Co-host Jared Yates Sexton comes in hot over the decline of the United States and its failure to contain the pandemic and continued insistence on settling for mediocrity. This leads to a discussion with Nick Hauselman about the many tiers of opportunists within the Republican Movement, including Christian fascists, middle-managers, and Trumpists looking to recapture a mythical moment in the country's history.
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We're talking about people who are physical specimens, who are really super young people.
Young people that age, without a comorbidity, have virtually zero risk from this.
We have to, again, become rational here.
The risk for people that age is less than seasonal influenza.
What's wrong about America today all has to do with the institutions we have and we have to tear them down.
And they're interested in complete political victory.
They're not interested in compromise.
They're not interested in dialectic exchange of views.
It's a secular religion.
It's a substitute for a religion.
They view their political opponents as evil because we stand in the way of their progressive utopia that they're trying to reach.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I am Nick Hausleman, and as always, I'm joined by my co-host, Jared Yates Sexton.
Again, we have to thank you for what's going on over on Patreon, because we're offering some really exclusive content there, and tons of people are signing up.
And I just want to stress this right off the bat.
It's a great way to interact with us on commenting on the posts because we can get back to you directly.
And finally, because there isn't a way to do this with a normal podcast, we finally have a way to just discuss things and respond right to you guys if you're a patron on Patreon.
So, again, visit patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast and check out the different tiers and sign up because it's really great stuff.
We did it.
We did Jaws last week, which was amazing.
People loved it.
And we'll continue to do more movies that are related to the social issues we're dealing with today, and all sorts of other things like Q&As with you guys, where we can answer your questions directly and only get the answers if you are a Patreon.
With that in mind, I'm going to turn it over to Jared because he's coming in hot.
I think he's got some things to say, get some things off his chest.
Jared, talk to me.
What can I help you with?
Hey, I'm so glad you started off with something good, because I'll be honest, I'm pissed off, Nick.
I'm pissed off, is what I am.
And I'm just gonna warn everybody up front, I am coming in hot.
If you have some kids in the car, you know, maybe put some earmuffs on.
I had to travel this weekend.
I went and I did this I can't get into the details of it, but I did a really cool project, like a talking head thing that I'm hoping people will get to see here pretty soon.
So I'm pretty excited about that.
But in order to do this thing, I had to drive.
I had to, you know, drive across a few states.
And, you know, like most people, I've kept a pretty low profile during the pandemic, and I was driving.
And I have to tell you, it was really disturbing.
It was really gross.
Driving through America and seeing all of the dumb bullshit.
You know what I mean?
Like, the stuff that we just sort of took for granted for a long time and we just sort of thought was our lives.
Like, theme parks and, you know, just, like, dumb signs for dumb businesses and just the straight vapidity, right?
And, meanwhile, so I, you know, I was trying to be careful and I was stopping at, like, gas stations and stuff and, like, I didn't want to go inside.
Meanwhile, my fellow Americans, my fellow citizens, are, like, putting themselves and their loved ones and the rest of society at risk to go into, like, terrible Subway gas station restaurants, right?
And eat just terrible Subway sandwiches and just sit around, like, eating the worst food And going into the worst places.
There goes our Subway sponsorship.
Yeah, Subway can go to hell.
I'll just say that.
Subway can straight go to hell.
And so, like, I'm driving around and I'm doing this, and it just really, it doesn't just piss me off, Nick.
It makes me sad.
That America, this country that is supposedly the most powerful, most wonderful country in the world, is not only, I mean, what are we at?
We're at 164?
We have to remember that's not the accurate number, right?
That's not the actual number.
It's probably 10% higher, something along those lines.
More, but yes.
I think it's closer to 200 total.
So we're in the middle of this terrible pandemic that the President of the United States, who by the way held a press conference at his private golf club, where all of his drunken, two of them, his drunken, sunburned, idiot club members You clapped at everything he said, like a bunch of morons, like a bunch of drunk assholes.
And as he just lied.
Just lied.
And he called the Democratic Party, not his party.
And I'm like driving, you know, up the coast listening to this bullshit.
And I'm listening to America just like break under its own weight.
And then today, and by the way, this isn't a sports podcast.
My wonderful co-host here, Nick, who is a sports superstar, gets enough of his sports talk in the rest of his life.
This isn't a sports podcast.
But meanwhile, today, on Monday, we started hearing that the big conferences in college athletics have come to the realization that they cannot play football.
Because they're going to kill their athletes.
Who, by the way, don't get paid.
Right?
These are unpaid athletes.
And meanwhile, Donald Trump, who, you know, is just an absolute moron, tweets out, play college football.
Well, get your dumb ass out there and play college football, right?
And waddle your dumb ass out onto the field.
Jim Jordan, America needs college football.
No, you know what America needs?
It needs an investigation on how you helped with sexual assault, is what it needs, all right?
So, I sit here, and I tweeted about this a little bit ago.
How disgusting is it, how many Americans That they feel that possibly losing college football is a bigger tragedy than losing 160,000 Americans.
