why would he be, you know, targeting troops like this?
And then their answer would be like, well, because he's not.
But it is interesting because I agree.
I feel like he has.
And again, I think it's just sort of this notion of chaos, right?
This sowing chaos, continually making things a problem for the United States no matter what.
And it's funny because Putin doesn't give a shit about Trump either way.
If he can get the sanctions removed, okay, great.
That'll help him a lot.
He'll be even more of the richest man in the world of all time.
But other than that, yeah, I just think he is sitting there trolling everybody.
So I want to say a couple things on this.
One, there's this thing out there, and it's really tired.
I'm glad that Sarah Kinsey brought this up a couple days ago.
People are like, Donald Trump needs to realize that Vladimir Putin is not his friend.
Donald Trump is a 70-year-old grown-ass man who's worked in business his entire life.
Do you think he's ever gone into a room with another business person and thought that that person was his true blue friend?
No!
They go in and they do what they can for each other and occasionally they'll be on the same side and occasionally they won't.
Vladimir Putin's entire history as ruler of Russia has been to sow chaos on every side.
He gives money and power on both sides, sees what happens and who wins, and then he wins!
It's like betting on sports.
You bet on both teams and you end up winning.
That's what he does constantly.
The third thing historically people need to think about.
We're talking about like actual politics here and the way things have actually worked and like hardball politics.
Do you know what happened immediately after World War II?
What happened was that America very, very quickly brought a bunch of Nazis into its fold.
They brought Nazis over to America.
They started working with fascist groups around Europe who were anti-communist.
And as soon as that war ceased, Nazis were our allies because the enemy of our enemy is our friend.
That's hardball politics.
That's, and by the way, I don't want to say that that's right.
That's actually what I think is really toxic and has destroyed the world.
I actually think that hardball politics, as you would like to call it, is just so immoral and disgusting, right?
But that's what's happening here.
If Vladimir Putin thinks that maybe in the future the Taliban, or even Al Qaeda, or even an ISIS at some point or another would help him geopolitically, do you think he would hesitate for a moment No, he plays all sides of every issue and that's one of the reasons why he is now at the forefront of geopolitics.
It's because he's willing to do the immoral, ugly, disgusting things that a lot of other people aren't willing to do.
Which is why hardball politics is corrosive and it hurts us.
No, I absolutely agree.
You're dead on.
He's playing both sides of everything.
You know, over the weekend, I had a, we did a podcast with a historian.
It was really interesting about, you know, deep United States history.
And one of the concepts I kind of wanted to bring up that, and if you haven't listened to it, check it out, but we, we, we didn't quite scratch the surface.
And I don't know if we did this before the last week, but do you think that the founding fathers intended the United States to have only two political parties in control?
They didn't want any parties.
They thought parties were one of the most dangerous things that could happen to a country.
They basically, and this is like one of the things I don't think that a lot of people understand.
The Founding Fathers were this oligarchical society that thought that if they just maintained control and that they were always in consensus.
You know what I mean?
Because what do they have to argue about?
They wanted power and they wanted money and they wanted control.
So obviously they would never have a problem with each other.
And then almost immediately they're like, oh, all of a sudden Federalist and Democrat Republicans, here we are.
And now we're fighting.
And all of a sudden you had like John Adams outlawing political dissidents.
No, they didn't want political parties.
They thought that was one of the most toxic things possible, and then they just immediately went to it.
Which, by the way, is one of the reasons we're in the situation we are now.
It's because of the bipolar nature of our politics.
I mean, we were talking about it before we were recorded.
The Republican Party just went and met with Trump to be briefed on his non-briefing.
Like, they did it not for informational purposes.
They did it so they could create a PR strategy on how to handle this thing.
Yes, and if you missed Kayleigh McEnany's press briefing, we need a new name for what they are.
Who would miss those?
They're so informative, Nick.
There's so much information and truth-telling at these things.
By the way, do you watch them?
Oh, I do, I do.
I appreciate the way she reads from her notebook very well.
CJ Craig must be rolling around in her whatever she is right now.
Her fictional TV grave.
Wait, do you actually watch those briefings?
I mean, I watch the snippets on Twitter and video, so I do, you know, maybe not the whole thing in one shot.
I have to, again, tip my cap to you, Nick.
And I do this all the time, because the masochism that you have with this stuff is incredible.
The episode where Nick watched three straight days of right-wing television is fantastic.
I can't do it.
And that's actually part of this as well.
I think my trust of the administration has just cratered to the point where I have to turn off the TV immediately when she comes on.
I just can't.
It's just such bad faith garbage.
And I even tried with Huckabee Sanders.
I just can't with her.
It's a bridge too far.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, she's worse.
And so I think Kaylee's worse than Huckabee.
Although, you know what?
Actually, my wife and I were watching it maybe this weekend, and she turned to me and said, you know what?
I think I hated Huckabee worse.
But even still, she's packaged.
Kaylee's packaged differently.
