The Trump Administration has federal agents brutalizing protesters and violating their constitutional rights in Portland, and has just announced plans to roll them out in major cities around the country. Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss this authoritarian overreach and sound the alarms. Also, they welcome artist Nate Powell to discuss his comic "About Face" that examines militarism, popular culture, and growing fascism.
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She never accepted her loss and she looks like a fool.
Can you give a direct answer?
You will accept the election?
I have to see.
Look, I have to see.
No, I'm not going to just say yes.
I'm not going to say no.
And I didn't last time either.
And they really have done a fantastic job in a very short period of time.
across the country.
We did that 10 years ago.
We did it long before this civil unrest started and we'll continue to do that.
And so I don't need invitations by the state, state mayors or state governors to do our job.
We're going to do that whether they like us there or not.
That's our responsibility.
And they really have done a fantastic job in a very short period of time.
No problem.
They grab them A lot of people in jail.
They're leaders.
These are anarchists.
These are not protesters.
People say protesters.
These people are anarchists.
These are people that hate our country.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckery Podcast.
I'm your co-host Jerry D. H. Saxton.
As always, I'm here with Nick Halseman.
We've got a great guest lined up for later today.
We've got Nate Powell, who's an artist who has won a National Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, a whole host of awards and prizes.
He worked with civil rights legend and hero, rest in peace, John Lewis.
on the March Trilogy and today we're going to be talking to him about his comic about Face, about rising fascism in America rooted in toxic masculinity and I have a really good feeling about this conversation.
What I don't have a great feeling about, Nick, is the fact that the federal government has secret police in Portland, Oregon Kidnapping protesters and citizens without reading them their rights, holding them indefinitely, and then on top of that, tear-gassing everybody around them, brutalizing people.
And right before we began to tape, the President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, came out and said that he plans to not only continue what's going on in Portland, but to take it nationwide.
So, ain't that some shit, Nick?
They're going to franchise it.
Isn't that what the natural order of capitalism is?
You know, I think there's two things about this that are the reasons for what they're doing this for.
So I think one was a photo op to basically intimidate protesters, that's what they really want.
And they also want to give the quote-unquote silent majority something to clench their teeth to, I suppose, while they're watching this going, Yeah, get those looters and rioters.
They've done a very good job, by the way, because in my brain, the way I'm trying to call up the word protester, I swear looter or rioter comes up first in my brain.
And I have to take a second to grab the word protester, which is the correct way to describe this.
But that's what they've been doing.
And there's a whole host of issues here, legally, that we need to discuss.
Because the ability for them to do this goes back to the beginning of the Constitution.
you know, the cliff notes would be, this is not legal the way they're doing this right now.
And it shouldn't be surprising because they've completely screwed up a lot of the procedures that they would need to do for certain things that are, whether lawful or not.
This one's a big one though.
Isn't it funny that the Republican Party that has been championing states' rights all these years is now cheerleading from the sidelines as the federal government just sends in federal agents And the state doesn't want them.
The city doesn't want them.
There are now a host of lawsuits.
I've been so frustrated the past couple of days.
I've been trying to tell people this for years, that this is the kind of thing that's going to happen.
I wrote about it on Twitter the other day, about how the presidency just keeps growing and growing and growing in terms of its power and scope.
And to have someone like Donald Trump in a position like this, particularly at a moment like this, is incredibly dangerous because of that power.
You do realize he said he called them anarchists, people who hate this country, which, by the way, if you need to translate that, that means anyone who doesn't agree with him, anybody who doesn't fall in line and lick his boots.
And now and this is an exaggeration.
We're living in a country right now where we have a paranoid, insecure president who, by the way, went on Fox News and told them that they are liberal now, right?
They're not fair.
Who perceives the propaganda organ of the Republican Party, Fox News, as being unfair and unloyal and too critical of him.
Anybody who doesn't fall within Trump's narrow scope of worship and fealty is now a terrorist.
Like literally, they're a terrorist and they do not deserve constitutional rights.
By the way, real fast, quick shout out to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Thanks guys.
We appreciate all the work that you did.
Keep showing up at funerals and giving where there's originals and hanging out with Ellen DeGeneres.
- Well wait, that's where we're at. - It's important to mention those two because John Yoo, who was part of the legal team, the Brain Trust, who came up with ways to get around the Constitution so they could torture people, is now advising the Trump administration on how to go about sending in federal troops to these local areas. - I was really is now advising the Trump administration on how to go about sending in federal troops to these local areas. - I was really thrilled that John
You know, there are so many mornings where I wake up and I'm like, God, I need more John Hugh in my life.
Like, that guy is just an American hero.
For those who aren't aware, have you ever read his memos?
Have you ever, like, really dived deep into these things?
I cannot say that I have.
Good.
Don't.
Because let me tell you what John Yoo did.
John Yoo basically gave the Bush administration carte blanche to do literally anything that they wanted to do.
Their lawyers created every scenario where they could crack down on constitutional rights and human civil liberties.
He basically at some point, this is incredible, when I was working on the book American Rule, I was like going through these memos.
One of the memos says, Torture isn't torture if the person carrying out the torture doesn't believe they're torturing.
So it's just like, it's like alchemy.
Do you know what I mean?
It's just like, no, this lead is gold.
So it's gold now, right?
Which is actually how the presidency works.
It's how American power has worked.
It's that malleable ideology.
Well, guess what?
Now Americans are terrorists.
If they disagree with President Trump, and maybe if they go out and protest, they don't deserve their rights.
And that is the hellscape that we're currently residing in.
And people need to understand, like, this is how it starts, Nick.
This is this is how things happen.
It started.
I think this is how it continues.
So Chris Wallace was getting all sorts of kudos on, you know, you know, his being really tough on Trump during his interview.
But I think he fell short of certainly one place when Trump has already been quoted as calling Black Lives Matter a hate group.
And yet he was able to say, oh, I have no problem with, you know, the Confederate flag.
I have no problem with Black Lives Matter.
He didn't quite pick that out and then call him on that.
And he allowed Trump to sort of say, ah, you know, it's free speech and Black Lives Matter is fine, whatever.
That was a big problem because they have him on record now.
We know what he's been saying.
And that's a problem.
You know, we haven't...
We haven't been able to figure out a way to make Trump clear enough of what his true intentions are, even though Chris Wallace might have inched toward that a little bit this weekend.
By the way, a quick programming note.
A little bit of housecleaning.
You brought up Chris Wallace.
I'm really glad that you did.
After the interview with Nate Powell, my loyal co-host Nick Houselman will administer to me, live on the air, a cognitive test.
The one that the President of the United States is talking about is incredibly tough and that he aced and all these... The doctors were just clapping, Nick.
They were like, my God, we've never seen anybody Oh yeah, like this.
Whispering to each other and in awe.
It's incredible.
By the way, this is the type of hard-hitting journalism and experienced journalism that we're doing here at the Mt.
Great Podcast.
Please do not forget to like, subscribe, and comment.
We need all the help you can get.
So hang out later after we talk to Nate Powell.
Nick will administer a cognitive ability test to me.
And the ability for you to give us a nice rating and comment is basically your cognitive test.
And Ace it!
Out there.
Ace it like nobody has ever seen before.
Like doctors who have just done this their entire lives.
They've never seen it before.
All joking aside, because you have to laugh or else you'll cry.
Nick, it's so...
It's so terrifying.
You know, I was trying to warn people about it this weekend, and the fascists came out in full force.
It was just, it was like the cicadas, you know, like every seven years, just crawling up and just singing their song.
And it was one person after another that was like, truthfully, this is what we want.
Do you know what I mean?
They were just like, no, this is actually what we want.
We want leftists to be rounded up.
We want them to be arrested, held indefinitely, not read their rights.
