Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss a Fourth of July unlike any other, featuring somber reflection of America's vices, skyrocketing coronavirus cases, and Donald Trump, an American president, going full-bore white supremacist as his reelection campaign stumbles. Also, in an exclusive interview, security expert Josh Berthume joins for an interview about his warning "7 Hours in November" and explains his concerns about the dangers facing America in the upcoming presidential election.
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Where our democracy is at stake, where our leadership role in the world is at stake, where the lives of tens of thousands of Americans are on the line, lost to incompetence and callous leadership that could care less.
We've got to change that.
Let me also say a word to those in the media who falsely and consistently label their opponents as racists, Who condemn patriotic citizens, who offer a clear and truthful defense of American unity.
That's what our people are doing.
We want a clear and faithful defense of American history, and we want unity.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm your co-host Jared Yates-Sexton.
As always, I'm joined here by my co-host Nick Hausselman.
We have a full episode today.
We're going to welcome on Josh Berthum later on, who is a Truman Project National Security Fellow.
We're going to talk about his article, Seven Hours in November.
his article that talks about how maybe the most dangerous seven hours in American history are going to be between the closing of Eastern polls on Election Day and 2 a.m., where, you know, just democracy might fall apart completely.
So that'll be a conversation at the end of the podcast.
Stick around for that.
In the meantime, Nick, we celebrated 4th of July, Independence Day, the birth of our country, and Donald Trump, for his reelection campaign, has gone completely racist, white supremacist, not even hiding it anymore.
How are you feeling right now about the President of the United States just being an unrepentant white supremacist?
Well, I had dismissed the notion that he simply has given up on winning re-election.
There have been some reports about that.
Maybe, like, they're just kind of going to punt this whole thing.
And it doesn't sound great.
It sounds crazy.
But then you listen to these two speeches he did this weekend and you have to wonder, yes, like, they might at this point be thinking about that because clearly that base that he's trying to rally and support is shrinking.
I mean, his poll numbers now are sub 40 and 39, 38, I think.
38 percent.
And so you have to remember that this isn't just sort of like bounce back generally this time of year.
He has to earn some votes back.
He has to do something to get some more people to actually approve of what he's doing.
But I think he's you know he's just towards that bridge.
And it's now, I don't know how you ever get any more of those people back.
Now, again, it's probably wishful thinking because things are going to change and you all know what happens there.
But there is some notion that like this is going to be a thing where not only they maybe not want to win, but they're going to burn the whole thing down and do as much damage as they can until January 17th.
Are we in the business of giving people false hope, Nick?
No, I wouldn't.
No, that is not what the Muckrake Podcast is about.
Let's just be frank.
We like to have conversations about the crisis that we're in and be honest about them.
Well, let me tell you something.
Do you know where Donald Trump is spending his campaign's money right now for ads?
It's in places like Georgia.
Georgia.
Where I live.
Georgia, Nick.
It's in Arizona.
We're talking about Trump strongholds.
They are not trying to build their base.
They're shedding their base.
If anybody's ever watched Spinal Tap, you know, this is the thing where in the movie they say, we're not becoming less popular, we're becoming more selective in the people who enjoy us, right?
Which is what's happening with Donald Trump.
It's a really terrible campaign.
There's literally the only plan that he's given to the American people for a second term is what he said this weekend at the White House, which I don't know if you saw this, but.
He proposed a national statue garden.
That was his big idea.
If he gets reelected, he's going to create which, by the way, will include a visage of Antonin Scalia, who he singled out as an American hero in another attempt to try and tell evangelicals and the right that they should vote for him.
That's his only plan.
He has no achievements.
He has no vision.
When asked why he should be reelected, his program overheats and he just talks.
The only thing that he can do at this point is to continue to be a toxic, disgusting mascot of barely hidden white supremacy and cultural rage.
I mean, what did he do today?
By the way, after finding out that Vladimir Putin is paying bounties on U.S.
soldiers' troops, which he hasn't talked about, He went after Bubba Wallace, the only African-American NASCAR driver who found a noose in his car stall and went out and targeted him.
That was his choice, and that's the only thing he's got.
And it's descending into a really ugly re-election campaign that's going to do more harm than anything else.
Well, to flesh that out, you know, remember Bubba Wallace didn't find the news, didn't report the news.
It's not like him who is just holding it up and shouting to the heavens.
And yet Trump is demanding an apology from him specifically, which is, again, It's just racist and the people that follow him are going to probably argue that it's racist the other way for trying to point this out in this gaslighting version.
We saw a woman trying to paint over the Black Lives Matter on the street and I'm now forgetting where that was.
Do you remember?
Did you see that?
And they have a good video of it because the stupid thing was the way she was doing it was just simply going to change the color of the letters to dark.
and not yellow, but you'd still read it.
It would just be still there.
And meanwhile, the guy is screaming, who's with her, saying that there is no racism.
Read about the Emancipation Proclamation as if, in their minds, the simply signing that piece of paper ended racism in a magical way.
Yes.
Done.
I want to talk about that because I was ruminating about this over the weekend and sort of came up with an idea, which is, you know, why do we want to have the truth of what really has been happening in our country for all these years?
What is the value versus what Trump wants to do, which is simply sort of celebrate this nationalistic, you know, ideal version of all these heroes and patriots who didn't ever do anything wrong.
And that's what we need to instill in our kids as they learn this stuff.
And I think the reason is, is that, you know, it's the ideals that we're trying to strive for and that the more of the reality that we understand of what really happened is what motivates us to continue trying to achieve those ideals versus if you want to, I guess you'd call it rest on your laurels and sort it's the ideals that we're trying to strive for and that the more of the reality that we understand of what really happened is what motivates us to continue trying to achieve those ideals versus then we're doomed to never have any progression
That's the amazing thing.
We're gonna keep having the same issues, especially along the lines of racism without that.
We need that motivation and that sort of perspective in order to achieve what we're trying to get, which we'll probably never get, but we need to keep trying to get there. - It's a pessimistic view of America.
That's the amazing thing.
I actually, so I did this livestream this weekend where I was answering questions.
And one of the questions I got asked was, why do I hate America?
I don't hate America whatsoever.
In fact, I love America so much that I want it to be its better self, right?
I want America to be better for everyone.
And in fact, the truth is, America has really been falling behind for a very long time.
We have watched as this economy has just juiced us, as economic inequality has grown, and as white supremacy has broken the meritocracy and all the systems we believed were real and honest.
Donald Trump is a Rosetta Stone.
He made it clear how broken everything was.
And I don't know how it was for you, Nick, or for our listeners.
This was one of the most undeniably strangest 4th of July's that I've had in my entire life.
It was a bizarre, cloistered, quarantined holiday.
And I kept saying this on Twitter, the 4th of July is like American Christmas.
It's like the birth of a religious, nationalistic mythology.
Where we, you know, we gorge ourselves and we sort of like celebrate summer, but we also talk about how great America is and how perfect it is.
There wasn't a whole lot to celebrate this year.
We have a pandemic that has just ravaged this country.
We have a government that has completely given up.
We have a president who's not interested in being president and can't even be bothered to, like, drudge up some basic empathy or, you know, basic human level feelings towards anybody.
And, you know, we're all suffering and we all kind of know that America is broken and Donald Trump has only made that clearer.
It's a weird thing because so many of us, particularly privileged white Americans, we're living in an alternate reality where America was really, really great and it did a bunch of good things and look what we have.
Everyone, we have iPhones, which by the way are made by poor people across the ocean and, you know, involved in slave and arduous labor.
It is making us reconsider who we are and how things need to be, which unfortunately is what needs to happen.
And I know it's exhausting.
It was really hard to spend the 4th of July.
I read the original Declaration of Independence, which Congress rejected, which condemned slavery, right?
Like, that's how I spent my 4th of July.
That's not how I used to spend the 4th of July.
You know, you read Frederick Douglass talking about independence and what it means for Black people.
Yeah, it's exhausting.
But do you know who else it's exhausting for?
People of color, who have to think about this stuff all the time.
And white privilege has been a matter of pretending it doesn't exist.
And that's breaking.
And thank God it's breaking.
I'm so glad you brought that up because I was watching, we watched Hamilton this weekend because it came out.
How was Hamilton, Nick?
Well, listen, I've seen it three times in the theater and then, you know, so now I've seen it on the TV.
That's the fourth time.
And it's really great because they were able to get close-ups and they were able to, you know, they must have, after the show, went on stage and filmed different angles to add into it later.
So it was, there was more of an immediacy.
They were able to utilize the medium.
And listen, You might not like musicals, but it's really overwhelming the amount of talent that exists on stage at any one time that's just coming at you in waves.
The first act is just a non-stop barrage of facts and information and singing and rapping and dancing.
It really is.
It's overwhelming, but it's great.
But I watched a thing afterwards where they had a Q&A with the cast on YouTube.
And Lin-Manuel said something that was really terrific where he said, but because we are dealing with the origins of this country and how it's based on ideals that we fell short of the moment we wrote them down.
So not the what you read over the weekend, but the actual constitution as it became framed.
The second the ink dried, we were already letting down those ideals, primarily because of slavery.
And he was discussing how that still affects the play, or the musical still affects us now, and it really was so poignant to realize that.
But that's, again, that motivation that we should all have and understand in order to get better.
Let me tell you something.
I come from a small Indiana town that the biggest event of the year is the 4th of July.
Like it, you know, it's this tiny, tiny town that has like the biggest 4th of July parade in the state of Indiana, right?
And I have to say like the carnival, the cookouts, you know, all of the trimmings, the fireworks, you can imagine small town nostalgic 4th of July.
I'll tell you what's a lot more fun than thinking about history and white privilege and going through American faults.
That's eating hot dogs and hamburgers and watching fireworks.
It's fantastic.
It's a really enjoyable time and there's a nostalgic part of me that enjoys that.
But you know what else we have to do?
You just brought up Alexander Hamilton.
Alexander Hamilton was a really problematic historical figure when he played a role in the founding of this country.
He pushed the idea that we should go ahead and accept slavery so that we could have a financial advantage.