And in fact, people are now, you know, have turned to just complaining about what she's wearing and how inappropriate that is now.
But the point is, is that she tried to clean this up a little bit about what Trump said last night versus what she said today and what they learned.
And what you're getting and what the gist of this is, is that she's saying that, you know, it was unverified and people never give unverified stuff to the president in a presidential daily brief.
Can you imagine?
Don't you know this?
Now, that said, if that was the case, then Obama would never have gotten briefed about Osama bin Laden and where he was hanging out before they took him out.
Like, that's how ridiculous that statement is.
That is one of the most dumb shit excuses that I have ever heard.
Can you imagine?
Okay.
Nick, you've been a leader of men.
You've been in positions of authority.
Does anyone in authority not want to know what's going on?
And by the way, that's even dealing with what she says as if it's real.
And actually, I don't know, I think it's a dumb shit congressman from my home state of Indiana who just came out and said this.
He went to the briefing and he was like, yeah, this was an ongoing investigation.
And because the New York Times brought it to our attention, it's going to put troops and harms away.
Which, again, is such a dumb shit answer.
And even if you want to be charitable and believe what they're saying, that is nuts.
The idea... Oh, it hasn't been verified.
It's been... What are these people talking about?
It's such grasping at straws.
And again, it's boot-licking madness what these people are involved in.
Obviously, it's been verified.
The intelligence communities not only went to Trump with it, They were so frustrated by the lack of response that they started leaking to the New York Times.
Do you know that the intelligence community hates leaking to mainstream media?
They don't like to do it.
It's like putting Honey Badger and any other animal in the same arena.
They hate each other.
Their goals are completely antithetical to each other.
Well, but I've already, I've posited this before where I've said that oftentimes in my mind it's the intelligence community that is the last stopgap measure against a corrupt government.
And we saw that with Deep Throat and Nixon and we're seeing that now.
And that, and that's why I almost take solace in the fact that thank God that we do have those things because that's clearly what's going on here.
And a great point that you made is that these things leak on purpose.
Right?
These things leak when there's, you know, we wouldn't have found out about Vindman and the whistleblower there without a leak.
We wouldn't have found out about this.
We wouldn't have found out about Watergate.
All these different things.
So it's really important.
And the interesting thing is what they're parsing, what McEnany is not parsing is Trump tried to say last night that the intelligence, that it wasn't verified or anything when he checked in with the spooks or whoever he was talking to.
And she then today was like, he was not briefed.
He was not briefed.
not been briefed.
So what is it?
Did he talk to the intelligence community?
Did they say, oh, it wasn't verified, we're not going to tell you about it?
Or did he not talk to them at all, which is what she's saying today?
It's a shit show.
They can't even get their story straight.
You are asking, again, for logic in an illogical situation.
There's no story that they can give because there's no way to do anything but admit malfeasance.
Right.
It's just the truth.
They probably knew about this and then hid it because Trump loves Putin and doesn't want to throw dirt at him, which means that he betrayed his oath, which means he probably, well, not that he probably, he shouldn't be president, and he put people at risk, including us and the troops.
How many military and intelligence leaks do you remember under Barack Obama?
Geez.
Not many.
Not many.
I mean, I'm trying to think, was the thing at the border with the guns and the cartels, was that a leak?
I can't remember.
What was that?
It wasn't rush hour.
It was Fast and the Furious, right?
Because that was like one of those, like, We're gonna go down to Cuba and kill Fidel Castro with like a poison cigar type operations, right?
Yeah, right.
It's the type of things that the CIA operatives dream up when they've had one too many scotches in a hotel bar, right?
Right, right.
This is not what they do.
The intelligence community is not, like, it's not the deep state.
It's not a bunch of antifa radicals who, you know, are studying up on their Marxist manuals and are like, how do we bring down this truth-telling president?
These are people who are like, they're hardliners, man.
They go around the world and interfere in the democratic processes of other countries.
They invalidate the privacy of people all over the world.
Do you know what they like?
War!
They fucking love war!
And for these people to call up the New York Times and be like, hey, I understand you're covering this posh new restaurant that's opening up.
Can we please talk about the president who's not taking our briefing seriously?
People don't seem to understand, like, how much madness that is.
This isn't the resistance.
This is a group of professionals who are like, listen, your lives are being put in danger right now.
We have tried and tried and tried and tried, and they will not listen.
Well, imagine having to make some of the most important decisions policy-wise, security-wise, as the most powerful person in the world, and not have information vital to make these decisions.
Constantly not having this information.
And, apparently, one of the reasons why they cut back on the number of presidential daily briefs is because he would just argue with them When they would present him with information, factual information that was gleaned from all these different sources, and washed, and cleaned, and verified, and looked at.
And if it's getting to him, it's going to be close to being factualized, if not completely fact.
And he would argue with these people.
And they eventually were like, well, you know what, we're going to have to do something, and we'll cut these back, because we don't want him so upset.
We can't have the guy, we can't have the big guy, you know, having an aneurysm every time we try and brief him on something.