We want this all to be very, very fascist and very, very strong.
And I was trying to tell people this for years.
They would tell you this is literally what they wanted.
These people are celebrating this stuff.
Left and right.
They're like, where do I sign up?
How do I go and help with this thing?
And you need to understand, and this is one of the reasons we're having Nate Powell on today, you need to understand that this is a sickness in the United States of America.
And it's not just Trump doing this in order to crack down on people.
His base loves it.
This is what they want.
This is why they want Trump as president.
They want a full-blown authoritarian who isn't worried about things like civil liberties and the Constitution.
They literally want leftists to be cracked down on and they literally want them to suffer.
The cruelty is the point.
So what we understand here is that these unmarked paramilitary troops are just wandering the streets and grabbing people and throwing them into unmarked vans.
There's a couple questions there.
Now, when they invoke their rights, it sounds like, for the most part, they simply drop them off on a corner and drive the hell away from there for obvious reasons.
So, you know, one question could very well be, well, why the hell wouldn't they just put some identification on them?
You know, I mean, this would actually quell at least that issue.
And why can't they get freaking transportation that isn't rent-a-car from Enterprise?
No, Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick.
Here's where you're missing the thing.
You're still working with logic.
Right?
You still want to see the law done.
That's not what these people want.
They want to strike fear.
The whole point of this is the violation of constitutional liberties is the point.
We're supposed to be afraid.
We're supposed to think at any moment an unmarked car will just show up in front of our house and take us.
That is the point of a failing state.
They have nothing to offer except for constant, ever-present, overwhelming fear.
But what you just said is exactly right.
Because it would actually save them some paperwork.
Right?
If they were actually just in cars.
I'm helping them.
I'm trying to help them.
Here's how you can do this a lot better.
They don't want it.
How many times do you hear about, like, you know, mobsters who get caught or even, like, gang members who get caught because they don't come to a complete stop at the stop sign and get pulled over and they find all that stuff?
It's like, if they just were to drive better, you would probably eliminate a lot of that stuff, those bad guys.
This is the same thing, though, and it really is a frightening experience only because, even just from watching it viscerally, because this is the footage that we've been seeing across the world for under-dictatorships.
But the only difference right now, on this date in 2020, is that in other countries, we never see those people again.
They just are disappeared forever.
At least right now, in July 2020, they are, you know, returning them.
But again, how much longer would it be till, okay, they're incarcerated for a little while, and then maybe they finally get out because they get a lawyer or whatever.
But then eventually that becomes something a lot different.
That's what's scary about this.
Yeah and you know this is the... I was trying to tell people about this too.
And I don't want to sound like a broken record.
There's a certain point where you just have to look back on the past couple of years and you look at people who have just been screaming about this.
That it was always going to head this way.
It's just that Trump is a certain way and the American right is a certain way and those things come together like poisonous peanut butter and chocolate.
You know, people were telling you left and right that they wanted these old, like, uh, like the old death flights, right?
With helicopters, where you just take dissidents out into the ocean and just toss them out of the helicopter.
And there were people left and right who, like, they would make their avatars on social media, like pictures of liberals being thrown out of helicopters, right?
Or they would talk all the time.
They would just be like, you know, Oh, Lib, I can't wait to take you in the helicopter.
And then they would tell you, we've got a Holocaust-style oven waiting for you.
Right?
These people told you who they were.
And everybody wrung their hands.
Well, I mean, it's maybe a performative type of fascism.
You can't take them seriously or literally.
You have to take them figuratively.
And Donald Trump, when Donald Trump says that he doesn't want to have five terms as president, or he wants five terms as president, you can't take that seriously.
Right?
He's just joking.
He's just doing...
These people tell you who they are.
Left and right, they tell you constantly that they want to round people up.
They want to murder people.
They want to hold them indefinitely.
This stuff, it's not been hidden.
They've told you what they will do.
And by the way, right now, Trump's in trouble.
The polls are bad.
The polls are really, really bad.
And by the way, I don't want to put the horse in front of the car.
Because there's no guarantees in any of this stuff, I don't believe, by the way.
He told Chris Wallace that he would not accept... Well, he wouldn't promise to accept a loss.
Right, right.
In the election.
Because, again, going back to Trump, the way his brain works, if he loses it's an unfair election.
Right?
Obviously.
What is it?
It's like Andrew Barnard does not lose, he quits.
Right?
It's that mindset.
And Trump tells you he won't accept an election loss.
He's told people left and right he'd love to serve multiple terms.
This is who he is.
This isn't some kind of, um, what was the one with Tom Hanks and the bad wig?
The Davinci Code, right?
You don't have to sit like a QAnon psychopath, putting together clips of things, trying to find clues.
They tell you and they've told you for years who they are and what they want.
Did you just have The Office and Dan Brown referenced in the same idea?
I think that's a muckrake pop culture twofer, is what that was.
It's like Scrabble.
That was like a double score.
Yeah, right.
You're just missing the Q, triple letter.
Oh, I got Q in there!
I brought up Q anon!
There we go.
Yeah, we're good.
Absolutely.
Q is everywhere.
Now here's the thing I'm kind of curious because remember we talked last time about how I just want the good old-fashioned country club corruption.
I want you know I long for the days when you know saluting somebody with a coffee cup in your hand was the big scandal.
Now if you remember long ago the Republicans were calling Obama's administration a dictatorship.
So I wonder if we didn't sound the alarm back then enough, because we probably put our head down and figured, okay, it's just going to go away if we don't put too much effort or focus on what the Republicans are saying.
Because it almost feels like out of that ideology, it's like birthed the Trump.
Trump now is justified to a lot of his base because, oh, well, Obama did the same stuff.
You know, that's sort of where I feel like a lot of the the base and their motivation is, is out of that, which then, you know, it goes to all sorts of racist racism and stuff as well.
But, you know, that that's what I keep going back to that.
I keep thinking about how what they accused Obama of and because you keep referencing how they would react, you know, if they were left the left.
And and it just seems like these are born of each other.
These are all sort of siblings and and offspring of that of what they were doing back then, like setting the groundwork here.
Can we have a quick moment just to set the level?
You and I would be having this exact same conversation if a liberal president started doing this.
Absolutely.
No one will believe us, I suppose.
No, we would be losing our minds.
Well, no, but I'm trying to tell you, and like, I keep trying, everyone keeps asking when I do these like, either a live stream or I do like a public event, people keep saying, how do you have a conversation with people and get through?
And I'm like, the first thing that I do is I tell them, these are my problems with the Democratic Party.
I'm not a member of the Democratic Party.
I have problems with Democrats.
They're not perfect.
There are issues here, right?
We would be losing our shit if any president did this.
This is like, this is like literally frightening apocalyptic constitutional stuff.
I would still be researching the history of the Insurrection Act no matter who was in the White House if this was happening, which I did.
Would you like to drop a little bit of knowledge for the people about the Insurrection Act?
I mean, you know, this goes way back to almost the beginning of the country where, you know, if we are Hamilton fans out there, Aaron Burr tried to sort of create his own country along the border and got in trouble.
Now, this also invoked the ability to to subpoena presidential records, because part of this whole case.
But they, Thomas Jefferson did not want to go after Burr without express consent from the Constitution.
And it was not clear that he could do that using federal forces to go get him in the middle of the country until they finally passed a law.
Ironically, they got him into custody anyway before they passed the law, a few days before.
But the whole point was there's a whole procedure that you have to do and you can override the governor's, you can override the local, I mean there was a Posse Comitatus rule which says you could not do this at all and this is the amendment to that, the Insurrection Act.
Again, it should be fraught with all sorts of political peril if you want to go in against the will of the local government.