He told everybody he was like we either accept slavery and as a result do not have a civil war right now and we have a financial advantage or we have a civil war and then we figure it out later.
It's one of the reasons why we had a civil war in the first place.
And if you go back and listen, it's a lot more fun to eat hot dogs.
Then it is to sit down and read Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention and suddenly realize that the Constitution was kind of a coup.
They didn't have authority to write the thing and in their conversations they talked about how dumb poor people were and how they shouldn't have votes and they shouldn't be allowed to direct the country and how African Americans should be enslaved and they didn't even mention women by the way.
Let's not even talk about that.
That isn't as fun as eating hot dogs, but guess what?
Sometimes you can't just eat hot dogs.
You have to sit down and actually think about your own privilege and think about the privilege of this country.
And here's the good news on that.
Is it exhausting?
Yes.
Is it demoralizing?
Occasionally.
But you know what it can lead to?
A better life!
It can lead to a fairer, more equal country.
And that's unfortunately the labor that we have to do.
We've been skating by on white privilege for so long that we haven't had to think about it.
Guess what?
We have a lot of makeup work to do.
And yeah, it's going to lead to some 4th of July's that aren't great.
But you know what?
We need to do it.
We need to do the work.
Well, you know, Hamilton was a federalist and he believed that we needed a strong, you know, central government to influence the states and have control because I think he probably understood then even how problematic it could be going into the future when you have rogue mayors or rogue governors who want to do their own thing.
And that was clear even from obviously the South wanted to do their own thing from then.
And so that's sort of what we're dealing with even today with masks wearing.
Okay, because we can't first of all we can't even get a centralized federal mandate to wear masks.
And so now we have all sort of piecemeal all different places and people pushing back on whether they should wear masks.
And, you know, whether it's scientifically proven to work or not and you know the narrator's voice, it is.
But we still have guys like, you know, I really don't want to call him a guy.
I want to call him an asshole.
Dan Crenshaw, for instance, who has just littered with the most ridiculous misinformation from the beginning, but presented in a very rational, very calm, as if he's, you know, really, you know, measured here.
And it's caused so much confusion.
That we're having spikes all over the place and we're having people who are destroying mask displays in Target as part of a QAnon mission.
Did you watch that video by the way?
Did you see both of the videos?
I watched both the videos and they are disturbing as disturbing gets.
Right, but let's face that.
Okay, if you didn't see it, if you're listening to this, a woman was in Target and just, you know, in an insane way, just knocking down all the masks and just sort of saying, I can't deal with this, this is not happening, we're not doing this anymore, whatever.
And then they go to arrest her later, and she's spouting out all the QAnon, you know, this is, I was actually working for the government, this is the top secret thing, you can't arrest me for this, I'm Jewish, you're now being anti-Semitic.
It was crazy.
And I think that that's the problem, is that, you know, she clearly just needs help.
This isn't, I mean, I'm sure it's a QAnon thing too, but she's just someone who needs help.
And I wonder if it was her husband in the background was kind of just sort of standing there, not getting involved and kind of smiling.
I got the, almost the impression he's like, finally someone needs to intervene and take her away because she, you know, they're going to hopefully get her to where she needs to go, which is psychiatric help.
Yeah, I don't know if you saw this because, I mean, America's got a lot going on, so it's hard to keep track of what's going on in other countries.
Last week in Canada, a QAnon believer rammed the gates at the residence of the Prime Minister of Canada.
Just loaded up his truck with a bunch of weapons and then just busted through the gate and then was arrested.
One of the things, and I talked about this last night, I did this live stream.
One of the things that we don't like to talk about.
It's kind of gross.
It's kind of iffy.
It makes us feel bad.
We're not just dealing with a political crisis.
We're not just dealing with a societal crisis.
We're not just dealing with an existential crisis.
We're dealing with a mental health crisis.
We're dealing with a lot of Americans who are not well.
Right?
And one of the things about MAGA and Trumpism is that it tells people, no, no, no, no, no.
The problem's not with you.
The problem is these people out here who are telling you that you have a problem.
Right?
Which is one of the ways that like leads to people getting lost in these alternate realities.
And I write about this all the time.
Fox News is an alternate reality.
Right?
It's where you and your family, if you are white, are under attack at all times by liberal traitors.
You're under attack by people of color who are, oh my god, if you give them even half a chance, Nick, they're violent.
They'll kill you and your family.
You need to get guns and gold and prep for, you know, a race war.
All that stuff comes together and suddenly you're telling people, oh, you have to wear a mask in order to help other people.
Well, the people that you are supposedly trying to help are trying to kill you, right?
And we're talking about this weaponized alternate reality.
And unfortunately, America has been embroiled in this, you know, game theory world, which is, oh, if I give an inch, you're going to take a mile.
So I'm going to take a mile and you have to play in good faith, which unfortunately, Has been a pandemic that has riddled the Republican Party and the American right.
Telling people now to wear a mask, it's not going to work.
Because Fox News has told them the pandemic's not real.
Trump isn't going to wear a mask.
So to wear, and that's the other part.
If I wear a mask, it's not to protect me.
You know what I mean?
It's to protect You.
And so it's you and me and it's a reciprocity.
I'll protect you if you protect me.
Republicans aren't going to do that.
They're not interested in sharing society and taking care of each other.
And the idea of liberty, I mean, all you have to do is go back to everything from seatbelt laws to secondhand smoke laws to, you know, Smoking being banned in restaurants and public places.
And you look at how all this stuff has played out.
Anti-vaccination movements, all of it.
Anything that is supposedly about other people, they're not going to do because they see it as a war that never ends.
Every one of these decisions is a war decision.
Well, we've talked about this a lot in this podcast, about how it's subtle at times.
The Republicans' leadership has led us along a path to not believe we're part of a community.
We've talked about it when, after the huge surplus at the end of Clinton's administration, W wins by basically saying, I'm going to pay you $200 for your vote because this is your money.
You know, think about what we could have done with that surplus and how great programs we could have done and things we could have solved with all those billions of dollars.
And instead, he just paid everybody $200 to get the boat.
Oh, and then carried out an illegal war that completely ruined our economy and took away money from any project that could have been done.
Sure.
Right.
And so when we see all the time from Reagan all the way through, we see, you know, even the argument against universal health care, which would have been the most, the biggest example of us caring about each other and lifting each other up and actually helping everybody live a better life.
All those ideals that the founding fathers had.
It became socialism.
It became you're going to get terrible care.
But that's not really what they're saying.
It's really what they're saying is You can't be, you know, helping anybody else.
You don't want your money to be helping anybody else.
How dare you even think about that?
You got to hoard all that money yourself.
And so that's what's so frustrating about this is that because I developed this thing, now we have like a whole sort of mistrust about what the government's leaders are doing.
And here's what's interesting.
They've been pretty wrong, right?
We had Trump saying, oh, 60,000 deaths, 70,000.
First it was 100, then it was 60, 50, then it was going to wash over.
It's just going to pass in the middle of the night, Nick.
We'll wake up one day and it'll just be gone.
And a lot of the other Republicans fell in line with the same stuff, and they're still saying it.
Navarro and all these guys.
So they now understand, even the people that follow them understand, that they were wrong about that, and that their credibility is now damaged.
So now we're living in an era where they're not going to believe anything.
There's no way, like you had just said, there's no way to sort of influence them to really do the right thing now, because they're just awash in all these things that clearly was wrong.
And so I feel like that's sort of the torque that's going on in their brains too, where they don't know what to do at this point, because nobody's been right, even though we've had plenty of the scientists be right, but they didn't listen to them in the beginning.
It's confusing, but that's where we are, and it's crazy.
I am so glad that you brought up healthcare.
Because it is...
It's the lens through which we need to view not just the Republican Party, but the pandemic.
So in the 1990s, Bill Clinton comes into office, and we've talked about this multiple times.
Bill Clinton comes in with the understanding that he's going to peddle Republican policies.
That's what he's going to do in the wake of Reagan, is he's going to present Reaganism with a human face.
So he comes in to do this moderate, just common sense health care reform.
And immediately, what the Republicans... By the way, the Republicans were incredibly charmed by Hillary Clinton, which is not a history that we like to talk about.
Like, they really liked Hillary Clinton for a hot minute.
And then all of a sudden, William Crystal, who again, I have no idea why that dude follows me on Twitter, but whatever.
So, William Crystal puts out a memo that says, hey, yeah, healthcare is broken, but if we actually pass healthcare reform, the Democrats will own it and they'll be able to win re-election.
And we can't allow them a win.
So basically, the entire Republican Party, knowing full and well that healthcare in America is broken, they go out in public constantly and say, there's no healthcare crisis.
And luckily, They had a lot of preparation because in the 1980s, energy companies, which made up a lot of their donors, guess what energy companies were worried about in the 1980s, Nick?
That's right, climate change.
Because Exxon and Shell and all of these people understood, by the way, you think that they don't have scientists?
You think they don't have people with degrees looking at climate change?
They knew in the 1980s that climate change was something.
They actually knew before most people knew that climate change was real.
But it wasn't good for their economic bottom line.
So immediately you say it's not real, you say healthcare crisis isn't real, and it becomes your political reality.
The Republican Party made a bet with the start of the pandemic, which was it'll just pass in the middle of the night, Nick, magically, like Tinkerbell, going from window to window, and it'll just be gone.
We'll never think about it again.
Guess what?
They were wrong.
And now we live in a country where nobody will take responsibility.
Because, my God, can you imagine being the person who takes responsibility during a generational pandemic?
You probably won't win re-election.
You probably won't be in politics anymore.
And you shouldn't be.
Which is the problem in this country, is the corporate delegation of responsibility.
The president won't lead.
He tells the governors to lead.
The governors won't lead.
They tell local officials to lead.
And the local officials, maybe they do, maybe they don't.
And it just, the buck, the bullshit just keeps getting spread thinner and thinner.
I'm so glad you brought that up because I was thinking about how, you know, we pay taxes because of the vital services that the federal government provides, right?
There are very, very important things and we're seeing them not providing it to us right now during this pandemic, but certainly in normal times there's a lot of different things that we need from both local government and the federal government that we pay taxes for.