By the way, for those who aren't familiar, we do have a YouTube version of our show where you can see me taking off my glasses in just utter despair and frustration right now.
Here's the thing I don't think a lot of people understand.
The politics that a lot of us are privy to is a performance.
Right.
Like this guy going on social media and saying, we just met with the president.
It turns out the Democrats have just, or New York Times have blown the cover of this opera.
That's a performance.
That's all that is.
It's just theater.
It's just trying to, this guy will probably send out a fundraising call in a couple of hours and get some money.
And that's how this whole thing works.
Trump does this.
Yeah, it's just like in Anchorman.
Loud noises!
So that's what Trump does.
That's what Republicans do.
And listen, we're not a biased show.
Democrats do it too.
That's the TV politics.
It's the theater we're all used to.
Do you know what happens under the surface of that?
It's this group of professional, serious people who have no time for any of this stuff.
And I want to remind people, because again, 2020 brain.
Trump reality.
These people that we're talking about are the people that Donald Trump, when he went to Helsinki to meet with Vladimir Putin, right?
And after everybody, and it doesn't matter if you're Democrat, Republican, Independent, every one of these people came out and said, we know that Russia interfered with the 2016 election, right?
We're not saying that there was collusion, any of that stuff, we know this for a fact.
Donald Trump went to Helsinki, shook Vladimir Putin's hand, and in front of the world took Putin's side and said my exactly nick is now taking off his glasses i want to point something out he threw them under the bus he betrayed america in that moment and do you know what these people did the next day they came into work and they went right back to work right and they they have been working behind the scenes doing what they think is right
and then it's just like eventually it's like well These professionals who have no interest in going on Twitter and yelling at people and revealing that they have a secret son named Nestor, you know, these people who aren't interested, these people who aren't interested in, you know, their next campaign ad is they, they throw up a, you know, a bill or Obamacare and blow it up with an AR-15 or, you know, paint shit on their faces, whatever.
These people who are just stewards Of a liberal democracy.
Show up for work.
They do whatever.
And even though they got betrayed on the world stage, they still showed up for work.
And here we are.
You're exactly right.
They're like, we can't even brief this guy for him yelling at us and telling us we're wrong.
We're just telling him what he needs to know to make good decisions.
He's not interested in good decisions.
He's not interested in the actual process of government.
That's not what any of this is about to him.
Yeah, well, the really old 85-year-old, you know, Intelligence Committee members must think that they're really a bunch of wimps now because they took JFK out for not agreeing with what he was doing.
But that's neither here nor there.
But here's what I think you forgot, Jared.
Not only in Helsinki did he take Putin's side, he actually pitched Allowing Russian officials to come in and monitor our elections going forward as if they're some sort of goodwill peace force.
That was the treason that a lot of guys were yelling out loud and people were like, oh, you're alarmist.
But imagine that.
And then he was going to, you know, who was it, Mike Moore, former Russian ambassador, Morel, he was going to like turn him over to the Russians to interrogate him and stuff like that.
I mean, this is how scary this guy is.
And I'm sure all the intelligence community, all the CIA guys must be like trying to figure out even greater ways to make sure that he doesn't get elected again.
You know, we've been getting a lot more listeners, so this is one of those things that, you know, every now and then we have to bang the drum on this and make sure everyone's on the same page.
Nations aren't really nations anymore.
It's not the way that we used to think.
Like, when it comes to somebody like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, you and I sit here and we're talking about America, right?
We're talking about our experience growing up in this country.
You know, I have problems with this country.
You have problems with this country.
Our listeners have problems with this country.
But I feel a patriotic duty towards the country, right?
I was born here.
I've had certain privileges here.
There's a part of me that's like, I have to fight to make this country better.
If a foreign enemy came to me and said, help me betray this country, I would report them immediately, right?
We look at countries as if they are nation states, as if they are sovereign places.
Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin are post-political.
They're business people.
They look at countries as operations.
They look at, oh, how do I use this place to strip it down to bare parts and sell off everything and, you know, basically it's an international consortium that goes through and figures out the way to make the most money.
They are not loyal to a country.
They use the idea of the country against us.
That's what Make America Great Again is.
Oh, if you re-elect me or you elect me, I'll make America great again.
He's not interested in making America great again.
He's interested in using America.
That's why all this is happening.
We're all talking about government as a way to make lives better.
He's talking about how to use government to make his checkbook better.
And it has nothing to do with the country that you and I and our listeners are interested in.
You know, it's a fine line between global corruption and progressive globalism, right?
I like to look at this as, you know, we're not necessarily nations either.
I think there's a progressive ideology that, you know, we're all sort of part of the same globe.
Right?
And, you know, even with the trade.
China makes the clothes.
Mexico's doing the parts.
We're going to do the innovation and tech, you know, and so on.
And I almost feel like what you're describing is sort of what Trump sort of feels the same way, but just more like he's looking at it as a carcass versus countries.