One of the only times I can think of in recent history when that happened was with George Wallace when he didn't want to have schools be integrated.
Desegregated.
And so Eisenhower had to send in the troops and then Kennedy had to do it later.
But this is a whole other different thing because I was kind of reaching out to some of the Portlanders on Twitter the other day to find out is this some sort of really is this under siege for 47 straight nights and do you feel like you're in a war zone?
And basically the description for me was this is downtown not amongst anywhere residential.
These are sort of people who are marching mostly peacefully and there's some graffiti.
And that's about the description of it.
And there's no way or shape or form that this actually rises anywhere near the level that was required to invoke the Insurrection Act, which has to be like Rodney King style, looting, rioting, mayhem, murder.
That's what justifies the federal government swooping in.
This is nothing like that. - Wait, Nick, listen, before we started this podcast, I didn't understand that there was graffiti and defacement of public and private property.
Now that we're talking about it, the shredding of the Constitution of the United States of America, one of the most like amazing projects that actually has ever come out, which by the way, it wasn't the Constitution when it was actually written as a beautiful product.
It was people like John Lewis, rest in peace, who would eventually lead this country to the place where it was actually like a developing contract between power and people.
Just to be clear, because the Constitution, which by the way, people don't like talking about this, People who wrote it didn't have authority to write it, but they did it anyway, and they did it to help white, wealthy slave owners.
But what it has become is considered one of the greatest products of human civilization.
I didn't realize there was graffiti.
Now that we're talking about that and people causing problems, I saw a tweet earlier.
I, you know, I lose track of which Republican fails.
Do you know what I mean?
Like spectacularly fails the moment.
I just see it and it just kind of now goes through like you know Marco Rubio um you know confusing.
Oh no.
Elijah Cummings for uh John Lewis.
You know it's just like one of these things where I at this point it just goes in and it goes out because I don't have enough um ram.
I mean, listen, it was terrible what Marco Rubio did, which, yeah, he tweeted out a picture of him and Elijah Cummings.
Both of them, Elijah Cummings and John Lewis, both had acknowledged over the years that that happened a lot, okay?
Oh, yeah, but... If you're going to tweet it out as a memorial to a man and his greatness, that is not the time to screw that one up.
And it turns out the other problem was they didn't have a picture together.
Hold on, hold on.
Marco Rubio was held up as the chosen one of the Republican Party.
He was the one, after 2012, the Republican Party was like, we have to completely change course.
And we have to become younger, we have to become more pluralist, we have to create a new Republican Party.
And Marco Rubio was the one, which by the way, I have to tell you so one of the things Nick and I've been talking about is creating some like feature-length multi-part audio documentaries, right?
Well, we'll talk more about this on Thursday or Friday.
I guess is when that podcast will come out.
We're going to have a state of the podcast discussion with our listeners.
I would love to do like a 10 to 12 part series that lasts about 24 hours about Marco Rubio making the decision to grab the bottle of water during his State of the Union response speech.
Because if you watch it, he knows that he's going to forfeit the rest of his career.
You know what I mean?
Like he's like, oh, there's the presidency.
Oh, but I'm very thirsty.
And this is a person who has failed multiple times.
So my whole point was, there's a picture that somebody, they were supporting the federal troops or whatever, and it showed a protester like, I don't know, throwing something at an Amazon brick and mortar store.
And the person's like, oh, these criminals.
Amazon isn't even left enough for them.
It's like, Amazon is not left or right.
Amazon is a corporate monolith that encompasses left, right, center, and the entire world.
It's a post-political entity.
I don't care if there's graffiti.
I don't care if some windows get broken.
You don't send in federal troops to just swoop up and pick people up and take them out.
And if you can't figure out the right place to be in this argument and in this situation, you're the problem.
You are the problem right now.
Here's the thing about all this, what they don't understand, and they don't understand a lot, which is clear.
They're not governors.
They can't govern the country.
They don't understand.
They can't read the room.
It's that big phrase we like to use now.
The more they do this, the bigger these protests are getting.
The more they sweep into this is only the only time these things become unruly.
And unruly is, you know, is being alarmist, basically, is when they start to sweep in and stir everything up.
Now, after all this time, what I understand is these crowds are not even phased by the pepper spray that they're throwing out there now.
They kind of, you know, take a couple steps back and they go right back where they are.
We have the Portland Moms coming out arm and arm, 500 strong, to back these guys down.
And then we have naked Athena.
who comes out and scares the shit out of them so badly that they literally like tail whatever, high tail it out of there, like leaving screech marks.
And if you didn't see that, you know, we've always talked about how the power of media can affect the country.
Certainly in Vietnam, the actual images of war turn the country against the war more probably than any other influencer would have done.
Well, this picture, kind of like Tiananmen Square, Who knows that this will be that way, but her sitting there in a spread-eagle position on the ground in front of a whole group of cops who were standing there opposing her.
I don't know if that will do it, but I can imagine at the very least we're going to see a whole lot of naked people in Portland standing alongside her going in the future, which is apparently legal in Portland.
You can walk around like that.
You heard it here on the Montclair Podcast.
Nick is predicting just a massive civil rights movement of naked people.
I will be right next to her.
So real fast, let's just go through the cities that Donald Trump said that he's going to send federal troops to.
Said this today, right before the podcast began.
New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, and Oakland.
Real fast, this is your cognitive test, Nick.
What?
What is it?
Because these cities do not have insurrections in them.
They do not have massive protests that are like destroying any types of property.
What do New York, Done!
He hates it.
Detroit Baltimore and Oakland having having common and why would it be important that leading up to his reelection that Donald Trump the president of law and order would have federal troops fighting with these cities on national tv for day after day after day they all have the letter o well except for Philadelphia he hates it he hates the letter o nick except for Philadelphia these are Black cities.
These are These are cities where black people are going to get into fights with the police who are trying to take them into unmarked vehicles and hold them without reading them their rights.
He's trying to provoke a situation where he will make an argument.
It's him holding up the Bible again in front of a church and saying, I'm the president of law and order.
Oh, you don't want to vote for me?
You're upset?
Suburban Republican moms or whoever he's trying to reach out to?
Well, guess what?
The New World Order, Deep State, QAnon fever fantasy that we keep trying to peddle to you people and we keep trying to sell to you people?
Here you go.
Check it out for the next couple of months.
And people are going to get hurt.
People are going to get killed.
And by the way, traumatized.
Let's just be real.
Can you imagine just being out in the middle of a city and being picked up and taken and black hooded and just taken in the middle of nowhere?
It's awful.
That's what he's doing.
It's not just about crushing people that might not like him.
It's about delivering a message that he's the president of law and order and that he is a white emperor that's trying to hold back these minority hordes.
That's the message that he's trying to send.
It really is.
Are you aware of any other groups in the country?
that might wear paramilitary outfits and drive unmarked cars and just cause a lot of mayhem and perhaps, you know, pick people up and drag them around and do that.
Is it possible that that might happen somewhere in the country?
Well, what's wonderful is we're going to talk to Nate Powell about that here in a little bit.
I think you're exactly right.
Is that we're looking at a situation and by the way, authoritarian states work like this.
The leader, who declares war on his own people, starts whipping up an us-versus-them rhetoric.
The idea of immediate, ever-present danger.
You have to defend your family.
Which, by the way, we talked about this on the last podcast.
We have people out sawing down trees because they believe an Antifa caravan is coming.
Like, yeah, we're going to get people out in the streets with weapons who are going to fight a war on behalf of Trump and what they think is right, which is white supremacy.
I mean, yeah, you just nailed that.
Dead right.
And how are we going to know who is what and which is who and who is supposed to be official and who's not?
That is really nerve wracking to me.
And I'm a white guy who probably would avoid a lot of this stuff if I was walking around.