But I discovered, I feel, that it's more important that we have competent leaders than we do taxes.
Because you can see as it is, when we need money, they just suddenly have money for whatever they need to do, right?
They can just print the money and they can give it away, they can allocate it however they want, and taxes be damned.
Like raising taxes, lowering taxes, doesn't seem to matter.
Isn't that weird?
Yeah.
Isn't it weird how their principles just Yeah, so it doesn't matter.
The taxes and the actual number of how much they're charging us for taxes doesn't matter at all.
It's really the competency of our leadership is what gets us through these issues and these pandemics and these wars and all the different things we have to go through.
And if it hasn't been clear yet, it's like now we're staring right in the face of what it looks like when you completely hollow out the government, leave thousands upon thousands of jobs unfilled.
It's kind of like, remember the movie The Falcon and the Snowman?
Wow, I did not expect The Falcon and the Snowman to come up in today's podcast, I have to tell you.
Well, you know, at some point, Timothy Hutton is working in, I can't remember what government office it is, but it's a big party.
They're just screwing around the whole time.
It's so easy for him to steal secrets and then, you know, his buddy Sean Penn sells them and whatever gets in trouble.
I can remember.
And in fact, there's a great scene where they have to hide the bottles of liquor that they were drinking in the shredded document bin and the guy doesn't catch them.
But that's probably what's going on right now.
I mean, certainly we've heard of these instances as it is.
And then we have other people who simply aren't qualified for their jobs who can't effectively do them.
I don't even want to blame them for it.
They're just probably trying to do their best.
But this is what happens, and it's going to get worse.
There's no question.
Let's mind it.
We're going to have reports, I'm sure, of different agencies failing us to no end.
And because they're not doing oversight right now, we're not going to find out for a little while.
Isn't it weird that we're in the middle of a war against a pandemic, but we're not receiving resources for that.
And meanwhile, the military industrial complex and law enforcement continue to just gobble up budgets.
I mean, that's the way this whole thing has worked.
I mean, people don't like to talk about it, but the Republican Party is obsessed with power and actual redistribution of wealth.
They take our money and then they give them to military contractors and law enforcement organizations.
That's the way this whole thing has ever been.
And rich people.
Yeah, and rich people.
And people don't like to talk about this and they give me flack whenever I talk about it.
The Republican Party doesn't actually have principles.
They're not fiscally conservative.
They're not socially conservative.
They're not actually pro-life.
They're not pro-troops either, my god.
I mean, put some bounties on their head and don't pay them their payments when they come due or take care of their health problems.
Or invite them over for dinner.
Or anything.
It's not a real thing.
It's a malleable politics is what's happening.
And what is actually occurring right now, and by the way, real fast, I just want to point out, do you remember when the governor of Michigan locked down the state, right?
Whitmer, a female Democratic governor.
My god, they were carrying AR-15s into the legislature.
Isn't it weird how that's not happening in Texas right now?
How all of a sudden this far-right governorship locks down the state and requires masks, but they're not carrying guns, Nick!
Isn't that odd?
It's almost like it's a performative ideology that has no basis in an actual reality.
And what ends up happening is you then have A completely broken system.
And you brought up federalism.
And by the way, I have my problems with the federalists.
They're one of the most disgusting groups of people ever.
They hated human beings.
They hated Americans.
But that's a topic for another time.
You have a system now that the federal government takes no responsibility for anything.
I mean, Donald Trump takes no responsibility for this pandemic.
It doesn't help anybody.
Then you have a cadre of governors.
So like, for instance, I live in Georgia.
I have to tell you, Nick, I'm so excited, as a college professor, next month, because there's been no guidance from my state, that we're going to, in my small town, which is a rural hotspot, In my county, where cases went up between June and July, 560%.
That's right.
560%, Nick.
In my town, numbers are doubling like every other day.
I'm really excited because we're bringing students back.
20,000 students.
Guess what?
They come from Georgia.
They also come from Florida, where... I haven't checked the news today, Nick.
How's Florida doing with the coronavirus right now?
Not good.
Not good!
And guess what?
Because my governor, who stole the election from Stacey Abrams, Brian Kemp, because he wants to physically just join Donald Trump, like a weird horror movie, he just wants to just absorb into Donald Trump and possibly be Trump 2.0, because he doesn't want to piss off his constituents.
There's no rule about masks across the state.
So I'm going to be in a room lecturing to students in an enclosed space.
And by the way, what's the CDC say about enclosed spaces with coronavirus, Nick?
You better have social distancing and masks.
Isn't it weird that I can't require masks because the governor of the state doesn't want to piss off his constituency?
Because he was one of the Trump cronies who came out and said, I don't know, nothing's really going on here.
Go out and get your tattoos and your waxings.
That's what's gone on.
We have had this bullshit pass from the top all the way down the bottom.
We're not being protected.
These people have no interest whatsoever in governing.
They have no interest in making tough decisions.
Because what happens when you make a tough decision?
You might not get re-elected.
You might piss some people off.
And these people, like corporate boards, do not want to piss anybody off.
So they're incapable of leading.
And guess what?
If you're afraid of pissing people off, you probably shouldn't be a leader.
That's just the stone cold truth of it.
You probably should not seek out leadership positions if you're afraid of pissing people off.
I mean, whatever happened to making a tough decision and then being able to back it up and convince people that it was a good decision and show them that it works?
That's what being a politician is supposed to be about and being a leader.
But they also are now going to revoke student visas for international students if they don't have classes in the classroom.
And we've already heard that Harvard is going all online, I think at least for the fall semester.
And by the way, if you're listening to this and you go to Harvard, can you get me a login?
I really want to see some of these classes.
I really want to find out just how good this Harvard education really is and what the information they're giving out.
Did you see the article that came out today?
This is, I promise it ties in, that there was an investigation done and it found that like 30 or 40 percent of Harvard white students were legacies, or like the sons and daughters of people who worked at Harvard.
Like, not that our institutions of higher learning are gatekeepers of white privilege and white supremacy, but you know, going forward.
Right, well don't forget, if they offer it online, then they could easily open it up and let more people in, right?
If that's really the goal here, and then it would help them become more diverse, right?
They could have more people of different cultures, or sorry, different socio-economic backgrounds, you know, get this quote-unquote education, this magic education that they're giving out at Harvard.
I really would love to see, you know, how different is that from, I don't know, like University of Chicago, or Berkeley, or any of those other schools that are also Really good and probably have the same curriculum.
I'm kind of curious to see.
But there doesn't seem to be any reason for the government to be mandating that they're going to kick all these student visas out, other than to put some sort of pressure on schools to actually bring the kids back into the classroom.
Right?
That seems to be the only motivation they have.
Because if there were, there's a lot of ramifications for losing all those students from international First of all, it's about cruelty.
That's what the whole thing is.
they're not going to get in revenue that schools when the students can't go.
And do we want to tie in the whole college football unbelievable bullshit-ness of this whole thing?
Because I don't know if people are really aware of what that means either.
First of all, it's about cruelty.
That's what the whole thing is.
And I'm so glad that you brought up college football because, listen, I could do a whole episode about this.
I enjoy college sports.
I just want to put a disclaimer on it.
My favorite sports are probably baseball and college basketball.
Those are probably my two favorite sports.
But you know what?
I'm also a professor.
I'm a member of the academy.
I think it is a total bastardization and perversion.
By the way, I hung out with an old friend of mine who is an old tennis coach.
And he said something that stuck with me for a long time.
And he said, Major League Baseball pays and funds a minor league system.
You come out of high school, you join the, you know, if you get drafted, you join the minor leagues.
Or you go to college and maybe you get drafted after that, right?
So college baseball is not where the best of the best go.
College football and college basketball are subsidized public leagues so that the NFL and the NBA do not have to pay for a substantive minor leagues.
And as a result, the bastardization of academia is that we have made our entire profit margin based around college football.
That is why, and if you have any question about it, and it feels weird talking about this because other professors just know it, right?
It's just an understood thing.
The reason why we are going face-to-face and having college students come back and risking their lives is so that they can have college football as a profit earner.
Because the NCAA said that there will not be fall sports unless you have students on campus.
Which is technically what they should have done, but they predetermined what campuses were going to do.
So now, because we want to make our nut in terms of getting all of our money from college football, we're going to endanger your kids' lives.
That's what's happening, and it is one of the most disgusting things, and also, I think, metaphorical for what's happening in this country.
It's really disgusting.
I know I'm going to go on the limb to express my confusion about things that come out of the NCAA sports mandates of why they do things at all, but I don't understand why they have to have a rule that says you have to have all of your students on campus to hold football games.
I don't get it.
You know, the football team could come back.
They could live in a quarantine, isolated thing with no other students on campus.
They could be practicing.
They could be getting tested.
They could whatever.
We have these things.
Don't we have these things that, you know, are all around the field and like they're like lenses on them.
And when you point them at things, you can then see what's on the other end, like from far away.
We have something like technology like that, right?
I think that we have been capturing the essences of people in photography and videos for, I could be wrong, I'll check my facts, I believe at least a couple of weeks.
Yeah, I mean Frederick Douglass has a freaking picture of himself, a photo of himself.
So we definitely have that technology.
It's really bad, and I just want to point out again, and actually what you just said about why the NCAA made that ruling, this is part of the problem with America.
I think that that ruling was right, which said we're not going to have fall sports unless it's safe.
And all the institutions took it, they reverse engineered it, and they're like, well, how do we get students back so we can have fall sports?
Which is actually the perversion of what the original ruling was.
And so as a result, you have, again, this level where it's like, okay, here are the people who are supposed to make decisions.
And here's everybody underneath them who keep passing the buck.
The problem is that America right now is a failed state.
It doesn't actually offer protection or assistance.
It just exists because there are people who are in power and seeking profit who continue to seek power and profit.
And that's one of the reasons why this country is in so much trouble right now.
I mean, by the way, I could do a whole podcast on why I'm morally opposed to football itself.
You know.
No, it is.
And real fast, I'm so glad you said that.
Thinking about football is a lot like thinking about America.