What you just said is really interesting.
And this is one of those things where I kind of wish that we had like a seven hour podcast to get into this, right?
Because what you just said, it's really fascinating because Trump and Putin and everyone under them, everyone from Alexander Dugan to Steve Bannon, they all go after globalism.
And they're like, oh, globalism is destroying our countries and who we are as a people.
They're not actually interested in destroying globalism.
They're interested in taking it over, right?
They're like, eventually, like, we'll have a rise of ethnostates where like only Americans, which are white Americans, and only Russians, which are white Russians, right?
They'll eventually have it out, and we'll have a new Cold War, and one of them will win the global system and take it over.
Globalism as it is, is a caste system, What you just said is interesting, which is that America will take care of tech and China will do this and Mexico will do this.
What we've done is we've taken nations and we've been like, oh, you're a second class nation.
You are now going to handle all the industry.
So Americans don't have to anymore.
The truth is that doesn't really work, right?
The way that it's set up is faulty, but you don't have to have a dichotomous decision.
We don't have to be on this podcast and say, you're either a globalist or you're with Trump, which is insane, right?
Like that.
And that's one of the reasons why we did this podcast in the first place is there have to be nuanced views.
There are better things than globalism, but being anti-globalism doesn't mean that you become a white nationalistic.
All right troll right or like a fascist neo-nazi and that's what they've done that I mean that that's the simple language and propaganda that Donald Trump and Bannon and Putin have created and we don't have to live in that it's it's like a really insidious idea.
I think the worldview that JFK had laid out, I think, was the ideals that even today a lot of progressives will still adhere to or look up towards because there was this notion that we want to make sure that we can elevate everyone's positions across the globe and not be oppressed.
And while it might not be democracy like we know it, there are some basic human rights being involved here.
There are opportunities for people that could make money.
I don't want to say money, but Sort of get themselves out of poverty and have an opportunity that they deserve as humans.
And that is a very, very threatening position to take.
Obviously it was very threatening back then to a lot of the hawks who'd want to continue war.
It's a zero-sum game for them and for Trump.
And that's a real frustrating thing because it just seems logical, again there's that word, that we would want everybody to have the same opportunities that we would have.
Well, first of all, you're the best co-host in the business.
Done.
Period.
Because you just took this podcast in a direction that I didn't even expect it to go, and we need to talk about this.
So, what modern president heroicized John F. Kennedy?
Clinton.
Bill Clinton saw him.
Everybody knows that one of the most famous pictures is Bill Clinton shaking John F. Kennedy's hands.
He really wanted to be John F. Kennedy.
Right?
He really, really, really, really wanted to be John F. Kennedy.
Now, one of the things about Clinton that we need to understand, and I'm so glad that we've now gone down this globalist rabbit hole, because this needs to be talked about.
Why not?
We had another segment.
Screw it.
Let's do it.
We'll get there.
We'll get there.
Well, maybe we will.
Who knows?
Yeah, again, best co-host in the business.
Okay, so Bill Clinton comes in in 92 and beats George H.W.
Bush, right?
So he comes in, and one of the first things that lands on his desk is a thing that George H.W.
Bush has been working on.
It's also a plan that was spearheaded in the 1970s by Ronald Reagan.
That plan is the North American Free Trade Agreement, right?
And by the way, that is the entire blueprint for modern globalism.
It's the idea that we'll send here, they'll send here, and we'll just go back and forth.
When Clinton was in power?
Tell me, whether you know or maybe you just guessed, what political party do you think provided the support for NAFTA in Congress?
When Clinton was in power?
When Clinton was president.
I mean, the Democrats ended up owning it.
They ended up owning it, but the Republicans were actually the one who pushed it through.
Because it was a Republican plan from the very beginning that Clinton had to see into stewardship.
Now, here's the difference in philosophy, and this is a huge thing.
Bill Clinton saw himself as JFK.
And what you just said about JFK's vision for the world, which is, we'll all come together and we'll all grow.
And if you listen to any of the speeches, Bill Clinton's idea was by doing this globalist project, we'll all come into the middle class and it will just be like a really equal middle class.
Well, here's the thing.
The Republican Party wasn't really interested in that because the Republican Party since the 1960s has been completely dedicated and obsessed with white supremacy as a means of power and control.
So they push through NAFTA and all of a sudden we start having this realization of, and by the way, let's go real deep, Thomas Jefferson's idea of an agrarian America.
And for people who don't know this, Thomas Jefferson's entire idea for America was that it would be this large agrarian country where we had no industry whatsoever.
We would raise up all the cotton, all the agricultural stuff, and what would we do, Nick?
We'd send it somewhere else and they would use it for industry.
Right, so all of a sudden we would have an entire system where America would never dirty itself with industry.
Well, guess who embraced that in the 1990s?
The Republican Party.
Because guess who else embraced it?
That's right, the Confederate States of America.
And that's what they wanted America to be.