It really feels that way when you look at who they are pulling off the streets.
We already saw this.
This happened in Oakland.
There was a shooting by these guys who, they tried to make it look like it was from the protesters and they finally, they put it all together.
Thank God we still have some semblance of a law enforcement agency locally that can put together evidence and sort of point this out because if we ever lost that, Then the government, the federal government has complete control over the investigations and all over all over the evidence and it will never know what really happened.
They could decide what they want.
I mean, this is just like the CDC not getting the data on the COVID-19 mortality in cases.
Should it concern me that videos and eyewitness accounts have already shown that white supremacist paramilitary groups have been working alongside law enforcement and that they have been triangulating information and partnering on these types of things?
Wait, that should concern me when we have a situation where secret police just show up in cities and don't identify themselves and take off with people?
Because here, this is the truth.
Donald Trump, when he's doing this, He's not, we've talked about this.
He's not playing 8-dimensional, 9-dimensional chess.
He's reacting.
He's a desperate person and he just, he just, he just, it's like the, he's just testing to see what he can get away with.
There are people who are not testing.
There are people who are playing 8-dimensional, 9-dimensional chess.
It's like the story that we broke on here about white supremacists going in and trying to escalate these protests and these situations.
They want this.
They've wanted this forever.
You think it's a coincidence that they look like law enforcement and that they look like paramilitary federal organizations?
No!
It's not!
And they will happily use that as cover to do what they want to do.
And if you have a president who happens to be a white supremacist and also paranoid and an authoritarian, Those things just start picking up speed, and they start picking up their own momentum.
And that's what happens.
You have destabilized states, and then you have paramilitary fascists who take advantage of it.
Guess what?
That's kind of how things like... What was that thing that happened in 1930s Germany?
Oh, that's right!
The Nazi party in the Third Reich who took advantage of a destabilized state and started to create a fascist environment and they took advantage of it.
Guess what?
That's what happens.
That's what happens in situations like these.
The troubling thing here is as his numbers go down, which invariably they will, even if it was just the COVID crisis that would cause it to go down, he's going to get more and more desperate.
I'm trying to like sort of picture, we talked about this notion of him, he gets to take this ball and go home.
Now you don't think he's, you think he's still running to win.
And I agree with that.
I'm not going to say, I don't buy it, especially because he has to win or else he's going to prison.
So here's the question.
That's what everyone gets wrong.
They need to understand he hates the job.
He doesn't want to be publicly humiliated and he doesn't want to be prosecuted.
Those three things can be true all at once.
Right.
So here's the question is if he's going to continue to take his ball and go home, like you can imagine from let's say he loses November 4th, whatever it is, he's got a couple months to burn the whole thing down. - Oh.
But I would almost argue, it's not a couple months, it's from today until that time that he can burn the whole thing down the way he wants to.
Because even if he does win, he's going to want that situation as it is.
So that's what's scary.
So what does that look like?
Well, the only thing I could think of right now, because I'm kind of mad at myself that I haven't been able to get ahead of this and predict better what's going on, but starting a war will probably be something that would have to happen between now and then.
And that would have to be probably Iran.
I don't think you'd want to do it with North Korea.
So I think it'd be Iran, which is all terrible ideas that would just result in the catastrophic events.
The Durham Report!
have to worry about.
But then even on the other side of that, politically, you know, he's going to try and throw Hillary and Comey and McCabe and all these people in jail.
Like, that's what he's probably going to, that's the easier part he's going to do.
I mean, he's already tried that.
You know what I mean?
Like, he's already started the gears.
The Durham report.
It's coming.
I mean, for real.
Now, the idea of the war, after watching him for a few years, I think Trump really likes declaring things without declaring them.
You know what I mean?
Like the idea that he's going to bring this act into being or he's going to declare Antifa a terrorist organization.
I don't think he's actually going to start a war.
I think he's going to start An invisible fake war against the American people.
I think it's what we're watching now is we're going to see this escalate into a societal constitutional crisis.
I mean, it technically already is.
We're just not completely up in arms about it yet.
It's a slow moving constitutional crisis that is actually escalating by the day.
So yeah, this situation is bad, but I also want people to think about this.
He's accused Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and other people of treason.
That's 10.
Do you know what I mean?
They're part of a giant deep state conspiracy.
He said coup.
He said that they've tried to take him out.
They've spied on him.
They're guilty of treason.
That's when the numbers were just, you know, still at their pathetic Trump level, but not where they are now.
That's not re-election in doubt.
That's not, I've lost an election.
That's already at a 10.
Where do you go after that?
I mean, you go to 11.
When you need to go up to that next level.
And that's what we're looking at right now.
It's that escalation.
And that only happens if they fabricate evidence.
Because we keep seeing how many times we've already had release of very thorough investigations that have shown there really wasn't any political bias and they were trying to do the best they could.
And this is all, you know what, this is really just Mitch McConnell's fault.
I mean, everything's Mitch McConnell's fault.
I mean, they go to him and say, we want to announce that the Russians are deeply influencing this election.
They go to the Gang of Eight.
He refuses.
And in Obama's mind, he wants to be fair and impartial, though they don't want to do it on their own.
It would look too political.
And as a result, all of that, this ideology sort of really hardened in the brains of this, whatever this group is that is still backing Trump.
Uh, and it still, it still feels like no matter what, it's close enough that this election is going to be close, right?
We don't, I don't seem to think that he's going to win, uh, Biden will not win by more than, I don't know, do you have any ideas, any feelings about how many millions of votes he possibly could win by?
I, again, 2016 taught me not to prognosticate elections.
I don't think that we should.
I don't think we should take it for granted.
But, I mean, this is a situation where you actually look at it and you say, because I've heard people say there has to be like a magic number.
That if Biden goes above it, suddenly any controversy goes away.
There's no way.
There's no possible way that Donald Trump will ever believe.
We talked about this.
When Donald Trump got elected president, he lost by, how many was it?
Was it three million?
Is that what he lost by?
Yeah, cool, three million.
Yeah, he lost by three million.
And then suddenly he started saying that there were so many illegal votes.
How many illegal votes were there?
Three million.
Three million, right.
That's just who he is.
He's broken.
And unfortunately we have a president Who is paranoid and lost in his own reality, who is enabled by the Republican Party, who has allowed this to happen and they've used it to their own advantage.
They've pretended like they're safeguard, you know, they're guardians of democracy while, you know, watching this whole thing unfold.
And unfortunately, there is a really dangerous fascistic authoritarian base of Americans who support this type of stuff.
They've told you who they are.
This is actually what they believe, and we're watching it unfurl.
And luckily, as announced, we're going to have Nate Powell, an artist whose comic about face does an incredible job of explaining how we got to this point and how to look at it and understand who these people are and the actual danger that we're in.
So we're going to be right back here in just a second with Nate Powell.
And we're back, and we're incredibly lucky to be joined by artist Nate Powell, who has basically won every award underneath the sun.
You've got the National Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, a whole host of awards simply because he is amazing.
He has worked with civil rights leader and hero John Lewis on the March Trilogy.
Rest in peace, a loss for all of us.
We're so happy that he can be here with us today.
Thanks for joining us, Nate.
It's an honor to be here.
Thank you.
All right, so what we want to talk about primarily today, for anybody who hasn't already, it's available for free online, is the comic About Face, which, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about fascism in America and how it's wrapped up into masculinity and how we've got to this point.
About Face is one of the most Clear-eyed accounts of how we got to this place.
I think it's absolutely brilliant, and I wish people would just pause this podcast, go read it, come back, and get ready for this discussion.
It's unbelievable.
Can you talk a little bit about what led to writing this comic?
What got you in that place to sort of wrestle with this topic?
You bet.