There is a way that you can watch the sport and sort of turn off your deeper thinking.
You watch people constantly getting leveled, suffering injuries, suffering, you know, traumatic brain injury.
There is like a level that you can go on where it's just like cruise control and you watch it for your enjoyment and you forget that people are suffering.
That sort of privilege is the type of privilege that has been pushing America and white privilege for so long is you forget that people are suffering and that there's oppression and you get caught up in the entertainment of it.
Scott, that's great.
And it's also the tuning out, like we had mentioned earlier in the pod.
It's too complicated to have to deal with the ramifications of what this country was founded on, right?
It's just much easier to have the hot dog, eat the burger, watch the football, and just sort of not worry about CTE or catastrophic spinal injuries or knee injuries and, you know, the long-term damage that football will do, that COVID will do.
I mean, I don't know if you heard the news about Nick Cordero, this Broadway actor, but I mean, it was devastating.
And here's a guy who's 41 years old in great shape, was a, you know, fantastic performer and lost his life after three months and losing his leg.
And then they could not save him, needing a double lung transplant.
And what we keep reading about now is that, you know, Trump had come out in one of his speeches and one of his sweaty.
He, by the way, he looks like he's got COVID.
He looked so bad at Mount Rushmore.
And, you know, even the way he described this looting, And the rioting?
It sounds like he's describing like if the purge had lasted 20 straight days and was going on right in the middle of this speech.
That's what he made it sound like.
We had a few nights of rioting.
We had a few nights of unrest.
Some statues got pulled down.
But we still have these peaceful protests.
But that wasn't the point.
The point was... What was the point?
Oh, people are eating their hot dogs, they want to have their hamburger and not be aware of what's really going on because it's just too hard to have to handle all these different thoughts and these complex ideas.
It's just easier to put it on cruise control and just enjoy seeing people get the shit kicked out of each other on a field in front of 80,000 people.
You know, I appreciate this podcast.
I appreciate the conversations we have.
I appreciate our audience.
I like to share things every now and then that I normally wouldn't share.
I'm going through a really hard time right now with my family and where I come from.
I love my family very much.
I've talked about them on this podcast.
I've talked about them in my research.
You know, not only did they go full bore with Trump, but a lot of them are being radicalized.
Like, when I log on like a Facebook, I see that my family members, the people I grew up with when I was a child, are starting to share not just white supremacist memes, but are starting to just really embrace white supremacy in totality, right?
Meanwhile, that makes me start to question when I was a kid And I've talked about this a lot.
I grew up in a white identity evangelical church.
The racism was everywhere, Nick.
And, like, it would be a whole lot easier to look at my childhood through, like, sepia-toned lenses and think about how much fun, like, a 4th of July or a Christmas was.
But the truth is, white supremacy was everywhere.
Fascism was everywhere.
This stuff has existed in America for generations.
It just so happens that Trump and Trumpism threw the door open and brought it out in the public for everybody to see it's ugly.
It's exhausting.
I miss being home.
I miss the festival.
I miss the Fourth of July.
I miss being with my family and not having tough conversations.
I'm from the Midwest.
My family doesn't like big, tough conversations, right?
Like, we'll sit there and talk about misery and our losses and stuff, but we'll change the subject.
You have to have a conversation every now and then.
You have to think about who's being hurt and where the oppression is and where the pain is.
And it's exhausting and it's tiring and it's stressful, but that's part of being an adult.
That's part of being an active member of society is not turning it off and embracing fascism because it promises complacency.
I watched a documentary this weekend called Unfit and it's produced by, you know, George Conway's in it, Scaramucci's in it, who else?
A bunch of psychiatrists and psychologists were in it sort of weighing in on Trump and his psychoses and how he is following the playbook of all the fascists that we've seen.
They spent some time on Mussolini and, you know, it's interesting that because they kind of accepted him as the leader of Italy at the time because they were just, they figured, you know what, let's just We'll let him have his power.
I'm sure we'll be able to influence him and he'll just kind of calm down after that.
That's how it worked with Hitler as well.
Yes.
And so it's how all these fascist dictators take over.
And that explains to some degree why we have the Republicans doing the same exact thing.
We had Trump say that the Black Lives Matter is a symbol of hate.
You know, again, if you don't, he's telling us in plain daylight that he is a white supremacist.
We did it the last episode about this, but it's like he will continue telling us and continue dog whistling.
And even in the beginning, we mentioned, you know, the mental illness that exists in our country.
I suppose the argument could very well be that with the proper leadership, Not only will we get better care for those kind of people that really need it, but with the things that he's saying, it probably does have some notion of encouraging really terrible behavior, violent behavior, you know, out in public and letting them sort of, you know, embrace this agitator and this insanity that's existing in their head.
Whereas with better leadership, it's possible they'd be in the shadows more and we wouldn't have to overtly see it like we are now.
They're different gradients to this.
One of the things I was trying to explain to people to bring it home.
I like them to think about the TV show Intervention.
You know, people who are addicted to, you know, drugs or alcohol or whatever.
What always ends up happening is you learn within an episode of Intervention that people get addicted or they have these problems because of something that they haven't taken care of internally.
Right, it's some sort of trauma or some sort of loss and eventually it metastasizes into a behavior.
And what you always end up finding on an episode like an intervention is when all the loved ones come together, there's one of two things that happens.
Either the person's like, yeah, I need to get help and they go and get help or they react violently.
They try and run away.
They try and escape.
What we have in America is a bunch of people who don't want to learn about white privilege.
They don't want to learn about their identities being based on this mythology.
A really hateful, prejudiced mythology, by the way.
And Donald Trump tells them they don't have to.
Right?
He's the person that as they're being led out to the vehicle, he stops and goes, you're perfect.
You don't have to do anything.
It's all of them.
They're all in on a conspiracy and they're meaning to harm you.
And that's what MAGA is all about.
It is an intentional weaponized denial of reality.
These people live in an alternate reality that the Republican Party created that right-wing media has just completely, not just planted, but tended to and grown and turned into its own ecosystem.
And then Donald Trump comes out and says, the people who are trying to burst your bubble are evil.
And if you allow them to burst your bubble, they'll take everything over and you will be killed.
And that conspiracy theory and that paranoid reality is what, unfortunately, powers America right now.
Exactly.
And you can see it because it's very visceral.
You've been to a lot of the rallies, and we're still seeing it even now.
And we see him do this where, you know, it's safe to say that a vast majority of his constituency are the people that really support him, who certainly go to these rallies.
I mean, let me ask you this.
Is it safe to say that maybe non-college educated white people is the big majority of the group there?
There's a disparate sort of a group there.
We've talked about this a little bit before.
They're the Republicans who would vote for any Republican who is up, right?
And they're the ones who would be at your county fair handing out, you know, elephant pins.
But the other thing about it, and again, this is very personal for me, right?
Watching the people that I love and my family being radicalized.
Their radicalization goes hand in hand, part and parcel with disappointments in their life, with frustrations in their life.
As their economic system goes badly, as their families go badly, they're in a lot of dysfunctional situations.
They're losing their careers left and right.
And let me tell you something, this is something people don't like talking about either.
Trump supporters have a reason to be pissed off about the direction of this country.
They have been betrayed by a lot of different people.
It doesn't mean that they're not racist, that they're not prejudiced, that they don't have white supremacy.
They have a reason to be angry about the state of the country, and they have rough lives as well.
But it just so happens that they're being radicalized by this movement.
So you're right.
A large part of them are people who have not been educated and who cannot work their way through the bullshit that Trump peddles.
And it's worth saying that a lot of the hate is focused on Democrats and Democratic policies, which did help accelerate some of their predicaments.
That said, accelerate's a key word, because if you were working in a factory in the, you know, I don't know, the late 80s in Michigan, whatever, you're going to be out of a job no matter what.
Like, that job was going to go away, and it was just a question of when.
Right?
No matter what was happening with, you know, either with NAFTA or not NAFTA, with Clinton coming in, for instance, you know, those jobs were so much cheaper in other places.
And those companies were going to keep doing it.
Now, by the way, if you notice, they also have mandated, they thought this was going to have a good effect on bringing American jobs back by mandating that Mexico has to pay a $15 minimum wage.
And Japan ends up saying, you know what?
We're not going to pay all that money to upend and move everything back into America.
We'll just pay the $15 and keep them in Mexico.
So they couldn't even get that right.
And the damage has already been done.
And again, it goes back to the competency.
That they couldn't have seen that.
And they couldn't have figured out that, you know what, the numbers don't work.
The Japanese probably took 10 minutes to say, it doesn't work.
We can't afford to move everything and we'll never make up that money.
And yet, here we are.
It's the incredible incompetency of our government, of the leadership.
And that was probably the biggest fear we all had, certainly in the first six, eight months, as we realized that they weren't going to staff a lot of these different positions across the government, when the turnover rate was so high, and they were getting people who were in college running some of these things.
Well, I'll tell you this.
My family, they're factory workers.
completely coming to fruition now, and we can only hope that enough people will realize this and want to go back to, at the very least, some sort of competency run by a guy like Joe Biden. - Well, I'll tell you this.
My family, they're factory workers, they're coal miners.
These are the people who lost that industry.
Those jobs suck, Nick.
Those jobs use your body up.
They maim you.
You know what I mean?
I know people my age who they look like they're in their 60s and 70s because they gave their bodies to this industrial labor.
The idea, and we talked about this on a previous podcast, the idea with the Clinton administration, particularly with NAFTA, was it was going to raise everybody up into the middle class.
Right, they weren't going to have to do this menial labor anymore.
Somebody else would do it, which is racist in and of itself.
It's xenophobic and racist, and actually it's really a scary thing that you can move to a country and be paid slavish, you know, cost for your labor.
That's a problem that we don't need to get into right now, but we should at some point.
But the money that was supposed to educate people, the money that was supposed to train people, guess what?
The Republican Party didn't want to spend it on those people.
And so they gave it to rich people or they used tax breaks or they used it for the military or whatever.
And so people didn't get brought up into the middle class and they were just left holding the back.
Right?