That they feel like their inconvenience not being able to go out and tailgate and, you know, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on RVs and dumb portable grills and go out with their friends to Buffalo Wild Wings and choke on bones.
Like, these people truly believe that they are the victims of a pandemic because their leisure, is under attack.
It pisses me off.
You're sitting in your ivory-clad, institutionalized tower of academia, just looking down your nose at these people, sneering at them at their Buffalo Wild Wings.
Wild Wings?
Time Out.
Whatever they're called.
Wild Wings.
Time Out.
I would love to go to a Buffalo Wild Wings right now.
I would love to go to a college football game.
I love college sports.
College basketball is one of my favorite sports in the entire world.
I would love to go to Buffalo Wild Wings and get a big, giant, cold beer.
And just, as an American, drink that beer way too fast.
And eat way too many wings.
I would love to do that.
But do you know why I can't?
Because of these dumbasses.
You know what I mean?
We could have stopped this thing.
We could have saved tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives.
But our dumbasses couldn't get over this stuff.
I'm irate today.
What I find amazing is that we live on completely separate lives.
I'm on completely opposite sides of the country, and yet, as I mull over my thoughts in between podcasts, and I'm trying to decide, well, what could we talk about, what we should talk about, it's exactly this, which is so interesting that you came in hot as well, because it was exactly what I was thinking of, without even peeking at your Twitter timeline.
Which is filled with all sorts of this discussion, too.
But I started to try and think, you know, as we always do with the historical context.
And I was musing about the idea, have we ever, as a country, been in a situation where we truly cared about our fellow man and woman?
Where we fully were really willing to sacrifice?
And I'm talking about, like, can we go back to the 1800s?
Because remember, the Spanish flu had a huge contingency of people who were anti-mask.
The same exact people who are now, you know, flooding the beaches and flooding wild ways and flooding all these places.
So it's like, it's a hundred years we've been this way and in this American experiment that you referenced.
I think, I don't know if we have to, when we have to go back to find it.
Is there a slight pocket a couple months after 9-11 that we had that?
And then we went right back to cutting everybody off on those roads with the way we drive and, you know, all those kind of things.
I don't know.
What do you think?
Well, I mean, okay, so like, in the mythological 9-11 that existed, right?
We all got in the streets and sang God Bless America and waved flags and, I don't know, we got all misty-eyed over George W. Bush standing at Ground Zero.
But no, we were out harassing Muslim Americans.
And not just Muslim Americans, people who maybe looked like Muslim Americans, right?
People with darker skin.
We were out harassing them.
There were hate crimes.
And then it's like, Oh, well, maybe around World War Two.
And it's like, yeah, we mobilized and we went out and fought a war.
But you know, we also, that's right, we threw like thousands of Asian Americans into a camp, you know, or multiple camps and killed them and took their things.
And you look at this, this truth, which is that America just continues to make these mistakes.
We do not learn.
And by the way, that's part of the American privilege, right?
We don't have to learn from our mistakes.
And we look around now, and this is the thing that pisses me off the most.
This country's failing.
Like it truly is.
This country is failing as a state.
And it doesn't have to.
And I keep trying to tell people this.
I understand that we're in the doldrums of summer.
It is hot.
We are suffering through the coronavirus unnecessarily.
The president is just melting down in real time.
I don't know if you got a chance to watch these press conferences.
That dude's done well.
Yeah, like the president of the United States is not a well human being.
So I understand that it's like a really shitty time and it feels very, very dangerous.
And also, by the way, we got to talk about this.
We have a cabal of crooks around Trump who are trying to destroy the rule of law and create a theocratic authoritarianship.
But it doesn't have to be like this.
We can live in a better country.
We can be better people.
We can choose to be better.
And we keep letting that mythology that you just brought up, that fake history, that fake idea of American exceptionalism, we keep letting that cut us off at the knees.
And it keeps us from getting past the pandemic.
It keeps us from uniting.
It keeps us, and by the way, you want to get selfish, keeps us from making better money.
Right?
It keeps us from living longer lives.
It keeps us from being healthier.
And it pisses me off.
We can do better than this.
It's such, such a low bar to do better than this.
Right.
And so it's this need, like you mentioned, I must be able to be a consumer.
I think the root of this thing is consumerism.
It's consumerism.
Which equates to freedom and capitalism, really.
But it's consumerism.
You got mad at me the other day on our podcast because I ended it with sort of the same idea.
This is now the 10th or 15th generation of consumerism since we started, or whatever it is.
And it's like, what are we doing?
I'm just raising my kids to be consumers.
Is that really what we're all about now?
And that it really is, you know, an existential crisis for me?
Probably for a lot of people.
You know, my parents were children of immigrants.
So their whole story is they moved to this country from horrible conditions and you're going to have a better life than me.
Well, you know, my parents have had that better life.
What am I now supposed to do with that?
And then now what are my kids supposed to do with that after having, you know, that American dream had been kind of fulfilled?