This is one of these situations where, you know, this is Relatively speaking, a little 12-page comic essay.
But the thought process, the developing observations and thoughts that were put together really started for me back in the mid-1980s.
I grew up in a multi-generational military family during the Reagan era.
And living in Alabama, my dad was in the Air Force as GI Joe kid, really surrounded by a lot of the pop culture version of Reagan era militarism, you know, as were many of us in the 1980s as kids.
So some of my natural curiosities And this is me, like, now being, you know, a career comic book nerd.
It manifests itself in different ways.
So as a kid, you know, like, being more interested in the military specs and stuff surrounding G.I.
Joe than sort of the fantasy version of themselves.
Wait, did you have, did you, there were G.I.
Joe comics that had the specs of the vehicles and stuff?
I used to read those all the time.
Is that like what you're talking about?
Well, yeah, I mean like what's I mean, G.I.
Joe on its own is like a fascinating side quest in that it's a it's.
Yeah, it's writer for the bulk of it was this guy Larry Hama.
Very, very skilled writer and editor in comics and kind of a renaissance man.
Also Vietnam vet.
And he offered looking back a very relatively like nuanced fairly sophisticated pop culture spin on early Reagan era militarism while still developing this huge host of characters.
So like as an intro like it's you know one has a natural tendency to like kind of scoff a little bit at something like this militarized toy line being an entry point for this line of thought that resulted in this comic, but it's kind of perfect.
When I go back and revisit these stories, there is enough craft and enough skill and enough nuance in there that actually makes it compelling.
So there's a reason behind that, I think, for how some of these seeds were planted.
So yeah, anyway, getting into curious at first, basically about the presence of facial hair on some Joe characters, you know, asking questions about standardized uniforms, standardized haircuts, like getting really into it with my dad about like which branches of the armed forces allowed the shortest and longest hair, what the waivers were for mustaches, et cetera.
Anyway, As a lot of this developed, some of those experiences as a kid and then growing up into activism, rebellion, and sort of applying all of these principles as an adult went into a book I made called Any Empire.
But there were a lot of unfinished questions I had that I kind of put by the wayside in Any Empire.
And those started to to reintroduce themselves in my mind around 2015, 2016, especially as you see the rise of organized white supremacy and its successful attempts to mainstream itself.
South Central Indiana is a hotspot of white supremacist activity and organizing.
And so educating myself on a lot of that along the way allowed me under our current regime to, you know, like everybody's finding ways to get through day to day and I couldn't help but notice that in my daily travels around town, this Noticeable uptick in certain aesthetic shifts and a lot of it is just kind of a comical.
I mean, it's almost like the GI Joeification of the of the average Hoosier who I would pass, but like a lot of it had to do with Brand new, fairly high-end pickup trucks that were always black or charcoal.
The gradual removal, you know, kind of like flipping a lot of what we consider in terms of like conservative signs of identity or consumerist signs of identity.
Actually getting corporate brands blacked out of your nice truck.
And growing up in Arkansas, like, I know that a Dodge pickup is like the gold standard in pickups and that was sort of my first tip off.
I was like, oh, there are all these brand new Dodges that are getting the RAM blacked out.
What's up with that?
And yeah, basically it's like riding this line where you're observing over a long period of time and you're like, Am I just being paranoid and bugged out about this regime that we're under, or am I actually observing things that bear some relationship to each other?
Well, I kept getting drawn to, as I was reading the whole piece that you did, and enjoying the artwork as well, which is really as important as the writing, I kept getting drawn back to the notion of how the media influences us and what we shape our visions of ourselves in.
So, movies that kept drawing me, as I'm reading this, are like maybe Born on the Fourth of July.
And if you watch that movie, you see how, you know, the Tom Cruise character has, you know, his family for generations before had fought in all these wars.
And he felt the same kind of need to do that.
And then also, even in a movie like Forrest Gump, where Lieutenant Dan demanded to die on the battlefield, just like every one of his ancestors had for every war we've had in this country.
And I feel like that kept coming up to me, and I feel like that notion of maybe sacrificing for your country has gotten so completely bastardized now.
And I wonder if that's how you feel, reflecting on how we've been influenced by all these kind of movies and stuff like that, especially as we get to 2020 versus how it was in the 80s.
Certainly.
I guess I feel that sort of collapsible sense of continuity A sense of the sort of the an intentional push to make all American involvement in war and colonialism, all American involvement in empire is an echo of all previous involvement.
And so yeah, there certainly is a strong sense of that.
However, I, I feel my my My gut instinct is that that sentiment was as strong in the 1980s as it is in the 2010s.
I do, however, think the difference is, you know, like growing up as kids of the 80s, looking back, it's obvious we were just like soaked in consumerism and pop culture.
But I think it's pretty arguable that that pales in comparison to the contemporary meshing of Identity, like the grafting of our identity into consumer goods and into kind of like cultural signifiers of self.
I think the the push, especially like in a post social media world, the push to have visual signifiers, to have brands and icons which allow you to be quickly identified in an identity politics kind of way, has almost superseded Criticism of like buying stuff as an extension of your identity are basically avatars and icons have condensed that into the shortest possible means.
So I think one of the one of the things I was first focused on had a lot to do just basically with bumper sticker culture in terms of identity politics and the gradual shortening of the abbreviation the efficiency of a lot of iconography and symbols that you would see on cars or on people's clothing to provide the shortest possible signifier of self and of allegiance.
So everything you just said strikes me as basically the most accurate description of what's going on that nobody actually wants to talk about.
Which is the idea that we're projecting out into the world these avatars of ourselves, the way that we want to be seen, these characters that we're
sort of playing and I wrote a I wrote a book about toxic masculinity where I started doing the research and I grew up in Indiana where where Nate is now and one of the things I kept coming back around on my research is that really really insecure fragile men overcompensate their masculinity and play characters right they're the ones who are buying the big trucks they're getting the chrome on the trucks they're You know, they're playing these characters.
And one of the things I thought the comic nailed was all of a sudden you start seeing how American men start playing the role of fascists.
And they start presenting themselves as being stronger than their weaknesses, wearing death's heads.
And if you actually look back on past fascist movements, it's always insecure men playing a role.
And then over time, They're not playing a role anymore, it's just who they are.
Can you talk a little bit about how those roles sort of lead to actual fascism?
And you actually said, and I want to get this quote in because I think it's important, you were talking about this generation of men that we currently have, and you say, and not to give the whole thing away because you're going to need to read the thing, you say, these are the future fascist paramilitary participants.
And I think that's completely accurate.
Can you talk about how that role and that sort of avatar lead into that, the actual embodiment of fascism?
Sure.
I had to choose my words carefully with that line, because where the comic, where the comics essay builds to, you know, much of it is focused on style and surface.
It's focused on aesthetic changes over time.
But the real, the real core of this shift is that it's, it's really only empowered and mainstreamed once a lot of this proto-fascist aesthetic functions on an apolitical consumer level once it becomes cool stuff to buy.
Fascist chic.
Yes, fascist chic.
But it doesn't seem like fascist chic.
It seems more like Mountain Dew, Code Red, you know, like gamer chic.
You know, like, I'm a comics nerd.
You know, like, I go to Comic Cons all the time.
You know, like, I'm knee deep.
Surrounded by, you know, a lot of the detritus surrounding this aesthetic.
And it naturally leads to a place where I've got illustrations of, you know, these visually obscured, unidentifiable, heavily armed, paramilitary, white supremacist militia units.
But the important thing is that by labeling fascist and paramilitary participants I don't intend for it to really funnel itself strictly into these armed fascist militias.
They are only empowered as they are, and they're only mainstreamed because their aesthetic has already proved a viable apolitical source of income for companies like Under Armour, Nine Line, some of whom, like Under Armour, Uh, you know, have paid a little lip service to try to brush off accusations of affiliation, uh, but have done nothing to change their aesthetic.