And so as a result, they were pissed at both parties, which is why Donald Trump won an election by saying the Democrats and the Republicans both suck.
The Democrats and Republicans let down those people.
Both parties did.
They just did.
And that's not a popular thing, but I'm sitting here telling you because that's my family.
That's what happened.
Okay, but you're exactly right.
This idea has led to a situation where we have a system of not just inequality, but of inhuman cruelty.
Not only do those people not have the jobs that they thought that they were going to have, they don't have the health care necessary.
They don't have the education.
They don't have the infrastructure.
If you go to my hometown, where that 4th of July parade is supposed to be held, or the fireworks are supposed to be held, it looks like a decaying tooth.
You know, these are places that are suffering.
And so, you look at all this stuff, and you actually look through the lens, they should be pissed off.
But what happens?
We talk about this all the time.
Someone comes along, gives them a conspiracy theory.
You weren't let down by NAFTA, you were let down by traitorous liberals, and the Deep State, and George Soros, and all these people.
And as a result, you get them pissed off, and they come after who they think has betrayed them.
All right, so thank you for hanging out with us.
Hang around for another minute.
We're going to have Josh Berthoom, a really good in-depth conversation about the seven hours that he calls the most dangerous hours in American history.
The seven hours between the close of polls in the East on election night and 2 a.m., which he has laid out in his essay, Seven Hours in November, as an opportunity for totalitarian Actions taken by Trump and people like him.
So yeah, hang out for a second.
This is a really good interview.
Hang out and give it a listen.
Hey everybody, thanks for hanging in there.
I am incredibly happy to be joined right now by Josh Berthiaume.
He is the founder of Swashlabs, Rogue Metrics, and a Truman Project National Security Fellow.
The reason that I wanted very desperately to get Josh on the program, he wrote an essay that I think should be handed out with packages of Tide around America right now.
It's called Seven Hours in November, and it was published by Jason Stanford on the Substack.
And to give everyone a brief introduction, the setting for this essay, Josh has been following everything from misinformation to threats and has really been analyzing what's going on in America.
And I think the portrait that Josh put together was not just apt, but very telling, which is the idea of what it's going to feel like on the day of the presidential election and the dangers that we might be facing.
Sure.
So Josh, if you could start off for our listeners who haven't read the essay, and I really want them to go read this because I think it's important.
Can you give people a quick idea of the danger that you see looming in November?
Sure.
So there are a lot of ways that election day could break.
And the, the thing that, that stuck out at me as a, as a real mounting danger, um, started to kind of sink in after the Iowa caucuses went the way that they did, which is there was no clear winner.
And the way that media reporting on election day goes, it's the culmination of the horse race.
And as the precincts come in and they report, then it's like this number and that number.
And by the, by the time everybody's ready to go to bed, there's a clear winner that they can declare.
That didn't happen in Iowa, and Republicans, who had no real horse in that race at all, took that opportunity, that information vacuum, to put out a ton of disinformation, which was then... And this is just noise and chaos.
This wasn't even necessarily anything specific targeted one single narrative that they wanted to get out in front of everything.
It was just flooding the zone.
And that became misinformation when people were hungry for something to talk about, were hungry for results, and they would grab onto things that weren't true, that had been intentionally and maliciously put out into the world, and then amplify those as well.
And that's a real blueprint for just how things happen on the internet now, and if something gets enough weight, no matter how insane it is, and then it gets Retweeted or amplified by one of these chuds that has a huge audience and it starts swinging the algorithm and then all of a sudden it becomes a fact before anyone actually knows whether it's a fact or not.
So that put me in a mindset of unease about Election Day.
Now, because of vote by mail, because of the pandemic, because of how long we're already seeing it's taking for results from primaries to come back in, there's just no way.
That there's going to be a fully declarable winner on election night.
Even if it is a huge blowout one way or the other, it just seems very unlikely to me that it's going to be severe enough one way or the other in order for them to say, yep, we know for sure this is it and then we're done.
And that creates two possibilities.
One, and this isn't something that's only occurred to me.
People that write about disinformation in politics are out here talking about it.
I don't see any evidence that People that are going to be covering this on election night have an alternate plan and that they're acknowledging that they need to plan differently for a different kind of election night and how they're going to manage expectations, which is where most of the anxiety surfaced from this piece.
I think there's one or two things that can happen.
One, it's pretty close.
And in a state where there's a bunch of provisional ballots or mail-in ballots, they call it because they feel like they have enough.
And let's say this was the scenario I saw in a Washington Post article.
Trump wins.
He declares he's a winner.
He's going to make America great again, whatever.
Then, as the provisional mail-in ballots are counted over the next two weeks, he ends up losing that state by 2,000 votes.
Like a Pete Buttigieg situation in Iowa.
Yeah, exactly.
Like a premature declaration of victory before all of the votes are counted.
Right, and that, this is making an assumption that, uh, all things are equal and there's not active, uh, like, voter suppression and there's not, like, general, can you swear on this podcast?
Oh yeah, do it.
Okay, so there's not general fuckery happening that's gonna make the, that would skew the results one way or the other.
And there will be general fuckery.
There will be, but I'm saying in a vacuum, in a vacuum, let's say this cut and dried thing happens and then this result is different.
So then, then you deal with the total meltdown, the, the, the, The clampdown on power, the civil unrest, and they imagine sort of what I think is a more genteel version of what's actually possible, which I think is a theme you and I are going to talk about is people not willing to let themselves imagine how bad it could actually be.
The way that I framed this up was that the time that the American Republic is going to be in the most danger that it has ever been.
Uh, not just, not just for like electoral integrity, but just democratic norms, institutions, everything is the seven hours between when the polls close on the East Coast and about two in the morning when the news media figures out that they're not going to be able to declare a clear winner.
Because disinformation from official sources is already so intense.
Um, because every day Trump tells us that mail-in ballots are a fraud.
Because there's so much entrenched voter suppression already firmly underway in so many states, some where it won't matter at all and they're just engaged in the systemic racist voter suppression that's just how they've always done it, some in which it absolutely will matter and they're purging voters from the rolls and things like that, especially in a shifting environment where a lot of states are going to be in play that people otherwise thought maybe they wouldn't have been, but because Trump is, you know, his policies have been such a disaster and he's turned off a lot of his audiences that were
That were ride or die up until the last three or four months or so.
Now just the recipe for chaos.
The opportunity for chaos is so huge that there's no way that not just from Trump or from federal federal officials or from like executive agencies or those official sources that that top end.
So because that behavior has been learned by state, county and city officials underneath them.
That the opportunity, the possibility of Of everything going straight to shit in those seven hours is really there and it's going to be driven by the uncertainty of who wins the election and it's going to be enabled by sort of a culture of trying to understand election day in terms of who won by the end of the night.
So I want to talk about this scenario that you have just painted which I would even argue Is not even the most pessimistic view of what could happen.
I am at heart an optimist.
Well, and that's the thing.
It's like we spent a lot of time on this podcast and I spent a lot of time in my writings letting people know that the faith that they have had in our system, you know, at times it pays off, but at other times it's entirely misguided.
And unfortunately, what we're talking about right now, like underneath, like the floorboards and the foundation about what we're talking about right now, is that elections don't actually work unless there is good faith.
And unless there is, because everything that we're talking about, and I try and make this point as much as possible on podcast, These are all imaginary constructions.
And we've just had politicians left and right who, you know, it's like after, let me see, 2004 when Bush beat Kerry.
Kerry could have just litigated for forever on 2004.
I mean, there were so many places where he could have, you know, one lawsuit after another.
And he walked out to the podium and he said, I've been bested.
Good luck to the, you know, the reelected president.
But we also look at 2000 where everything broke down and we weren't even dealing with the malicious actors that we are necessarily with Trump.
Obviously, those are predecessors, right?
The Republican Party has played what I believe people have euphemized into hardball, right?
Which is the idea that you really play to win.
And that's actually sort of destroyed the system, I think, from the inside out.
But what you're talking about is even what we know right now.
Well, and it's that level of uncertainty that I think is so troubling to me.
we don't even know how elections are gonna be held in November.
We have no idea what Supreme Courts and states are going to do.
We have no idea about the mail-in ballots.
We, I mean, that fight should have started, I mean, at the beginning of this pandemic. - Well, and it's that level of uncertainty that I think is so troubling to me.
You know, if you talk about Gore in 2000, you know, if Gore had had a fair and free recount, - He would've won. - He would've won.
And he didn't because the cultural momentum in the Democratic Party, and I don't, and I think it actually started there.
And that to me is the first real moment in history when Democrats said, well, we got to play by the rules.
And Republicans said, we're going to flip every switch that's available to us and turn every lever that's available to us.
And we're going to win because we're here to win.
You know, it was like Survivor, like we're not here to make friends, right?
So Bush and his party used every possible thing that was available to them to win.
And I hate to say, to their credit, because it actually degrades what America is supposed to be about.
And maybe destroyed the American empire as it is.
And maybe destroyed the American empire as it is, but there's a lot of things that are true about America that go against the idea of what America is supposed to be, right?
But no matter what, they won.
And then in 2004, that made it, I think, impossible for Kerry, because he didn't have as clear cut of a case, although there were plenty of arguments he could have made.
And then that trust in institutions is what caused Obama to make a lot of decisions that he made when he knew what he knew towards the end of his term.
And I think that's absolutely what caused Stacey Abrams, who had a perfect argument Her election was stolen.
Her election was absolutely stolen, but she, and she, she would have fought that fight, but she did not have the institutional support to go and say, we are going to burn the earth and prove a point because this election was stolen.
So instead I'm going to, I'm not going to concede, but I'm going to give up this fight.
That is not how this is supposed to work, but it is the game that we play.
And it's not even necessarily an unfair game, because the GOP has been telling us what the rules are for the last 20 years.
And the rules are, you do whatever you need to do in order to win.
They haven't hidden this.
They haven't hidden it.
Now part of that in fighting every fight you can to every bit of strength that you have left, with the systems and institutions that are supposed to protect us, if you don't dig way in and use those institutions, then they're not going to protect you.
That's where institutionalism fails.