So what you end up having, which is the thing a lot of people misunderstand, is that you have globalism, which starts out as a project to bring everybody into a place of equalness and better lives, and people say, no.
This is now going to become a racial and a global way of oppressing and maintaining power.
So you're exactly right.
There is this weird thing that happened with JFK and Bill Clinton and with this entire Confederate operation that ended up becoming a racial and a class system.
And that's what they're fighting over now.
They want control over a system that oppresses particularly people of color all over the world.
Yes, I was not prepared for that journey.
I wasn't prepared to talk about that either.
I mean, listen, there are moments when, you know, I know that like in China, the sweatshops there, the Nike is making these people work in, you know, there, there has to be some lip service paid, at least the notion that what even though they're paying such little, you know, money to them compared to what we are used to making.
A lot of times it is a lot of money in their situations.
So there is some notion of that, that where, you know, people can actually, you know, have a better life or make more money than they would have made without those factories being there.
Just a quick little, quick little notion.
I just want to get the facts right because we care about facts, right?
The final House votes on the North American Free Trade Agreement.
- 156. - Sure, well, don't you remember NAFTA, do we have to?
That was a big value cry back then. - That's such a terrible, terrible cry.
- Okay, go on, I'm sorry to interrupt your point about that.
- So, I mean, listen, you know, if you want to look at the 4D chess that Newt Gingrich might have been playing, that, oh, let's get this through, and then we'll just flip it around to 94, and we'll just hammer him for getting it done, even though we were the ones who shepherded it through.
I mean it's sort of I think what happened I think also maybe they didn't realize that it would lead to job losses in America which I think is they prepared us for.
If you listen to Clinton carefully, he did acknowledge that factories were going to close, they're going to open up in Mexico and those different things.
But the point also was that the prices of things would go down and we'd actually be able to afford more.
And that was probably a bigger benefit than some of the factory jobs that were probably going to be lost anyway.
So one quick fact and a quick anecdote.
One, the reason why Bill Clinton believed that wholeheartedly was because he came from the great state of Arkansas, which is also the birthplace of Walmart.
And let me tell you something.
As the governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton was tight with Walmart and Walmart built its juggernaut from importing goods from China and then claiming that they were all made in the USA waving an American flag.
So there's a reason why Clinton believed that.
The second is an anecdote.
I come from a factory family.
And I have to tell you that NAFTA not only destroyed my family, and I have problems with that, and I have problems with the globalist system, and all this stuff.
It destroyed my family.
It not only took away their jobs, but because of Republican politicking, they weren't given training.
They weren't given incentives.
They were not taken care of in this complete reshifting.
Right?
So anytime that you have like a major project to push a country into the future, people get lost on the wayside.
And it was people like my family.
They suffered greatly.
They live shorter, more miserable lives because of this thing.
But here's the thing at the heart of it.
Do you know who my family supports now?
It's Donald Trump.
And they support Donald Trump because they're still pissed off about all that.
They have a reason to be pissed off about it, but that goes back to the dichotomy we just talked about.
Just because you're against that entire system does not mean you're with Donald Trump.
That's the way he says it, right?
That's like the world is winners and losers, right?
There's America and then there's shithole countries or whatever you want to say at the time.
It's not dichotomous, but they've made it dichotomous and unfortunately that's been the message and what we just talked about is one of the reasons why America has been hollowed out and also one of the reasons why the coronavirus has been so terrible is these people were not taken care of and they were not given an opportunity to get ahead.
It just didn't happen.
And meanwhile, during the epidemic, we're having the billionaires making hundreds of billions of dollars more and really just feasting on this situation, whereas we're now approaching, I don't even know what the numbers are for unemployment, and really devastating a lot of the people in the service industry, and it'll be worse as we go forward.
Which is an interesting dichotomy to the people who, again, making all this money and who are doing well, because we got to see firsthand a little bit of how they react to the groundswell of upsettedness that we're seeing.
Because remember, one thing that we were talking about in the last couple of weeks has been, what's the Venn diagram between Black Lives Matter and anti-Trump when we're talking about these protests?
And I think there's a lot of overlap, and I think a lot of it has to do with just even being cooped up and needing to get out.
But we saw in St.
Louis, and St.
Louis is also notable because that's where Ferguson happened when we had the Michael Brown riots and problems a few years ago.
But we saw a couple in one of the fanciest mansions imaginable, in my mind.
I mean, I saw the interior of this thing.
This is amazing.
And maybe you want to fill us in and paint the picture with more of your flair for the description, but basically they're marching down the street in front of their house and they have to get out their AR and their little miniature pistol and start menacing the crowd.
I'd never seen something like that in my face like that.
So they run out, these people, they run out.
He has an AR-15, she has a pistol that she has obviously never held in her entire life.
We start having peaceful protesters, which by the way, I love that there's this call where it's like, They broke through a gate.
They went through a gate.
Okay?
And by the way, again, personal anecdote, I've had people show up here at my house who have personally told me that they wanted to do damage to me and kill me, like, and threatened to put me into, like, Holocaust-style ovens, who have shown up at my house in the middle of the night.