And I, I pay close enough attention to some of these companies to, to see what's talking, what's not a nine line on the other hand, uh, you know, I've seen over the past year really kind of doubled down, uh, aiming for, I mean, Yeah, without even casting judgment or whatever, aiming for their profit motive.
This is our market, so we're just going to go whole hog on it.
But these things are only possible by having enough mainstream acceptance of the aesthetic that people who Notice a little bit less of what's going on with the neighbors around them and within their community are able to kind of brush off this stuff, you know, as like, well, I mean, yeah, sure.
Their T-shirt or like, oh, yeah.
OK, their truck.
Whoa.
Oh, no.
You're so scared of these black trucks or whatever.
It's really easy to kind of brush that off because it does sound like paranoia.
But we are talking about aesthetics in culture.
Actually, real fast, that's so funny you said that because I was going for a walk in my neighborhood.
It was like, I don't know, six, seven months ago, and I walked by a neighbor who always wears the Nine Lions shirts, and there was another one just like him out in their front yard, and they were examining their, like, modified AR-15s.
And that was the first moment where all of a sudden it finally clicked with me.
I was like, oh no, they're paying for this thing, right? - For the experience.
- For the experience that they are somehow or another special forces or they're ready to fight an invisible war and they have the weapons, they have the ideology.
All it's waiting for is like a light, right?
To go in that tinderbox, like that sort of like enables it, yeah. - And I think like one of the ways in which a broader understanding of the danger of this shift
One of the ways that's been undercut is the notion that I think is widely accepted across the country, just in casual discourse, the notion that the cultural and political climate under 45's regime is something that started in 2016 or in 2017.
And the entire, I mean, like one of the most important things about the essay is there's a reason why I starred in the 1980s.
There's a reason why I have observations through the 90s.
And, you know, thanks to writers like Kathleen Ballou and James Lewin getting to understand the longer history of organized white supremacy in the 80s and 90s and their presence in ways that I was not made aware of, though I was aware of what they were doing as it occurred in the news.
This is a decades-long kind of shift that has taken enough time to sink in that it's like throwing the frog in a pot of water and doesn't realize it's boiling.
But yes, absolutely.
There's an experience.
of projecting one's identity into something that that, yeah, an aesthetic that takes multiple paychecks to achieve.
I think that that's another angle, I think, that maybe came to started coming to light a little more during August of 2017 is people love to kind of dismiss and discount A lot of trolls and white supremacists for being basement dwelling losers who, you know, quote, still live with their parents.
And yeah, we all know there are plenty of them.
But all you have to do is just look with your eyes on the news or in your community.
And you you can kind of, you know, tabulate how many hundreds or thousands of dollars go into a lot of the equipment.
And you recognize these are middle class people with full time jobs.
These people aren't messing around, and you can start out by messing around a bit and wanting some cool stuff, but the end result is not messing around.
Well, Nate, you talk in your piece a little bit about doing a mock cover for a magazine where you pose that the villains and the famous villains we know in the past are actually the heroes or their stories.
And I can remember in the 80s, we would study Beowulf.
And then we studied the book called Grendel, which is like the bad guy.
And Beowulf was actually the good guy.
We've seen it in The Unforgiven to some degree.
My son is now thinking that the dark side is actually the better version of the force.
And I'm kind of curious if you, and what's making me nervous reading your thing, because now I have to pull him aside and actually have a talk to him, because I'm wondering if you see that kind of connection, which has now become mainstream, that has led to some of the white power and white supremacy issues that we have now.
Oh, number one, without a doubt.
But number two, it's important to note that, you know, like for me, like, you know, like Cobra Command was always cooler than G.I.
Joe.
The Empire is clearly cooler in terms of the way they look and the way they act and what goes down.
The Empire is clearly cooler than the Rebellion.
You know, so that's nothing new, but I think one of the important roles that parents have is simply to make sure that they give their kids enough bandwidth to be able to To have explorations and fantasies, to let kids play, but also to just make sure you take a little bit of time to point out what Cobra is based on.
To point out where you see the galactic empire in our world.
And that's really kind of all it takes.
Now, in terms of on the ground, it's very easy to see empire Bumper stickers with the sort of gear mechanism that's a clear derivative of fascism.
You know, like, these are things that weren't done absentmindedly in terms of designing the aesthetic of the Empire.
It's very obvious.
I mean, it's there in the names of the soldiers themselves.
But, yeah, you know, like, earlier in this decade, being at Comic Cons and, you know, slanging my books and stuff, there was inevitably every couple of conventions
You know, you would run into the lone Nazi cosplayer and it increasingly, you know, became, it's one of these things where you come from a 1990s coming of age perspective in which it's easy to, it's still easy to kind of dismiss people for just being dumbasses or to dismiss people for just being into a particular kind of fantasy and for not thinking things through.
And I sort of had an eyes-open moment at a Comic-Con in 2011 or 2012 with one of these Nazi cosplayers, where it wasn't immediately certain to me if this person was cosplaying a particular fictional character.
I'm like, is this a Heinlein character, a Philip K. Dick character?
Does any of that even matter, if so?
And I was debating, I was like, I need to go ask this guy some questions.
Someone actually beat me to it.
A stranger who had another booth came out and was like, why are you, what's up with your outfit?
And the, it was eyeopening because the, when confronted, uh, this Nazi cosplayer, uh, was really like taken aback.
It was also being confronted by a woman.
Um, but he kind of didn't understand what the big deal was before he got defensive.
You know, he couldn't quite, he had a smugness to him before he was confronted, but he's like, it's a costume, it's characters, but he couldn't come up with clear answers.
And immediately, I remember clearly him shifting into this accusatory tone we're very familiar with, with trolls these days, you know, about like, I'm just expressing myself and freedom of speech and, uh, And it was sort of an unresolved moment that I thought was a really dangerous portent that planted a lot of seeds for what became About Face.
So being in a comic convention, being a real hub of pop culture and, you know, cultural signifiers being represented visually, it was the first time I'd seen a direct confrontation To someone dressing as a Nazi in a fictional sense, but then kind of defending the right to dress as a real Nazi as a costume.
And that was, you know, that was only eight or nine years ago.
I think that would be a very different story now with a lot of different outcomes.
Yeah, I make an argument a lot of times that the modern era of anti-heroes is based on trying to make a sort of conscious room for America's misdeeds in order to carry out hegemony and, you know, the spread of white supremacy.
I grew up on comics in the 1990s where every hero was a mercenary or a paramilitary group.
You had Cable with guns bigger than his entire body, right?
And you're dealing with all these wars.
You bring up the idea of the forever wars that are obviously still going on in the age of terror and about how A lot of what we're seeing right now is probably a side effect of a lot of American hegemony and empire being marched around the world.
I mean we live in a country where industry is kind of gone.
These old careers that men used to have that would prove that they were men are gone.
And as a result, now they want to play soldier.
They want to play mercenary.
They want to pretend that they're special forces units.
Can you talk a little bit about that relationship between constant militarism and this hegemony and the quest for that and how it's probably had an effect on men?
Certainly.
And I mean, it's important to note that, you know, the War on Terror is now 19 years old.
So we're talking about voting now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
People.
You know, people participating on troops participating on the ground who weren't born in September 11th on September 11th, 2001.
And so importantly, like I guess one of perhaps the most central line or concept within about face to me is conformity disguised as rebellion.
And so that even involves aesthetic shifts within active duty military troops in the 2000s.
In terms of kids of the 80s and 90s, and I couldn't help but notice from a punk perspective, sort of mainstreaming of certain aesthetics like the Mohawk through the 90s mainstream punk explosion, but then those children of mall punk growing up into the War on Terror, some of them You know, heading off to war as active duty troops.