The thing I don't agree with is, and you see this sometimes on the left, when they're like, well, we should do all the bad guy shit that the Republicans do on the internet and with disinformation and all that sort of stuff, which I absolutely do not believe in because, you know, either the truth matters or it doesn't.
And there are ways that we could fight these fights without, there are ways we could fight these fights in good faith, as you said, but we choose not to.
And we have not chosen to learn how to do it.
I don't know if it's that we don't have the will to do it, but that weakness on our side, that unwillingness, A, to believe that the other side will do whatever they can to stay in power, which has bitten us on the ass more than once just in the last six months, and that unwillingness to fight the fight as far as you need to take it, is what has gotten us where we are.
Well, and I think a large part about it, and, you know, we can talk about the history of how this has happened, is just huge.
Like, the Republican Party has dictated the language and the battlefield constantly.
That has been one of their main strengths, is they've been very aware, and this goes back for decades, they've been very aware of the power of presenting one thing and doing another thing.
Right.
And how those things like everything from the Southern strategy into colorblind politics.
And so the left in America has always started with a disadvantage because they have been portrayed as being anti-American and being destructive towards America.
That's always been the narrative.
And if you turn on Fox, I mean, if you turn on Fox News right now, that's what the story is.
Right.
The idea that Republicans are protecting Americans from people on the left who want to destroy America.
And so like if you go out and you play this hardball that we're talking about, it looks like you're trying to destroy America.
Like you're actually getting rid of good faith politics.
So I think there is a level of willingness, particularly on the right, and especially what we've seen in modern politics, to be able to play those games.
But I think what you just brought up is really important.
Which is, when the battle becomes that so-called hardball politics, or bad faith politics, what ends up happening is politics loses all meaning altogether.
Like, because technically, and I try and bring this up all the time, politics is not supposed to be thrilling.
It's not supposed to be a really exciting television show, you know, that you turn on for characters and these subplots or whatever.
It's supposed to be about how we, like, agree to bridge our differences as a shared society.
And what you're talking about right now, and I wanted to get a little bit in the weeds on this, we're talking about the disintegration of shared society.
Because when you talk about this crisis in November, If you look through the history of America and in other countries, what you see is when civil wars and civil war situations occur, it's when two people within a country start to believe that they are not only different from each other, but that the other side is conspiring to destroy them.
And as a result, they have to do whatever it takes to destroy that other group first.
I mean, that's the basis of institutional fascism.
Well, and Americans learn it early.
You know, I know that you talk a lot about evangelical sort of culthood, right?
And the southern evangelical structures and things like that.
I was born in Michigan.
My grandfather was an Assembly of God preacher.
My parents sold cars.
You know, we moved to Texas when I was about five.
By the time I was in second grade in Texas, small town Texas, I was regularly being asked by children, what church do you go to?
And the only sin greater than not going to their church was not going to church at all.
The othering begin now, you know, that was that growing up in an environment like that was, it would never cause me a disadvantage.
I was never a victim because I'm straight white cis male, you know, I have all that stuff, but there was absolutely a cultural othering.
That was a learned behavior.
You know, uh, people talk about like no one is born a racist.
I think that's true, but they absolutely learn it super early.
So the, the deconstruction of that shared reality becomes one in where the border is placed.
Around a family or around a social group or around a social structure, and everybody thinks that they are living in an agreed-upon shared reality, but they are not.
One of my favorite political science professors on the last day of the Politics 101 class when everyone was an undergrad, I asked him, hey, if there were two or three things you'd want someone to come out of here knowing about American politics, what do you wish everyone in America knew about politics?
And he said, okay, number one, Federalism is a bitch and someday it'll kill us all.
And he said this in like the year 2000.
And the second one was there's about a third of people, a third of the people in this country are very angry and they're very alone and they can't see each other.
And technology someday is going to make it possible for them all to see each other.
And then we're in real trouble.
And it's because they learned that othering, it's because they learned that their reality is not the same as someone else's reality.
And that's the breakdown where you can't depend on norms or assume that everyone else is operating in good faith if no one else is.
Right?
If you're the only one who's like, well, these are the rules, and no one else in the room is paying attention to the rules, then your rules are not the rules.
Yeah, and I think what you just brought up in terms, and this is one of those things, and we like to talk about this stuff and sort of bring people into it who maybe haven't heard about this stuff before, but there's a difference between objective reality and subjective reality.
Objective reality is a reality that is reality, right?
There's no arguing.
It is absolute fact.
Subjective reality is, of course, how you perceive it, and it's different for everyone.
Make America Great Again, I think, was actually one of the more important slogans we've ever had, which is the idea that America was great at some point, right?
But the idea of the consensus, capital T, capital C, never actually existed.
It was just a period of time where the people who were being oppressed, people of color, women, you know, vulnerable populations, they were oppressed either through social, you know, stressors, they were oppressed through, like, media.
There were things that kept them from being able to talk about their reality, and so the quote-unquote majority had their objective reality.
And now, I think especially with the advent of social media and of course the age of computers, we're starting to see that those realities are all different.
Which actually stresses not just the idea of objective reality, but it almost completely demolishes shared society.
Which is what we're talking about.
I mean, that was actually one of the most chilling things.
I thought, I have a quote here written, From your essay, 7 hours in November, that I've been thinking about a lot since I read it.
And it says, I don't have any options for you or good news or plans or PowerPoint slides about how to protect yourself from what's coming.
And I think this is one of the problems that we've had is I don't think that we're necessarily talking about something that is far fetched or alarmist.
We're actually talking about something that is pretty obviously happening that people have been in denial about, but especially in the past few months with everything from the protest to, uh, I mean, Trump tried to become an authoritarian, you know, like he literally tried to do that and tried to call for blood in the streets.
I think people are starting to realize that this shared society is starting to be endangered.
And I think what really resonated with me with your essay, Seven Hours in November, is it was a portrait of the moment where it's undeniable anymore.
Right.
There's no sort of, you know, putting your head in the sand and pretending like our institutions will save us or a Robert Mueller will save us or like somebody will come in and impeach Trump or there will be the gotcha Lester Holt interview.
But the fact that this is a train that has been coming for a very, very long time.
And we can't hide behind empty hope.
Like, there's such a thing as hope, and we can fight for things.
And knowing about this, I think, means we can fight for things.
Yeah.
But we can't hide behind empty hope and delusions.
Well, and I said, like, I don't have any plans for you.
And then I proceeded to talk about what you could, what we could do.
Because I'm an optimist at heart.
And I think that it's so much easier to look at what has been happening since day one of this administration and think, Um, and I did it too.
Like I talked to myself and I was like, Oh, well, certainly he won't do that.
Or surely he won't do this.
And I think the real turning point for me was the deployment of the United States military against American citizens with bayonets on American soil.
To me, like that was really that, that, and, and of course, like, even like when you're, when you're a liberal and you're young and then your family members are like, Oh, well, and you get older.
Uh, you'll get more conservative.
And I've only gotten like by an order of magnitude more radicalized and like more leftist every, every day.
And I openly admit that.
But there is a, there is a semiotic tension to the reality of what happens just on a day to day basis with the Trump administration that, uh, you know, some people could say, well, you know, this is, uh, the, all the chaos, like it's, it's all distraction and it's, Supposed to be this, and they tell these stories about the Trump presidency that tries to make it fit into some sort of mold that has existed before.
But in modern times, it really hasn't.
And there's a part in the essay where I talk about, like, I really want you to believe your lion eyes, right?
Like, now we're to the point now where our biggest failure has been our unwillingness to believe that Trump is who he tells us he is.
And if you don't believe it now, you know, if the deployment of the United States military against American citizens on American soil doesn't do it for you, then what about kids in cages?
And if that doesn't do it for you, then here's a ton of other incidences of things that are just that crazy that have happened.
And, you know, we're talking about two tracks of things here, right?
Like you're talking about shared reality and shared society where people talk about things and, you know, Republicans Rhetorically, whether you're talking about from Fox News or from how they talk about policy, have been weaponizing the comfortable shared society against all of their political opponents for a very long time.
And I think an incredible, and I'm going to come back to the Trump stuff, but I think an incredible example of that, of the semiotic power of that, of the sort of the crazy phenomenology of people taking things in, has been the first time that we did it almost on accident on the left, and it was defund the police.
Because, you know, Democrats, when they talk about gun control, forever, it's always started at, well, I know you're not going to give me this, so let me start with maybe just a background check.
Or maybe an assault weapons ban is too much.
So they come in negotiating against themselves.
And Republicans start at, we're going to, Um, you know, you can't have anything and we're going to shut down the government.
We're going to shut down the government until we get this right.
And I have been saying for the last couple of years, if we started at, we're going to abolish the second amendment.
Then you set the terms of where you're thinking psychologically about the argument that you're having.
And you said like Republicans set the terms and they set the playing ground.
Like they're very good at that.
So all of a sudden.
I say all of a sudden, this is a movement in favor of social justice and against systemic racism that people have been fighting in this country for hundreds of years.
But in the perception of American broad culture, all of a sudden, this sort of uprising happened after George Floyd was killed.
And the policy idea that emerged from it was defund the police.
And it flipped everybody out, including a lot of people on the left that were like, well, it's counterproductive to start at defund the police, because boy, that's just insane.
And of course we need police.
And it was so incredibly effective because then everyone's argument to that was, well, defund the police doesn't mean what you think it means.
Let me show you this incredibly coherent policy doctrine about what it actually means.
And it drove the ride insane.
And the result has been like, we have a long way to go, but huge structural changes in terms of the budgeting of police departments in a lot of major cities have actually happened because we started from the place of We're gonna take all the money away from the cops and start over.
Right?
Now, is it necessarily good for a democracy for that to be, like, where the playing field has to be?
Probably not, but that is an example of people living in the reality that they really live in.
Well, I would also make the argument that going into the streets and illegally pulling down monuments of Confederate generals... Yeah!
It's a moment, I mean it's kind of, and again this isn't something the Democratic Party would do.