This is where we're at.
And my story is the story of millions of people now across the country, not just my generation, but a little older and even younger.
So, you know, what does it really mean when we're talking about this, this, this dedication to consumerism versus anything else?
Well, so let's talk about these jumping off points, and let's start with World War I, and then we'll go to the post-World War II era, right?
So, post-World War I, Woodrow Wilson created this movement in the country to try and basically rebrand America, right?
And make it a world power and the champion of democracy.
And to do that, he basically created modern propaganda.
He brought in a bunch of marketing people, and they just sold America as a product.
So, by the end of the war, they had not only rebranded America on the international stage, but these people were ready to go out and rebrand consumerism, right?
And all of a sudden, everyone could go out and buy things, and the idea of the individual started to really foam it, right?
That you and I can play a different character based on the clothes that we wear.
And by the way, one of the things that We have to recognize, and I'm sure that you and I feel this way, we're a couple smart dudes.
I assume that like, you know, we see a commercial and we're like, ah, commercials don't work on me.
I'm an individual.
I'm a character.
You're a character.
All of our listeners are characters, and as we're going out into the world, the things that we wear, the things we do, the things that we project out, like on social media, what we say we like, what we say we enjoy, we're telling a story about ourselves, right?
Which is a side effect of consumerism, right?
We have to be able to work through that stuff and find who we actually are.
Post-World War II, and I want to point out, so we are the winners of two massive wars.
The idea is, after you win a war, you should be able to shape the world.
Right?
You should be able to, like, make it better and come up with something truer and realer.
They were like, ah, we got all these factories churning out warplanes.
Let's send out gadgets!
Let's send out refrigerators and stoves and microwaves and all this bullshit.
And so America forfeits all of its winnings and stakes in order to have a consumerist culture.
People right now are continuing a pandemic to go to TGI Fridays.
They're saying, how dare you try and keep me from Fuddruckers?
Well, I'm going to Long John Silvers!
You deserve better!
Like, this life that you have, the way that it feels, the way that you're being exploited by your employer, if you have an employer anymore, by the way, if you haven't been laid off and fired and thrown on the grist of this bullshit, like, you deserve better.
We can have better lives.
You have to stop Accepting these scraps.
Because they're not even... like austerity is scraps.
And that's why it feels so bad.
It can feel better, but we have to reject it.
Right.
Well, it ties right into Jimmy Carter's speech about malaise, because when you identify it in an effort to just provide some reality to the situation, that is like saying, death to America.
It's kind of what really hurt him politically for that, which is ridiculous.
Do you want to tell listeners that that is going to be the hub around our feature-length multi-part audio documentary.
Do you want to go ahead and break that news?
That's an exclusive?
Yes, on our Patreon.
We're going to, we're planning on doing a multi-part mini-documentary on the Malay speech that Jimmy Carter gave in 79... 79?
Shit.
Right, which by the way has been shit on by every pundit as like one of the worst speeches in American history.
And if you actually go and listen to it, it is profound.
It's a prophetic speech.
So yeah, that's going to be the subject, and it's going to go from, it's going to be the hub.
We're going to get Nixon in there, of course.
We're going to get Carter in there, Reagan, Bush, right into the thing.
We want to create this feature-length audio documentary that explains, it's like an omnibus, right?
That explains How we got to the place that we are, and that's one of the reasons why we've opened up the Patreon over at patreon.com.muckrakepodcast is that Malay speech, for sure.
Every sentence he utters can take us into a direction that directly relates to today and in the past.
But you know what the downfall of America is, I think I've discovered?
I think it's the laugh track.
Wow!
- The mention of the laugh track is the beginning of the downfall of America.
You know what's funny, because when you start talking about consumerism and all the evils of those things, and you start thinking about the 80s and the dawn of Reaganism and how that really took hold, I think of the movie Time Bandits.
And if you remember that movie, the kid is sort of peeking in at his parents to see where they are, and they're watching the TV, and it's a horrible game show, and it's like, it's hell.
It's hell would be stuck having to listen to a game show with a cheesy host and that laugh track going on and on in the background, and then people trying to win.
You know, the washing machines and the microwaves and all those things that you mentioned.
That is sort of, in some brilliant imagery that Terry Gilliam provided us, sort of stands for all that stuff.
I mean, I walk into the big box stores like Costco and I look around and say, this is why Muslim extremists want to kill us.
I really had that thought whenever I walk into those huge stock stores and you see millions upon millions of items you can buy at whatever you want at any time.
That's how I feel.
Well, actually, so it's funny you mention that.
Like, one of the founding ideologies of the group that would eventually become Al Qaeda, even though that was sort of like a fake name of a fake threat that the Bush administration used.
Antifa.
Yeah, this idea, the kernel of it, starts with people who were in America who saw America and they were like, this is just senseless.
You know what I mean?
It's just, it's a gross, consumerist culture.
And what you bring up here is interesting because, again, I was driving across the country this weekend for this project, and I have satellite radio, and I kind of love satellite radio.