But then around 2005, 2006, seeing differences in like hair and clothing trends that a lot of that I saw in a lot of music videos, et cetera, that are definitely incorporating, reincorporating fatigues, reintroducing a more masculinized Mohawk, reducing its height, increasing its width and sort of creeping ahead slowly until the Mohawk just returns into a fascist haircut.
But, you know, the Mohawk has its own interesting history, but its use by World War II paratroopers is sort of an entry point from cultural appropriation before punk, so that it sort of ties a thread between the War on Terror to what is considered one of the most just wars in the popular imagination.
And so, yes, there are a lot of defense mechanisms here, and this is plainly not to cast blame on Anyone at random for engaging in any of these style choices, because we're talking about cultural language.
We're talking about visual style and what it means for our society and what it means politically.
But yes, these shifts are noticeable and they serve a purpose.
They serve a purpose to sort of justify an unjust and often very unpopular war and series of wars.
They serve a purpose to kind of whittle down vocal resistance, but even visual and aesthetic resistance by muddying and undermining certain movements, whether they're coming from the left or whether they're coming from mainstream resistance.
Yeah, I mean, style's powerful.
All right.
Thank you so much, Nate, pal.
As I was telling everyone, they have to read about FaZe.
I think it is just so perfect and dead on and absolutely important for the moment to understand all this stuff.
Where can the good people find you?
Well, I'm on Twitter.
I'm on Instagram.
You can just search my name.
Or my website is seemybrotherdance.org.
Wonderful.
Thank you so much for coming on, man.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
Alright everyone, that was Nate Powell.
Again, I cannot tell you, go read about FACE.
It is really illuminating in terms of rising fascism in America and it'll make a lot of things clear that maybe have been pretty vexing.
Speaking of clarity and vexing, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, has been bragging for, what, has it been weeks now?
A while, yeah.
About how...
He can't make it up!
Right, and he thinks that Joe Biden would fail this, right?
He was taken in for a cognitive test.
And by the way, why?
Why was he given a cognitive test?
Like, no one will answer that question.
Like, why was he taken in for an examination?
And he's like, I passed it.
I aced it.
Nobody could believe how great I was and how great I aced this test.
So Nick apparently has found a cognitive test, and really fast.
He's going to administer one.
We're going to find out what your loyal co-host, Jerry Dade Sexton, whether or not I am slipping, I guess, and whether or not I'm in a good spot.
So we're going to make this work.
Yeah, if you want to jump over to YouTube so you can watch this, because we'll have the images on the screen as well.
We'll describe it for you if you're listening only on the audio, but still, it'll be up on YouTube as well.
I'm a little worried.
I'm a little worried the pandemic's got me a little fuzzy.
So let's do this thing.
Let's find out.
Let me find out.
So let's get into it.
The first thing we have on the MOCA, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, is a Visual Spatial Executive Function test.
So I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to show you a chart that you now need to connect the dots between.
So if you can see this on YouTube.
But Jared, just you can walk us through without having to write this down.
What would be the pattern here that you connect as the arrows go?
I'm sorry, I'm just imagining Donald Trump just as he's messing everything up, just bragging about what he's doing.
Okay, so I'm going to 1A, then I'm going from A to 2.
At that point, I'm going from 2 to 3, then 3 to 4, 4 to D, 5, and then E.
Really?
I aced it.
I did great.
No, I'm gonna go from 1 to A, A to 2, 2 to B, B to 3.
Oh, that's the problem, Nick!
Here's the problem.
The screen cut off.
It cut off the C down there.
I was thinking ahead of the test.
I didn't see the C. I didn't see the C. That's the problem.
This is a very unfair test.
Obviously this is set up by Jeff Bezos.
Ok, so the only question here on this test, it doesn't tell me... Oh, I see, out of 5.
Ok, so I'll give you a 5 out of 5 on that one.
That's a 5.
That's a 5.
That's a total 5.
Ok, now you have to copy a cube.
Let me show you this one now.
This is what the cube looks like.
Oh, I guess it's cute.
So can you draw that and show it to us?
I love drawing cubes.
I love drawing cubes.
I taught this in high school when I was an art teacher.
I spent so much time copying cubes.
Oh, wait.
We couldn't quite see that.
It's a little bit blown out.
Can you move it a little bit farther away?
I actually drew a really terrible cube.
So now I'm going to draw a better cube.
You know, I can't give you the full points until you show me.
All right.
Here we go.
That's too close.
Oh, there we go.
All right.
There you go.
We'll give it to you.
Okay.
So the next thing is you have to draw.
Are you ready?
You have to draw a clock and the time on the clock has to be 10 past 11.
10 past 11.
2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.
And it needs to be 10 past 11?
Yep.
11, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.
And it needs to be 10 past 11?
Yep.
Okay.
There you go.
Here's my beautiful clock.
Okay, I will give you three points for that.
It's whatever time, I say it is.
Alright, so there we go.
Alright, so we're moving along.
By the way, wait, hold on.
Do you think Donald Trump drew an actual old time clock?
Or do you think he did a digital clock?
I think he did a digital clock.
I think he just wrote 11-10.
And like Melania leaving.
All right, great.
Well, let's go on to naming different types of animals.
What is this type of animal called?
That's a big cat, baby.
That's a lion.
Okay, the next one.
What is this called?
That is a rhinoceros.
Yes, and the third animal is a That's a camel.
You know what?
I'm so impressed.
I am now whispering to the other scientists next to me how amazing that is.
They were shaking their heads.
They were amazed.
They had never seen anybody do this before.
Okay.
So, here is the thing.
I'm going to read some five words to you and you need to be able to repeat them.
Oh my god.
Oh my god.
Do I have to do them?
Like, do I get all of them at once?
Yes.
You have to do... I'm going to give you them all at once and you have to repeat them.
I'll give you two chances.
Are you ready?
So here are the words.
Five words.
Face, Velvet, Church, Daisy, Red.
Face, Velvet, Church, Daisy, and Red.
Okay, that's fantastic.
I didn't think I was gonna do it!
But even though you did it right the first time, you gotta do it again.
I gotta do it all over again?
Yep.
Do I?
Wait, damn it.
I got so excited celebrating.
I don't get them again?
No.
Okay, I've got it.
I've got it.
Face, Daisy, Velvet, Church, and Red.
Those are all correct, but not in the right order.
So, do I have to get them in the right order?
I believe you do.
Okay, all right, that's okay.
This test is very unfair.
Not everybody is perfect.
Let's see, that was the memory part of it, okay.
But that was really impressive on the first part, but you gotta get them on the second trial too.
I appreciate it.
But okay, I'm gonna give you a list of digits, and you have to repeat them in the forward order.
Okay, are you ready?
So, the first grouping I'm gonna give you, all you have to do is repeat it back to me the way I do it to you.
Two, one, eight, five, four.
2, 1, 8, 5, 4.
Yay.
Okay.
Yes.
These numbers, you have to give it back to me in reverse order of what I give you.
Okay?
So I'm going to give them to you.
You have to give it back in reverse.
7, 4, 2.
Two, four, seven.
Okay, all right.
That's great.
Now we're cooking, baby.
You got two on that one, on the attention.
Okay, good.
This is good.
This is some cutting-edge podcasting.
I can hear your brain churning here.
This is cutting-edge podcasting.
I dare anyone to tell us that this isn't, like, award-worthy.
Okay, so here's the thing.
I'm going to read you a relatively long list of letters.
Let's tap on the microphone when you hear the letter A.
Okay, I'm ready.
So every time you hear the letter A, guys, tap on the microphone.
Are you ready?
Yep.