I think it's incredibly symbolic and an apt metaphor that Democrats knelt, you know, with sort of like cultural iconography to show that they supported it, and the people in the streets pulled down Confederate monuments, and at which point it makes the opposition, they have to come out and say, I support Stonewall Jackson.
I support the Confederacy, which actually is a rhetorical genius move.
Well right, and they were struggling with that because then they were like, well what, you think we should take down Mount Rushmore now too?
And a lot of us were like, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Give that land back to the Lakota.
Oh, and then all of a sudden to have not just Trump defending Confederate names on bases, but to come out for Andrew Jackson, and then people are like, well, what did Andrew Jackson do?
And suddenly they have to look at the history and they're like, oh my God, this dude was not only a genocidal madman and a slave holder, he was stealing Native American babies out of dead people's arms.
I mean, like, just madness.
In terms of restructuring people's semiotic construction of what a thing means, It's been incredible, right?
You know, the semiotic construction, the phenomenology of it is, you know, like a third party between me and you says the word tree.
I think of a tree.
You think of a tree.
It's different trees.
Like that's, that's the, when you talk about objective reality and subjective reality, we're both thinking of trees, but they're different trees because of our personal experiences.
Now, like what has happened in the last six weeks, three months has been a shared lived experience.
In America, which is going to have an effect on how we perceive things like American history and how we think about things like, is a budget a moral document?
Let me show you a budget that's a moral document that takes all the money away from the police department and then puts some money in police and some money in social services and some money in supporting, you know, black and low-income neighborhoods and all that sort of like a real radical restructuring of what it means to govern.
The idea of what it means to govern in America has Yeah, and I just want to point out real fast because, and again, I'm so happy that you came on here so we could get in the weeds on this thing.
What you just described, I think, is the fundamental American conflict.
Which is the existential idea that different people can feel different things and live in the same sort of universe together.
Right.
Versus, you know, the idea that it has to be a top-down oppressive reality.
Which is actually, so we're taping this around the Fourth of July holiday.
I actually think the fundamental conflict of America is between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
The Declaration of Independence talks about everyone being equal and this idea that all lives have worth and we have to have a pluralist society.
And the Constitution, which of course was actually framed illegally by a bunch of slave-holding wealthy white men in order to maintain and hold power.
And I actually think that the spasms that we're talking about It's not and and I actually think for some people I think this is comforting It's like being on a plane and being told Oh turbulence everybody deals with turbulence, right?
Yeah, but the spasms we're dealing with are fundamentally American but they're actually that that's actually for me a little bit more worrisome because this has been a problem that has led to bloodshed and tragedy and Over and over and over again.
And the question is whether or not the experiment can continue or whether or not it eventually reaches a terminal point.
And again, what I believe from this essay that I found really interesting for everyone who hasn't read it, Seven Hours in November by Josh Perthoom.
It's this idea that we're just a few months away from a tipping point.
Like an actual tipping point.
And it's not just political.
That's the problem, is I think everybody thinks about political in terms of, oh, I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine, I'll do you a favor, you do me a favor, and that's what politics is.
Or it's this theater that's built up around it.
But we're actually talking about, I mean, the state of the world in existence, right?
We're talking about the very difference between liberal democracy and an authoritarian state.
And I don't think most people are really comfortable with how close we are to the latter.
And I think that's the big deal.
You know, like there are a lot of, uh, activists, uh, you know, in the George Floyd protests, uh, and the movement for black lives that, that rallied around and supported a policy idea.
And then in the space of 24 or 48 hours were because of their support for and demonstration in favor of that policy idea, we're losing eyes or we're getting tear gassed or, you know, in America.
Like essentially having war crimes perpetrated upon them in a police riot.
That, that is, that's a, that's a very different idea than most people's idea of politics, which as you said, in a, in a perfect world, politics is boring.
It's who gets what and how much, and everybody comes together and you negotiate and everybody maybe gets a third of what they came in wanting to get.
And everyone feels okay with that because liberal, in liberal democracy, you, you all come together and you're like, all right, what's the best way we can do this where everybody is a little bit mad and a little bit happy, and then we go home.
And it's fair, and it's just.
And plenty of countries have figured this out, right?
America has not figured that out to the extent that we would like to think that we have.
And that tension between America being this paragon, this super example of what democracy should mean in the modern world, and what actually happens in this country, Is now you talk about it like spasms.
I think it's just really being laid bare.
I saw a headline and I have no idea who wrote it, so it's not mine, but I saw it that the pandemic has made America's decline more obvious.
Like how we how we go about our politics, how our social systems work or what our social safety net looks like.
If it does, the scourge that is health care and how much it affects Like, the weight that it has on the dragging down people's ability to, like, do the shit that's in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, right?
Like, there's so many factors that weigh on the lives of Americans now that make it impossible for us to live the way that the idea of America was supposed to work, and people don't see that.
Part of that certainly is privilege.
Because, you know, hey, this stuff hasn't affected me directly, so it's not going to bother me.
And I'm a voter and I do these sorts of things.
But the pandemic has been a very sort of flattening force in that it affects everyone, whether you want it to or not.
It's a force of nature.
So people are now seeing the inequities in health care systems and they're seeing, you know, if they lose their job and there's no way for them to get unemployment as long as they need it.
Or like, how many people are going to be evicted this month?
Right?
No matter what their political ideology is, no matter how engaged or not they've been with the political process, this big thing has shown up and said, it's not how you think it is, it's not how you want it to be, it's like this.
So, the way that Americans think about democracy, the way that Americans think about government, is changing fundamentally, and then you've got this totally insane, the worst possible person being president at the worst possible time, at the top of all of this Chaos and upheaval and, uh, disruption in terms of how people just think about reality or, or politics or whatever it is.
It is.
And you've, you've got the end result of years and years of, of disinformation campaigns and, and, uh, like Fox news doing what it has done to give brain worms to as many people, it has given them brain worms too.
Um, you just, you put yourself in a position here where in that moment on election day.
When things are uncertain, the opportunity, and this I think is really what it boils down to, the opportunity to really set everything on fire is going to present itself to an administration and a set of enablers that thus far, every time a similar opportunity has presented itself.
Every time.
Every time they have taken it.
Every time, and I say this out loud more than once a week, How do they always make the worst possible decision with malice every time?
And that, you know, it's a big thing to talk about.
It's a big thing to think about.
I think some of the frustration that I have had and even on a micro level talking to campaigns about like how to protect yourself against disinformation or how to change how you think about political communications in order to operate in the reality that we live in right now.
That the this the problem has always been like no matter how bad you think it can get, it's worse.
They always come like to the bad faith, worst possible action that you can imagine.
So if you think about an election day when there is going to be this much uncertainty from forces that no one can control, there's no policy thing that we could do Yeah, and I think, unfortunately, the really, really dire possibility is that disinformation and sort of the suppression of free and fair elections.
I mean, that's the new dystopia, right?
night for a number of reasons, the pandemic being chief among them.
Yeah.
And I think, unfortunately, the really, really dire possibility is that disinformation and sort of the suppression of free and fair elections.
I mean, that's that's the new dystopia, right?
It's a world that appears from the outside to still be a liberal democracy and is decayed on the inside as a managed democracy.
Putin is Russia, is what we're talking about.
Or even what China tries to trot out in front of the world, right?
So this weird dystopia where they control the people within it and use the technology as a means of doing that.
Well, let me ask you, and as a last question before we finish up, and we're very grateful for your time.
So, past November.
Let's talk about 2021.
Where you are today, where your head is, how you're feeling about this.
How do you think this thing shakes out?
Like, what are your optimistic and pessimistic views of where this thing ends?
Because I keep telling people, and I don't know if you're aware of this, and people I tell, they just kind of roll their eyes and then they want to change the subject.
I get that a lot.
In 2012, When Obama, I mean, just walloped Mitt Romney to win re-election.
It wasn't even in question.
As soon as the media announced that Obama had beaten Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, who does not care for Mitt Romney, never has, was never actually invested in his candidacy, took to Twitter and told Americans that America had been stolen and that they should march on Washington and it was time for a revolution.
And that's how he felt about a guy that he didn't care about, right?
Because there's only one person who cares about himself.
So I always tell people that they need to strap in and be ready for anything in November and just be ready to fight like hell for their lives and their rights.
So where are you right now, optimistically and pessimistically, going forward, 2021 and moving forward?
So I think I'll start pessimistically and then I'll move to optimistically because that's the way to do it, man.
However, even even that has like a warning wrapped up in it.
But pessimistically, that's how he felt about a guy he didn't care about when he had nothing on the line.
When he wouldn't be immediately exposed to criminal prosecution the second he was no longer president of the United States, right?
So I think it's, I think it is just as you describe it, but probably worse.
There is a version of this where he just is tired and is defeated and is like, ah, you know what, nevermind.
He hates this job.
He hates, no, he absolutely hates this job.
And I don't, I don't, I don't disagree with that idea for a minute.
So there is a, there is a, there is a possibility that I think is also plausible where he loses and, and is whipped and then he's like, okay, fine.
And just is too tired and, and, and doesn't deal with it.
Uh, that's, I think, much less likely than a fight going to the mat where he either legally, in very strong terms, or physically has to be removed.
Like, someone's gonna have to prove it to him in a way where he thinks he can't win the battle in the court of the public opinion.
And he'll always think that he can do that.
And these stories in the last couple of weeks where it's like, oh, he might drop out because his poll numbers are so bad.
Like, there's almost no way that he drops out.
Even though he hates the job, even though he doesn't want to do it anymore, I cannot imagine a scenario in which that is what happens.
It's hard to get these people out.
It's hard to get these people out, and a lot of people are like, oh, I sure hope that he drops out, and I think that they're discounting the horror show that a Mike Pence presidency would be.
Yeah, it's Trumpism with a human face.
It's Trumpism with a human face.
The only thing that has saved us thus far is his incompetence.
And I gotta live in two worlds on this because people say, oh, he's so dumb and he can't manage anything.
But he's also managed to convince like 40% of the country to live in an entirely alternate disparate reality to the point where, you know, QAnon people are winning congressional primaries by running to the right of dudes that are extremely right.
So that's not a balm and that's not anything that makes me feel good.