I kind of like being able to drop in and find songs that I hadn't even thought about for forever.
And I turned on the 1990s station for a second, and have you listened to any music from the 90s lately?
You know, my daughter somehow got into Spin Doctors by accident and I was just genuinely mentioning it.
There it is!
Actually, it was a Spin Doctors song that made me think about this.
So I heard it.
It sounds like it's being beamed in from a completely different reality.
You know what I mean?
Because it's like, if you listen to something from the 1990s, or if you watch something from the 1990s, It's so infected with Ida.
And by the way, there's a part of it that's like Gen X malaise, which is like rolling of the eyes and being like, I hate this.
Right.
But then there's another part that's so fancy free.
The party will never end.
This is a Dayglo Clinton-esque fantasy.
Everything's great.
Everything's always going to be great.
Oh, this party will never stop.
And you hear it.
And you're in the middle of what definitely feels like the decline of the American empire, and you just want to send a message in a bottle that says, wake up, man.
Like, this thing is going to come to a massive crashing halt, right?
And obviously it does.
In like 2007, when the housing market crashes, and we suddenly have to deal with all of our checks coming due all at once, and American hegemony absolutely falls apart, and the empire starts crumbling under its own weight.
We are in the middle of a project that has reached its logical illogical conclusion.
And here's the thing, when the levy starts breaking or when the bridge or the infrastructure starts falling apart, you have to tear down the bridge or the infrastructure and rebuild it.
That's what we have to recognize is that this is a moment of crisis and crisis breeds opportunity.
But if we keep trying to drive over that bridge, We're going to end up in the drink, man.
And there's just no other way to look at it.
This is a project that is failing and we have to hit the brakes and we have to figure out something different.
First things first, Friends was filmed from a live studio audience.
So let's not say the downfall of the 90s.
They actually didn't have a laugh track.
But let's examine the notion of having to tear down that bridge.
Oh, yes?
Real fast, when's the last time you saw Friends?
You know, I'm watching How I Met Your Mother right now, which is like basically Friends 10 years later.
Which is different!
But it's like that generation's version of Friends, I suppose.
But I have not watched Friends in a while.
Do you know anybody right now who lives in New York and rents an apartment?
No.
Okay.
To watch Friends now with these big, giant, loft, luxury apartments, which by the way now would cost Multi-millions, right?
I mean, like, there's no way that the Friends could afford the apartments that they live in, and they live these sort of fancy free lives, and yeah, there's sort of like love triangles, and maybe Joey didn't get the part that he wanted, you know, or they got a... I wasn't ever a Friends person.
But if you watch that, It also feels like it's from a completely different reality.
We now have, I want to say, I don't know if you saw this article, it's like 40% of Americans right now are facing possible eviction.
Yeah.
And that's not even New York, right?
That's just around the country.
And like, we live at the moment where hyper capitalism, and we talk about this all the time, Hypercapitalism isn't like trying to get your part of like a river.
It's damming up the river, right?
And eventually you dam up the river so much that the river just doesn't flow anymore.
And it backs up to the point where disaster is imminent.
We're at a point where disaster is imminent.
And something like a Friends or something like that 1990s culture shows that, yeah, the living seemed like it was really, really good, but the living was not.
Permanent.
Like, we were always going to come to this end of the project.
And listen, I talk to people now who are in their mid-20s, and I do feel really bad for them because their entire lives are shaped around either 9-11, the housing collapse, or now.
And it's like, think about that.
There's no notion of a time where we had... I graduated college in 1994.
I had the whole 90s in front of me, and it was very prosperous.
We felt like we were getting somewhere.
There was peace across the world, basically.
And so it's gonna have a...
Long term, just when we talk about how COVID is going to have a profound effect on these kids who are not getting the social interactions they would normally get and develop that way.
Right.
By the way, look at it for sports, too.
Like, you know, you're going to have basketball players who don't work out and work on their games for a year.
The effect of what that had on the people who are now in their mid 20s and like, you know, maybe even late 20s and 30s is extremely profound because all they know is debt.
You know, all they know is catastrophes.
So, it's so funny you bring that up.
Because we kind of talk about American history and politics as if it's just sort of a black and white thing that happens, and then later on something else happens, and you know, A, B, C, D, or whatever.
We don't talk about what you just brought up, which is the actual traumatic effect On Americans, right?
So like, um, just just a little bit of information on me.
I come from like an extremely impoverished background, right?
And not just impoverished, but also like a dysfunctional sort of a background.
I think of myself as pretty well adjusted.
I think I've done okay.
It wasn't until I got in my 30s that I started learning about things like survivor's guilt.
Or, you know, trauma from poverty, or the fact that there are like these physical effects of trauma that like affect your health and affect everything from your ability to be successful, to carry out relationships, all this stuff.
We have a population right now that is undergoing, I don't know about you, you seem well.
You strike me as you feel okay today.
Today for me, there's an up and a down with the pandemic, right?
Today was down for me, man.