Do you think I ran out just holding a gun and just waving it around like a madman?
No, that's not how you act in a society.
These are people who obviously, and by the way, this house is disgusting.
It's just so gross that people live in this thing.
He said in an interview right before we went on, he said, oh God, this made me laugh.
He felt like it was the storming of the Bastille, Nick.
He saw these these gross protesters coming through the gate and that was it.
It's the French Revolution.
And he kept saying revolution and revolution and revolution.
Now, it's something that we can laugh at because it's so absurd.
It looked like they just got done at, you know, P.F.
Chang's or something.
And, you know, and then we're deciding to like mow down protesters.
But the truth is, this is white supremacist paranoia.
This is the reason why the Republican Party wins elections.
It's the reason why Donald Trump is president.
They have been radicalized into believing that African Americans, first of all, hold the potential for mass chaos at all times.
This is why we need law enforcement who's willing to kill them and take them down all the time.
It's why they need military-grade weaponry.
Can you imagine running out of your house as a parade of people playing instruments and singing chants?
Can you imagine running out with an AR-15 and just being like, here we are, this is where we're at?
I mean, first of all, the guy, they're barefoot and he's wearing a pink polo and his ironed pleated pants.
I mean, it was unbelievable.
And then the wife comes out and she's holding her gun.
The bottom line is these two people should not have guns.
Because they don't even know how to properly hold them.
And she's holding it like it's tea time or something.
As if it's a saucer of something in her hand.
That's going to go off without a misstep somewhere.
We're lucky she didn't shoot somebody.
And by the way, again, an anecdote.
Listen, I'm a gun owner.
I am.
I've inherited a bunch of guns from like my father who was like the type who just bought a bunch of guns.
And let me tell you something.
My family has moments of just really offensive behavior.
I've heard them say fascistic stuff.
I've heard them say unbelievably fascistic racist stuff.
Do you know what real gun owners talk about when they give somebody a gun?
They talk about safety.
I'm talking about people who one moment will tell you that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization and then they'll be like, no son, you really don't point that at people and you don't keep your finger on the trigger unless you intend to shoot it.
It's insane to me that this happened.
This is obviously a couple of people who feel very guilty about internally and subconsciously.
Maybe they don't even understand it.
They feel very guilty and endangered living in this.
It's not even a mansion.
I think mansion actually underplays it.
It's a palatialist state.
Yeah.
Yeah, by the way, when I saw how much it costs, and if you know what the real estate is like in LA, it's like the most bargain basement deal of all time.
It's St.
Louis.
St.
Louis.
And by the way, hey, this is why people keep listening to this podcast, Nick, because it just keeps churning.
Do you know what hollowed out St.
Louis?
Not just NAFTA, it's operations like NAFTA.
Right that have created places in the Midwest where this has happened.
And by the way, why do they not feel safe?
Oh yeah, because they live in a city where people are oppressed and they know that people are oppressed and that a spark could possibly lead to bad things.
So what they did, there's a long American history of this thing.
The country was founded on it.
The founding fathers were not supposed to create a constitution, but do you know how they got it ratified?
They went out and they said, yeah, it was kind of a coup that we pulled off, but do you really want to face an uprising of slaves?
Do you really want to face Native Americans on the warpath?
And everyone's like, yeah, I guess I don't.
So I guess we're going to ratify this thing.
It's so absurd.
And I know we can laugh at it, but it's also very telling.
We've had people shot.
We've had people murdered.
We've had people running out with knives and weapons.
I mean, this thing just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.
And what's going to set it off is going to be white supremacist paranoia.
That's just what it is.
And that's what Trump and Fox and Republicans have been selling for years.
Yeah I mean and we're seeing even instances like just the n-word being angrily thrown around.
I saw a video this weekend and it was the people weren't even black people but they were being called the n-word in such a it's just in the when you see it in real terms right it's just it's so startling because you kind of can conceptualize it and be like oh but this is there's something different There is something different about these times than we've had in the past.
My real quick question to you would be, if you were a next door neighbor of this couple and you were sympathetic to the cause or agree with what the marchers were talking about, do you feel threatened deep down in your bones enough to where you're going to get your guns out and get out on your lawn and start pointing them at him?
I don't think so.
I think, you know, and I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the political nature of where we've gotten to in our country has now made people so on edge, I suppose, and so radicalized their thought process that, like, you know, if I was their next-door neighbor and I was like, yeah, I'd go out there and I would probably, like, cheer them on or just stand there and, you know, give them a salute or something.
And I don't think I would have felt at all threatened that they're going to come storm into my house and do some damage.
You know, I didn't plan on talking about this.
This has been a podcast of spontaneous conversations.
I enjoy that.
I hope our listeners do as well.
I want to let people in on a truth.
And it's a truth about white supremacy and white racism in America.
Okay.
It's not just a thing that hides under the surface.