But I think you're right, like no matter what happens, no matter how it breaks, it's gonna be a fight.
And I think it's just really a question of how deep into, how far past the institutions that fight gets.
As far as optimism, I think that if Joe Biden wins, I think he does one term and he has to spend nearly all of it rebuilding the federal government just back to something that we functionally recognize as a government that can actually work.
I think, you know, my wife is a much more astute political observer than I am, and she feels like he is the perfect guy for that job, because he is ultimately The Supreme Technocrat, like he knows how it all works.
He he will hire experts and he will listen to them.
There's not going to be a whole lot of agenda stuff into it.
And to his credit, as a politician who has been around for a long time, he has evolved a lot more than people near the top of political parties tend to evolve, which I like.
And I think that if he comes in every presidency, every president gets to do maybe an eighth or a tenth of what they say they want to do.
Because they got 18 months to do it before they got to start running for reelection.
But we've talked on the podcast that we think the ceiling and I especially think the ceiling for Biden is Lyndon Baines Johnson.
The idea that it could be a person who comes in and has evolved to a certain point where maybe they adapt a thing and bring people over the finish line for it.
I would say that that might be the ceiling of a Biden presidency.
And if that happens, I think we should all thank our lucky stars.
Right.
I think that would be an incredible thing.
That's the Scooby-Doo ending.
And I think a lot of policies that he puts forward in an agenda.
And let's say it really is the Scooby-Doo ending and we win the Senate, too, which is a real possibility now in a vacuum, again, where other things happen like that is literally a plausible thing that could happen.
You know, he could we could end up with policy initiatives That are more progressive than maybe we have seen from another president in a long time.
Some of that's going to be by necessity, because like the pandemic, like I live in Denton, Texas, which is just barely a little bit north of Dallas, where they had a thousand cases just in that county today.
And that's 25 more than New York City had, or the whole state of New York had today.
This is not going anywhere anytime soon.
It is bad.
It is really bad in Texas.
And it is because of this shared reality thing where they've politicized the basic tenets of public health to the point where if you wear a mask then you're not a real man and you're not gonna take my freedoms and, you know, a quarter of a million people are gonna die by the end of this thing, right?
Not even by the end of it.
It's real bad.
So that's going to fundamentally shape whatever's going on.
It's still going to be happening so hard by the time we get to January 20th.
So almost by default, a Biden administration is going to have to come in and be like, okay, everybody has to stay home and we just have to give everybody money and we have to, like, we have to stop this.
Because it's going to be worse by the time we get there.
There's nothing, nothing that I see either anecdotally out in real life or, and I'm not an epidemiologist, so I don't know a lot about this.
I know everybody should wear a mask, and on the very rare occasions when I leave my house to go out and do stuff in Texas, people very proudly and almost to the point of violent conflict are not wearing masks.
So what I know about the American public is that we are in deep shit.
And we are going to end up with a thing where a very big chunk of the first priorities of that administration is going to be cleaning up with and trying to get out from under the pandemic.
Yeah.
And that's a, that's a tall order, man.
It is a tall order, but we absolutely as a country can do that.
We have the money to do it.
We can do it.
Um, the amount of money they sank into the, into the stock market and banks, and then like really fought tooth and nail over $500 billion for small businesses, which is more than half of the jobs in this country.
Like we can absolutely do it.
And we will get to a point where that's absolutely a thing that has to happen.
So that, that's the, that I think is the most.
I don't know what happens in 2022, but I will tell you this.
I got to the point where I wrote this essay when I figured out that what America would need worse than anything if Trump loses is a truth commission.
functioning government again by the time we get to 2024.
I don't know what happens in 2022, but I will tell you this.
I got to the point where I wrote this essay when I figured out that what America would need worse than anything if Trump loses is a truth commission.
And for people that aren't into studying international relations and comparative politics and conflicts and stuff.
After a civil war or a genocide, a lot of times what happens in a developing nation, when they get help from more developed nations to come in and fix it at the end, is they will have a truth and reconciliation commission, where a lot of times it's not even that people are going to go to jail, they just tell the real story of what happened in a country.
And after The military was deployed on American soil against American citizens.
I was like, there's so many things that you go back.
First of all, like we got to like the end and now like fucking Tucker Carlson.
And let me just say to an audience, it's bigger than one that I've had before.
Fuck Tucker Carlson, because he is, you want to talk about a real danger to America?
Like this guy, that is, he is real dangerous.
And he's out here telling them like Republicans are going to be hunted.
The fucking Dilbert guy is out here telling them people, Republicans are going to be hunted.
I want.
A, I want racists to feel afraid, I want to destroy white supremacy, and when people have been criming for several years, I want them to be worried that they're going to go to jail in a new administration.
For doing a lot of crimes, I think you should be afraid of going to jail.
A bigger problem, like we're going to need to tell the story about what really happened.
There's a lot of things that we have to get into.
I know Biden has already said, no, I'm not going to pardon Trump.
And when you get out, somebody asked him about it and it was an offhand thing.
He absolutely should not do that because that is the mentality of we got to do what's good for America.
And we got to do what is good for America is laying bare, not just bearing witness and suffering through all of this shit, but pointing out what happened.
Now, if we don't deal with the problem of disinformation, whether from the democratic party, Or, or from the government standpoint or whatever it is, like all the way up and down.
If we don't deal with that, then yes, Trump is bad, but you are going to have to deal with, uh, Tom Cotton running for president in 2024.
You're going to have to deal with Dan Crenshaw running for president in 2028.
And people that are, that I really wish no one would take seriously are actually very capable.
Of throwing all the switches and using all the levers available to them.
And the original thing I wrote about disinformation in 2017 was, was not about bots and was not about Russian interference in our elections.
It was about domestic organizations taking those tactics and using them in America because they cost nothing.
They don't require a lot of technical skill and there's no cost.
There's no risk.
I keep telling everybody that these people, these ideological people, and Trump doesn't have an ideology.
That's the whole thing.
It's just consuming and consolidating and profiting.
Everything he does is through toxic instinct, but there are people with an actual ideology and who are patient and, you know, they're fluent, they seem respectable on their veneer.
They are reverse engineering everything that he has done.
To find all of the weaknesses in every system and they are going to weaponize it quicker than shit.
I mean, we're going to see it probably in 2024 is when that will probably 2022 2022.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's that's really that's a real concern there.
So the biggest danger was wrapped up in the Scooby-Doo ending and it's that we win and it's a landslide and Trump gets his ass kicked and you know, maybe he goes to jail and we win the Senate and then everyone's like see America works.
We did it.
As Richard Nixon flies off into the clouds.
Right.
When in reality, that's the, that'll be the next most dangerous thing because then everyone will have cover to do all this kind of shit.
And if you don't, if you don't have a truth commission that explains in great detail the vast amounts of suffering that Stephen Miller's policies have caused, you tell me Tom Cotton doesn't end up with Stephen Miller back in his campaign to try and fucking replay the hits.
And they turn it up.
Yeah.
They know how to do it and they're not run by someone who, you know, is actually really incompetent and hates the job.
These guys, the real patient ones that are real dangerous, would love this job.
Love the job.
Yeah, in this case you have a total buffoon.
Who is just trying to get to his next tea time.
He's an avatar.
He's an avatar.
He is.
He's a mascot is what he is.
And you're exactly right.
These are the people that that's what keeps me awake at night.
It's the cottons.
It's the Grinshaws.
And it's, I mean, Tucker Carlson, my God.
That whole bubbling up over the past couple days has just been nightmare fuel.
But I have to tell you, Josh, Josh Bertham is who we've been talking to, the founder of Swash Labs at Rogue Metrics and a Truman Project National Security Fellow.
This has been absolutely a delight.
I'm so glad that you came on.
Where can the good people find your stuff?
Well, if you go to roguemetrics.com, I've got a bunch of research papers there that like 28 people read, so I'd be more than happy for people to dig into the academic side of things.
I am, I have a Substack now because I've really, because I have been putting stuff on the internet for so long, the last thing I want to do is learn a new content management system, but that one's really easy, so I'm going to be writing more there as we get off into the future, and that's at rogue.substack.com.
And then you can follow me on Twitter at jayberthume.
Awesome.
And everybody, if you haven't already, go and read Seven Hours in November.
Just Google it, give it a read.
It is absolutely essential reading at this point.
And yeah, can't thank you enough for coming on, man.
Thanks, man.
I really appreciate it.
So really great interview and really kind of scary.
That's what I'm looking at right now as far as they're going to have the election.
I don't think they're going to postpone it, but I'm just worried that there's going to be shenanigans.
know that's your concern, but I think the shenanigans are going to happen exactly immediately after that.
They're already preparing for that to put things into motion that will, you know, lead a contested election.
I don't know if you saw, like, you know, they had a Newsweek article about the 12th Amendment.
And I don't know if we talked about that in the last one, but certainly it seems really far-fetched that they'd have, I think it has to be no less than four states be really close, and that Barr will then contest those election results.
And they somehow invoke the 12th Amendment, which means that each state gets one vote, and we now know that, you know, the Republicans have a couple extra votes, even though we have control of the House.
And that would lead Trump to being elected again.
And all those things are scary.
There are a lot of scary things.
And again, we don't like to give false hope, but we also don't like to be alarmist.
We like to be realist on this show.
The truth is, and I think this is something that Berthoum speaks to really well, which is all the stuff is in place for this to be a miscarriage of justice and democracy.
It's not just the electoral system, but it's also how society works, how the media works.
It's a tinderbox.
And when you have a party like the Republican Party, which is not interested in democratic institutions, bad things happen.
And we just want to let people know about that and let people be aware of that.
And we thank you, as always, for being here and listening to the show.
The audience is growing by leaps and bounds, and we are just so grateful for you.
As always, all we ask, if you can, like, subscribe, comment, rate us, all that stuff actually helps us.
And you've been doing a great job and it's, again, it's been building this audience by leaps and bounds.
So we really, really appreciate you and thank you.
Until next time, you can hear Nick, or you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
SMH.
You can find me.
at J.Y.
Sexton.
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