I felt brittle.
I felt glass brittle today.
I was not just pissed off, but I just felt like a small breeze would hit, and I would just fall off a shelf and break like a glass menagerie.
You know?
That was it.
And the point is, we're all going through that.
And we're going through it because we have people in charge who aren't taking care of us the way that they need to take care of us.
Look, we are all being exposed to massive amounts of trauma that will affect us for the rest of our lives.
Scientists tell us our lives will probably now be shorter, not just because of COVID, but because we're going through this thing.
We'll probably all make less money.
I assume all of our retirements have taken a hit in some way, shape, or form.
Well, that's not necessarily the case.
We could do a whole series of podcasts about how the market is completely manipulated.
It doesn't follow reality.
You know, it's crazy.
So maybe.
But eventually it's going to go down and stay down.
I have a feeling the way this is going.
Oh, and it's all going to destroy us.
And that's the thing.
It's like that disconnect between the higher up and the elites and the powerful and the rest of us.
And we have to suffer because of their bullshit.
And this is what we've seen with the economy.
Like, the economy crashes all the time.
Who takes it?
It's us.
We always are the ones who take a bath in it.
And these other people get bailed out and they continue on, they're totally fine, like Donald Trump with God knows how many bankruptcies and massive failures.
They're fine.
It's the rest of us that take a bath.
And you're exactly right.
There's like there is a cumulative effect of that.
So the other thing that you mentioned earlier about the notion of how the levy is going to break, the bridges are going to fall apart and you just simply must tear that down and rebuild it.
Well, if you think about that as an economic impact, those are like a lot of jobs and long-term projects that would employ a lot of people and actually improve the economy.
So we've been waiting for infrastructure week, right, for four years.
It's the biggest joke of all time.
And meanwhile, the president comes on in these press conferences in the last couple of times.
He kind of comes out with this bullshit of executive orders that actually don't do anything.
So you mentioned how many people are at risk of being evicted coming up in the next few months.
And so he pretends like he did an executive order that's going to protect them when in fact it just sort of gives, it just sort of passes the buck down the line with the language he used.
They're not, there's no real binding.
These are memos.
These are not executive orders.
And which by the way, Johnny three putt, who is about five or six Johnny Walker's deep in his afternoon, he's like, "Bah, great, Mr. Presby, and I ain't my guy." And meanwhile, he's like, "Oh, I'm given a payroll tax." Well, what's that effect, Nick?
That affects social security.
It affects social security.
And then he's like, well, Democrats don't want to help people.
You're exactly right.
It's not real.
That's even worse, because remember, it's not a payroll tax cut.
It's a deferral until the end of the year where you're going to have to pay anyway, but guess what?
He then floats out there and says, well, if I get elected again, Then maybe I'll make that tax cut permanent.
Which, by the way, again, will devastate Social Security and Medicaid, but it sounds like, oh, we're going to help all you guys out only if you elect me.
And again, this is not what he has control over the way the Constitution was written.
And yet, the people that pride themselves on not wearing masks, because they're not going to listen to people, I'm my own person, I have my own ideas.
Follow this fucker to the, off the edge of the cliff, into the water, back through into hell, and then back up on the cliff again.
That's how far they follow this guy.
And by the way, you're talking, and I want to make this clear, because we started out talking about American vapidity and shallowness, right?
You're talking about the Trump supporters who are like the cultists, who are like in my hometown, right?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I think you're talking about Republicans.
Oh, I want to talk about the other group.
The ones who are at the Bedminster Golf Club, right?
Johnny Three Putt, or, you know, the guy over here.
And here's the thing.
I want to talk about these sycophants who are, like, leering during this entire press conference, and they're cheering at everything Trump says because they're drunk and they hate their families and they hate their lives.
These are middle managers at like a company that doesn't really help anybody, doesn't really build anything.
A couple of them maybe own a construction company.
They also hate their families.
They're cheering for a president who is probably ensuring that either their kid will get COVID and have permanent lung damage or their niece will get it and die.
And meanwhile, they're hanging out at their golf club because that's where they want to spend all their time.
They don't want to hang out with their family.
They don't want to have any actual joy in life.
And they are making... God, maybe they cleared a million dollars one year.
Maybe.
You know what I mean?
They're not making decisions.
They're not, you know, they're not running a party.
They're not like bigwigs.
They're middle managers.
These are the guys who could barely get a job at a Cracker Barrel if somebody got upset about their reservation.
You know what I'm talking about?
And these are the people who are willing to put on boots and march out in the street for these people.
And you have, meanwhile, you have Trump, you have Barr, you have Pompeo, you have McConnell, all these people who want to Basically, set off an explosion to destroy the American Empire and then sell the debris to the highest bidder.
Or the middle bidder, because none of this is about exceptionalism, right?
And these people are outside with maybe a Lexus that they can't afford, Nick.
Maybe they have a Lexus that they can't really afford, you know what I mean?
And they have a McMansion that the payments come in due here pretty soon.