Okay, here we go.
F, B, A, C, M, N, A, J, K, L, B, L, B, A, F. A, K, D, E, A, J, A, M,
J, A, M, O, F, A, A, B.
B!
Okay, you made it!
Wow!
Okay, you got a point for that.
Do I get the nuclear launch codes now?
Do I get to stay in the Oval Office?
Yes.
Not yet, not yet.
There's more on the tab.
Okay, let's see here.
Subtraction.
So you are now going to subtract 7 from 100 and go back as far as you can.
How far do I have to go back?
Well, keep going and I'll stop you when I feel like you got it.
Alright.
I'm actually, I'm weirdly good at stuff like this.
Okay.
And I'm not even good at math.
Okay.
Okay, 100, 93, 86, 79, 72, 76, 58.
Okay.
Good.
All right.
51.
That's good.
40.
44.
37.
All right.
30.
23.
16.
9.
2.
Very nice.
Very nice.
Okay.
Watch out.
Watch out.
Don't hold me back.
I know Trump didn't do that.
Trump was actually... I'm a peacock.
30, 23, 16, 9, 2. - Very nice, very nice.
Okay, very good. - Watch out, watch out.
Don't hold me back. - I know Trump didn't do that.
Trump was actually-- - I'm a peacock.
You gotta let me fly.
Absolutely.
I mean, you know, what's his face?
Howard Stern had given Trump some subtraction or division problem, and he totally muffed that one.
So I don't think he was doing that one right when he did it.
Well, I do love that when Chris Wallace asked him what was hard on the test, he brought up counting backwards from 100.
Right.
He was very adamant that this was very tough.
You haven't seen some of these questions.
And Chris Wallace played it awesome, because he was just sort of bemused at this guy.
OK, you have to repeat after me.
Are you ready?
I'm going to read a sentence.
You have to repeat it.
I only know that John is the one to help today.
I only know that John is the one to help today.
Okay, good.
The next sentence is, The cat always hid under the couch when dogs were in the room.
The cat always hid under the couch when dogs were in the room.
Perfect!
Wow!
These are getting progressively harder.
I'm just saying.
Okay, good to know.
You have to actually say it like me, with my voice.
No, I'm kidding.
Let's see here.
Let's see.
Fluency, name, maximum number of words in one minute that begin with the letter F. Wait, where am I?
Can I do that?
I would love to do that.
Yes, but I'm confused.
Where am I taking the words from?
From what we just read?
I think so.
I'm supposed to come up with this many words.
Oh, I'm sorry.
That's absolutely right.
Okay, so are you ready?
You have... Wait, are you going to write these down?
First of all, I've got to time you.
You've got to time me, but I want you to write down the number because I have faith in this.
Okay, I'm going to get my... Faith and freedom.
And I feel fancy free.
Okay.
I have my stopwatch and I'm going to count.
What am I going to count on?
I'll figure it out.
Okay.
Are you ready?
The letter F is the word.
Words that start with the letter F as many as you can in one minute.
Okay?
One minute.
Ready?
Go.
Fancy.
Free.
Formaldehyde.
Frog.
Frack.
Fracking.
Forget.
Fantasize.
Fantasy.
Four.
Four, as in the Gulf.
Four.
Oh, wow.
Fumigate.
Felt.
Feeling.
Feelings.
Find.
Finding.
Finder.
Found.
Foundry.
Founding.
Fickle.
Felt.
No, I already said felt.
That's a good partner for a while.
I'll tell you this.
Anything more than 11 and you get full points.
What did I get to?
32.
32 in about 40 seconds.
Yeah.
32!
We'll give you one point for that.
Some would even say, Nick, that that is a fine number of words.
It is.
You know, it's almost as if you were trained to come up with words, in a way.
You're almost a ringer for that one.
All right, here we go.
Almost.
We need to now, okay, we're going to talk about, you need to describe the similarity between two words.
So if I say, you know, banana to orange equals fruit.
Can we just real fast, before we move forward, remind everyone that I am taking a cognitive test that the President of the United States had to take for unknown reasons and also bragged about how great he did at it.
And nobody had ever done so great on them before.
Nobody.
And that you didn't cheat.
Nobody.
Also, we have to trust that you didn't cheat on this one.
Alright, I'm ready.
I'm ready for the words.
So, banana to orange equals fruit.
Train to bicycle equals... Transportation.
Fair enough.
Watch to ruler.
Measurement.
Perfect.
Two points.
All righty.
I'm not sure you've gotten anything off.
We've got to look here, but let's see.
Two points on abstraction.
All right.
And we have a couple more left.
Okay.
Now, can you recall those five words I gave you from before five minutes ago?
Okay, um...
Maybe.
Face, Daisy, Velvet, Church, and Red.
Those are all the right words.
Not in the right order, but I don't know if they are... Who cares, man?
I'm an iconoclast.
I don't play by your rules.
I don't think that you need to do it in the order, at least on this one.
So we're going to give you those points.
I'm like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon.
I make my own rules.
That's it.
Well, I'm too old for this stuff!
It's a Murtagh rule.
Delayed recall.
So that's... I'll give you five points for that.
Okay.
And we now have... Okay.
Basically, tell me the date.
It is July 20th, 2020 AD.
Ooh, what day is it?
Monday.
Wow, I actually had to check that.
I forgot what day it is.
Yes!
This is airing on a Tuesday, but this is a Monday.
It wants to know what city, but also wants to know what place.
Oh, I see.
So, what city are you in?
First of all, I'm not telling anybody where I live.
I've got neo-Nazis who show up at my house.
I live in Statesboro, Georgia in the county of Bullock.
So what place are you in at this moment?
I'm in my house.
Okay, so we'll give you six points for that.
That almost doesn't deserve full points because everyone's in their house now.
Right.
But by the way, that's the highest point total you get for anything out of this.
Can you believe that?
So this will give you an idea of what this test is and how bullshit it is.
I took off some points though for the first memory thing when you did the numbers.
You repeated the second time out of order.
But anyway, that was amazing.
That was great.
You passed with flying colors.
Grown men were coming up to me and saying, Sir, we've never seen anybody do this before.
There were tears in their eyes.
They were thanking me.
Yes.
You've never seen anybody cry.
They only cry when they're kids and they're crying for that.
We're talking tough guys here, people.
Yes, but listen, what needs to be hammered home is why he took that test, why they rushed him to Walter Reed that time, why he jerks his shoulders back and then has, you know, misspeaking at the same time.
Lots of evidence of cognitive malfunction.
They still haven't explained why he was rushed to the hospital in the first place and why he was given a cognitive test.
Wait, that is false.
That is false.
They did explain why he went.
Oh, way to go.
I'm sure it's a real solution.
You don't remember?
Well, we had a couple hours to kill.
We figured we'd do the annual checkup, the first half of it a little early.
It's a great time.
It's a great time to be an American, folks.
It's a great time to be an American.
On that note, thank you for listening to me take a cognitive test on the Muckrake Podcast with just cutting-edge entertainment that you can't get anywhere else, folks.
You just can't.
You can't beat it with a stick, Nick.
You can't pay money and get entertainment like this, I tell you what.
Oh man, my cube and my clock are just terrible.
Okay.
Anyway everyone, thank you so much for hanging out.
As always, if you want to help out, and we would love if you did, because we really appreciate building this thing with you.
Please go like, subscribe, rate, comment on this.
We're building an audience and you have helped out so much and we appreciate it.
In the meantime, hopefully there's not going to be an emergency episode between now and when the next one comes out on Friday.
Cross your fingers.
Knock on wood.
Do what you have to do.
Federal troops are going all over the place and Donald Trump is getting desperate.
If you want to follow Nick in the meantime, he's at canyouhearmesmh.