I can tell you that racist people, when they're around other people that they are confident are racist, talk about shit that would just curl your hair.
And like my family and people that I grew up with, they have part of the story that we're talking about right here.
They have talked about needing guns for a race war for forever.
You know, like the people who prep, the people who like stockpile guns, the people that you would think you're like, oh, that's cartoonish.
It would be over the top to talk about them sitting around a living room or at a picnic or wherever having these conversations.
They're having them.
They literally are talking about, Oh, the African American population.
Well, they don't say that, but you know, the black population in America is getting out of control and eventually these Marxists and Democrats are going to lead them into a revolution.
And what are you going to do?
Or the new world order, right?
Or the UN or whatever racist conspiracy theory or whatever.
They talk about this stuff.
So like when that, I mean, why else would you have an AR-15?
You don't grab your AR-15 when someone breaks into your house.
What you grab is a shotgun.
Someone breaks into your house, you grab a shotgun.
- What would you actually do?
Someone breaks into your house, you grab a shotgun.
You don't grab an AR-15, which could take down, you know, your house.
An AR-15 is for when a swarm of people come at you, right?
It's for when you think the race war comes to your front door.
So what do I think people will do?
It depends on which part of America they've been a part of.
There's a part of America that has been preparing for this moment forever and the fact that there were more people in that neighborhood, like, Approaching these people with AR-15s and weapons.
I'm a little shocked by that.
But yeah, I don't know what their neighbors think.
I don't know what these people think, but I know that there's a large swath of America that actually believes this stuff and would have done the exact same thing and possibly worse.
Well, your friend and mine, Matt Gaetz, had an interesting tweet.
The esteemed congressman from Florida said... Nestor's dad.
Nestor's dad.
"In Joe Biden's America, your job is illegal, you are locked in your home, borders don't exist, MS-13 lives next door, and the police aren't coming when the mob arrives.
This is all of us and it's a picture of the husband and the wife and by the way the husband who had spent extra money to trick out his AR to be a lefty to be used because he's a lefty and then she's again holding this gun out like in the most absurd angle like it's it's like she doesn't know how to use a gun.
I actually, by the way, there was an article that just came out in the New Republic.
I just gave it a parsed over before we started talking.
The person who wrote it says that it's not actually outfitted to be a lefty AR-15.
He just didn't know any better.
Which just makes it all that much better.
Never mind then.
Again, I don't know much about guns.
Can I ask you a question for clarification?
Because this is one of those things that I actually think Democrats are failing on because they don't want to talk about it.
So Matt Gaetz says that in Joe Biden's America, the police won't come and help you.
Nick, in the interest of non-biased communication and fact-telling, what Democrat of the last few decades has spent more of their political capital trying to raise money and funds for law enforcement organizations?
The esteemed Senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, who has staked most of his political career talking about getting tough on crime and getting more money for law enforcement.
Listen, I know that people are hearing that or planning on voting for Joe Biden that don't necessarily like it.
It's the truth.
So if you want to live in Matt Gaetz's world where Joe Biden is an Antifa, you know, like, rioter in the streets, you can.
But that should show you how these people are not only not serious, they're not even approaching serious.
They're jokes.
They're engaging in that theater that we were talking about earlier.
They're not actually engaging in any reality that resembles ours.
Let me ask you this.
Who's the president right now?
Whose world is this that's been shaped?
So how can Matt Gaetz argue... Nick!
Okay?
He's fighting the deep state so hard that he can't do anything else.
He's presenting an example of what is on the ground now in reaction to something as if Biden was in the White House now and already had done all these different things they're talking about.
But no, they've had the four years of Trump.
This is Trump's world, not Biden's world, that these people are living in.
That is probably the biggest takeaway I took from that tweet was that what are you doing?
You can't sort of accuse somebody who's not even in power of doing these things that exist today because it's the guy that you're supporting that's doing this stuff.
That's the craziest part of it.
That was probably too logical and that took a couple of extra steps that people might not be able to follow.
But it's just mystifying.
It's almost like blaming your opponent for starting globalism when you were the ones who constructed it, pushed for it, and voted for it.
Because what we're talking about is the fact that, and by the way, I assume, we've never talked about this, I assume you probably watched The Daily Show in the past.
I mean, you know, we're a couple of, you know, liberal people in America.
Hip cats.
Yeah, you watch The Daily Show, right?
On occasion, I've been known to watch.
Okay.
So back in the day when Jon Stewart hosted The Daily Show, one of the most popular segments that they would do constantly is showing Republicans shifting what they said and what they believed.
One day they're for this, and then when they were in power, they were for this.
And it was just back and forth.
What Republicans have done, and this is one of the reasons why they've been successful politically, is that they have shamelessly given up any consistency whatsoever.
That's how they gain power.
It's one moment, whatever is good for them politically is, you know, they'll change at the next minute, depending on.
It's malleable politics.
There's a reason why Donald Trump says one thing in the morning and says another thing in the afternoon.