And maybe they have a vacation home, who knows?
These people whose lives, they're so joyless.
They have to go to these things, and again they're like four or five Johnny Walkers in on this thing, and they're applauding like trained seals on a person who doesn't give a shit about them.
Donald Trump wouldn't spit on these people.
He would look at them and be like, you should take my courses over at Trump University.
That's what he would do!
He wouldn't, if they died, he wouldn't, he wouldn't spend a second mourning these people.
And it's those middle managers that have propped up the Republican Party and driven them into Trumpism.
Because they are white nationalists and supremacists, and they have led us into the abyss.
I just want to put the guilt where it belongs.
You know, that is all true.
I think what concerns me more, by the way, you're still hot.
I thought, you know, I'd have a calming influence on you.
I'm hot.
Listen, I spent way too many hours in a car by myself looking at you.
You know what I mean?
Just looking at it.
Well, I think the people that scare me the most, or frustrate me the most, or anger me the most, are the ones who can pay a little bit of lip service to some social issue or two.
Like, oh, you know, I don't mind if gay people get married.
You know, like maybe I want to drive a car that has a little bit better gas mileage, you know, like, you know, that kind of throw a bone.
But like, you know, then they'll completely and utterly ignore the things like separation of children at the border or complete mismanagement of the covid where people are dying, you know, and all in the name of.
Oh, look at all the judges he's getting and all the tax cuts that they were getting through.
The literal eradication of the rule of law.
Yes.
I mean, literally, the destruction and weaponization of the rule of law.
Yeah, sure, go ahead, that's fine.
Give me my tax cut.
And again, it's probably more of a consumerism thing.
That's their religion, that's their politics.
But those are the people that, you know, it's kind of like when Hamilton kept screaming in the show to Aaron Burr, who doesn't stand for anything.
And I kind of feel like you've got to stand for something and you can't just have a poo-poo platter or you don't get to choose a la carte what you like and what you don't like.
Not in this era.
You probably could have done that a long time ago.
But I just don't feel like you can stand idly by and just sort of not look at what they're doing, some of the atrocities that are going on, and violations of the Constitution.
Uh, in the name of, like, the couple things that you like that seem to make, you know, make more sense to you than, for instance, the Democrats.
The fundamental problem we have, the Republicans have forgotten that the point of democracy is to represent the will of the people and the plurality of the will, the plurality of the people.
So they don't care that most people in America want sensible gun laws, right?
They don't care that most people want laws protecting the environment.
You know what I mean?
And that's really where they've, I think, lost their way.
Probably the root of this is that they don't seem to, they're not governing in the way democracy is supposed to be governed.
And that's so frustrating to me.
Nick, really fast, because our podcast is devoted to not just talking beyond the headlines, but giving historical nuance.
Can you remind me which far-left liberal president it was who established the Environmental Protection Agency?
Who was that pinko comic?
Uh, it rhymes with, uh, RiNixon.
Wait, Richard Milhouse Nixon created the EPA?
That can't be true.
Okay, it's true.
But wait, who's the guy that invented the thing that protects workers in the workplace, like in factories?
What's that called?
OSHA.
Who invented, who signed that into the law?
No, that had to have been some sort of communist agent who had taken over the presidency.
Yeah, right.
I mean, you know, a guy who was probably just drinking it late at night and crying on people's shoulders, too.
But shit, Nixon did that, too!
No, there's no way.
That can't be right.
It cannot be possibly true that the Republican Party, up until the 1980s, cared about the welfare of human beings in some ways.
How is it possible?
You know why Nixon had to resign, right?
Because he actually had... Wait, did he get in trouble?
Because he actually had Republicans and Democrats telling him he had to do it.
That's the last time.
And by the way... And I want to point out, just to take what you just said, which is all these things that they flush down the toilet.
And I've been trying to explain this to people, and it's really hard.
Because we've been trained to believe in left and right.
We talk about this all the time, right?
Oh, the left!
Oh, the right!
No, the American right has gone so far right that they've drug the Overton window to the point where what we consider the left is actually the center, right?
Liberals and Democrats are arguing that trans people deserve to live.
They're arguing that people shouldn't be, you know, unnecessarily brutalized and murdered in the streets.
These aren't issues.
These are just common sense things.
We should be talking about what we do with the economy and how we manage it.
Those are the arguments we should be having, but instead we're having arguments about lunacy.
And the people you just brought up, so like these middle managers, the guy who maybe owns a small construction company, the guy who is, you know, underwater for his third house, but he also has a Lexus, and you know, he also has a gambling problem at the country club.
Do you know what?
That guy gets screwed by the Republican Party too.
Because the Republican Party helps the giant corporate monoliths who will never let that guy grow his business into a challenger.
He gets screwed as well.
He actually gets pushed down.
But you know what he does?
He settles.
He settles for what he has.
Which is what Americans keep getting told.
And by the way, it's not a coincidence.
That we're having a crackdown in places like Portland, or you know around the country with the shock troops are going in.
They're not going in necessarily to suppress uprisings, right?
It wasn't like Portland was going to take over the country.
It wasn't like Antifa was going to march through the streets.
They do it to crack skulls, so when you and I are like, this isn't right, the first thought we have is, do I want to end up bloody in the streets?
Right?
I should accept what I have.
I should accept that pie.
I was making fun of Fuddruckers and Subway and TGIF and all these vapid American products.
They want me to sit here and be like, well, at least I have Subway.
Yeah.
At least I can go to Fuddruckers.
And that is supposed to be the pinnacle of human experience as opposed to working towards something real and human and lasting.
Let me give you an example of what you just described.
A woman buys a can of paint at a paint store in Utah.
Subsequently, there's a protest against some Utah police who killed a kid, and the paint is spilled.
The woman is now being charged as a terrorist, as part of a gang, because she was more than one or two people in a crowd that broke the law, and she's facing life in prison because she bought the paint.
Now, if you don't think that that's more examples of them trying to... Oh, and by the way, they were protesting the Attorney General, who is now suggesting that as the term of her punishment.
It's insane.
But here's the other thing is, this notion of settling that you said, is sort of what's happening in the way that we want to punish the wrongdoings of politicians since Watergate.
And as I was doing some research this before we started the pod, you know, what's the biggest frustration for me, I think, in the 80s was that Iran-Contra was not prosecuted properly.
And you can argue that because nobody, you know, there was a lot of parties at the end.
We'll get to that, how that all happened in a second.
But you can argue that because that didn't get prosecuted properly, it sort of invites all the corruption that we're dealing with now.
I think it's a pretty decent argument.
So, what you realize is that when you study the older articles from back then and why they didn't do it, there was a little bit of a political will that said, you know what, we already dealt with Watergate, we don't want to get dragged back into another one of these things.
Reagan, he seems like a nice guy, so let's not, like, drag him back into all this stuff.
Yeah!
He hands out jellybeans to people!
I mean, yeah, his brain is mush, but he hands out jellybeans, Nick!
And by the way, we know his brain is mush medically.
We diagnosed him, it was earlier than we thought.
So when he, with a straight face, tells us on national television that what he believed was true, you can fill it in exactly what he said, but basically it was like...
I know that what I said wasn't true.
When I told you, I believed it was true.
I still believe it's true.
He's worse than Trump at that point.
So now it's my turn to be hot because of the failures of them.
By the way, you can argue that we failed to prosecute Nixon when we did because he got pardoned.
So it just encourages this kind of stuff.
And if you continue to follow along the lines of how this continues to grow, just like consumerism continues to morph and meld into other things after generation upon generation, so does the corruption in politics.
And this is where we are.
And the reason why we're here, part of it is because of William Barr.
What the fuck?
So my daughter's been ringing my phone knowing I'm recording a podcast.
And then still, what is she saying?
Let me go open the door for her.
Hang on.
I'll let her keep the phone.
Okay.
I don't believe I'm doing this.
It's cute actually.
It's really cute.
Oh!
Thank you.
I suppose being at the beach is just such a terrible thing.
We can't stay at the beach for too long.
Anyway, we are lucky.
We live literally, our house is like half a block from the beach.
It's amazing.
Okay.
Are we still here?
Yeah, okay.
So I saw the bar, I was about to get to the bar.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
In Iran-Contra.
So you can cut into that right before that point.
Okay, yeah, and then I'll do that and you can bring it around.
Okay.
But that's the point is with Nixon particularly and the fact that he wasn't prosecuted, he becomes the bar, right?
It ends up in a thing where it's like, well, the president can be corrupt as long as he doesn't reach Nixon levels.
Right.
And then all of a sudden Trump comes along with a pole vault and he's like, well, I guess we're going here.
And it's just going to keep going and going and going because it's open season.
It's obvious that you can get away with any crime that you can get away with as president.
That is the precedent that we've seen in modern history.
Right.
And the reason why they've been able to do that is because it's the same freaking guy who's doing it.
William Barr, first off, was part of the Iran Contra and helped them get off and then recommended the pardons that wiped that whole thing clean.
And it's fascinating because when you hear him describe what issues he had with that case, it sounds exactly like what he says now.
Wait, but Nick.
Yeah?
But Nick, Jesus... Jesus what?
That is Bill Barr's only actual concern, is the carrying out of a theocratic regime.
He doesn't care what laws get broken, because if they're broken in the name of God, then they should be broken.
Tell me this sounds familiar.
This is from 1992.
quote, "People in the Iran-Contra affair "have been treated very unfairly." Does this sound familiar to you? - So unfairly. - People in this Iran-Contra matter have been prosecuted for the kind of conduct that would not have been considered criminal or prosecutable by the Justice Department, and it probably means in the past.
So what he's trying to say is, who are these people that are actually trying to enforce the Constitution?
Whereas, for all these years, we've gotten away with it.
Look how Nixon was able to get away with it and then get to get his pardon that way.