And you couldn't actually pin down Donald Trump's politics besides saying that it's racist, xenophobic, and occasionally it switches around, right?
They're not a party that has a consistent philosophy.
We joked about it a couple times already.
Their platform for their convention, they plagiarized it from the last one when Barack Obama was president and still refer to the president in power as if it's a negative.
They don't care that...
They're not consistent.
They'll do whatever they have to do, which is one of the reasons why this party needs to go away.
It has given up any grip on good faith politics and anything approaching actual working towards something better.
All they're interested in is power.
That's it.
Period.
I'm sorry that it comes down to that simple of a thing, but it does.
My neck is now hurting from nodding so much the last minute of what you were saying.
Yes, and that's why I used to watch it on YouTube, because it's so much to see.
But it is, you said it exactly right.
The malleable notion of this, and here's the thing, the people that they're trying to absorb into their tent are not malleable.
Right?
They have very distinct ways of seeing how the world is supposed to be, and they're not interested in changing one iota.
But if you can feed them the crumbs of what they want to hear here, and then hopefully they don't hear the opposite of that later on that night, or they'll be able to rationalize it away, then you can maintain this coalition, which again, is not a majority of the people.
And last I checked, I thought that the government of the United States is supposed to represent the will of the people.
The majority of the people.
I thought that was supposed to be how it was set up, but that's not how it works.
I get nostalgic about our relationship and the conversations that we've had.
It's such a rich relationship.
I get nostalgic about it.
One of the things that we've talked about a lot and has been brought up a lot was my experience reporting on the Trump campaign and you trying to discern the line between the Trumpist And the Republicans who work with the Trumpist, right?
And where that line is, and what that number is, and where we believe it is.
Because I actually think it's a really important conversation.
I do.
One thing that I wanted to point out that I thought was really important, and actually, you know, I don't write textbooks.
I write books that have history in them, but you know, maybe I'll write about this at some point.
That video that Trump retweeted from The Villages.
With the retirees and their golf carts supporting him and like within the first 10 seconds, somebody yells out white power, which is just first of all, who says white power?
Who says that all the time?
Neo-Nazis.
Yes.
Right?
That's their calling card.
But it was in jest.
It was in jest.
It was so funny.
But that's the whole point.
That's where they come together.
Right?
It's those retirees who have been wearing, you know, elephant buttons for forever.
And meanwhile, when they're hanging out with their friends and playing pickleball.
I don't know what the hell this thing is.
Or bocce or whatever.
You know, these are the ones who are like, well, you know, I'm not racist, but...
Right?
And then they talk about the problems that African Americans present and all this stuff.
And they're white supremacists, but they won't even admit that they are.
Well, guess what?
Those groups have collided.
And where they meet in the middle is Trumpism.
Right?
You have neo-Nazis over here who use Trump because he's a white supremacist, probably in denial.
And over here you have white supremacists in denial.
And they all work together.
And now, The wall's just eroding.
The people who are sticking by this disgusting display are the ones who saw the Neo-Nazis and were like, maybe if you lost the swastika, maybe we could play some pickleball, right?
But it turns out that they're on the same side.
They just are.
I agree.
And it's really just a profound effect.
Now, the only thing I can take Saladin is that the older people, and by the way, there's nothing more absurd than the image of some sort of Trump rally being done by these people in golf carts, driving in a circle around and around because they're too old to walk, I suppose.
It was just so ridiculous.
At the very least, though, they're beyond raising kids.
So it's possible that they may have done the damage when the kids were young decades ago.
But at the very least, they're not actively training very young kids to be indoctrinated to this.
So there might be some hope that they're not going to pass this along as easily as the parents of young kids now who are the white supremacists.
Yeah, if you want some hope, it's the fact that you have a generation right now, and the generation before it, that are living in an America where these things are being questioned.
They're a lot smarter about politics, and they're a lot smarter about what actual history is, and what privilege is, and what systemic racism is.
So, there is hope to be had.
I mean, all this stuff we're talking about Trump betraying the country and all that, I mean, it's rough stuff, but there's hope.
And you know what?
Speaking of, we try our hardest to make this a hopeful podcast.
We try and give you information and, you know, bring you a realist, actual, nuanced perspective.
We try and bring hope with it.
So we want to thank you for hanging out with us.
It's really, really cool that you do and the support that you give us.
You've been doing a fantastic job of helping this show.
Again, what we ask, we're not looking for money, we don't have a Patreon, any of that stuff.
What we're asking, just please share it.
Just, you know, share it with your friends, share it with your social media, like it, subscribe it, rate it, leave comments.
Weirdly enough, all that stuff helps.
It helps with algorithms, and it's helped build our audience, and it's certainly growing, so we're really, really appreciative.
We're going to be back later this week.
I'm hoping to do a live stream on Sunday where I'm going to talk to people, so if people are interested in that, come along.
Man, it was good to be back here.
I missed this last week, so this is nice.
Until next time, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me SMH.