That was basically what he's arguing, and it's what he's arguing now.
It's not that it's not a crime, it's just that no one would have bothered to prosecute these things in the past.
And that is what becomes so cynical and so horrible because You add to that, and the imperial presidency, which is basically what he's describing, to the fact that he's some sort of Judeo-Christian warrior zealot, that's what makes it frightening to me.
And I'm still not even sure why it's completely frightening, which is why I'm glad I'm talking to you, because you're going to help me coalesce this into some vapor of something.
Because he's calling for a return to the idea of consensus.
And what people need to understand is that Make America Great Again is not just a fantasy, right?
But it's a weaponized fantasy.
It's the idea that there was a point in America where everybody just sort of agreed and we were all on the same team, going back to what you were talking about, right?
And everybody thinks about that being the 1950s.
Well, I'll tell you what, most white people were on the same team.
Democrats and Republicans pretty much agreed on everything because everyone was making money left and right and they were very, very powerful.
Do you know who wasn't necessarily on the same team?
People of color, women, LGBTQ Americans, people who didn't conform within that Judeo-Christian white lifestyle and pursuit of power.
They want to get back to that.
And what Bill Barr keeps saying when he says, oh, it's a secular religion and they're trying to find power or destabilize the system, they're trying to suppress anyone who doesn't agree with the white patriarchal, white identity Christian system of power.
Make America Great Again is a call to return America to a place where people are afraid to speak up and they're afraid to be different.
And that's exactly what he's talking about.
If you speak out against Trump right now, And you speak out against white patriarchal power?
That makes you a terrorist.
And by the way, I assume you remember this, that took place post 9-11 as well.
When all of a sudden it was like, if you criticized Bush, if you criticized the government, if you criticized America, you were a traitor.
Maybe you were a terrorist.
Maybe the FBI and the Patriot Act meant that they should investigate you and your civil liberties.
They were negotiable.
Right?
That is malleable law and that's what leads to fascism.
Or if you question whether we should go into Iraq based on the 9-11, you're not a patriot.
Wait, wait, wait.
You ain't into going to Iraq, Nick?
Yeah, right.
Well, forget Afghanistan.
We don't have to finish there, do we?
No, I mean, by the way, just to bring this thing full circle because, you know, I love talking about this.
The reason we're in this situation is because these people orchestrated illegal wars that used all of our resources and all of our power, all of our political capital, and they were wrong.
They weren't just wrong, they were spectacularly and tragically wrong.
They used up everything that could have led to a better world, and they used it up for bullshit.
And now these people are like, oh, why are you complaining?
Take what you get.
Eat your slop.
Take your scraps.
The world can't be better.
Fight over this.
And it's also the lack of punishment for being part of such a corrupt administration.
So, for instance, the Nixon administration had guys like Dick Cheney.
And Donald Rumsfeld.
And they get to come back, the corpses of their zombie versions come back, and then create more atrocities.
And it's exactly what's going to happen now if they don't properly punish Trump.
And every single person, like McConnell, who's enabled him in bars, needs to be disbarred and never be... I mean, he's already too old anyway to probably practice law much.
But that is what's scary.
Now again, the Attorney General of the United States gets to decide what they want to emphasize as far as prosecuting crimes.
So, he starts to reference things like nuclear family.
Like, I've heard him say that recently.
So, you know, if you don't think that's a little signal to, like, maybe outlaw gay marriage, you know, across the country, like, that's the kind of thing where they would go back and start rewriting the laws and getting rid of these things, especially if Trump won a second term.
Now, would Trump give a crap?
He's probably got lots of friends who are gay who are married.
Oh, he doesn't care!
Right.
He doesn't care.
And he would not give a crap.
He'd just be like, oh, don't worry, it won't happen to you.
Yeah, go ahead!
Fine, do it!
Yeah, and so this is where we're going towards, and why I think the next, you know, 80 days or whatever we have until the election are so fraught with every kind of anxiety you can imagine is because the notion of him being able to win, and also we haven't even mentioned the fact that what they're going to do with the post office to eliminate votes from getting to the vote boxes.
I mean, they're now trying to pass laws where you can only have one drop-off ballot, you know, kiosk per county.
Where you might have a million people in a county in Pennsylvania and they're not going to have more than one of those things to vote.
I can't even begin to imagine how that's going to affect things.
But the bottom line on that one is that what it means is that they're simply overtly trying to suppress the vote.
And I don't think it's going to, you can't show these things to Trump supporters and convince them that that's what's happening.
But, which is another whole frustrating conversation we can have, but that's what's going on and they don't have to even hide it anymore.
And it's like, where are we?
And is there the hope that we can overwhelm the system and there's no way they can affect the actual election?
So what you just brought up, and we have to connect these things because it's essential, right?
We talk about this all the time on the podcast.
There are different games going on all at once.
There's no silver bullet explanation for all this stuff.
It's way more complicated than that.
Trump's doing his thing.
Trump wants to just make corruption the rule of America, right?
He wants to turn America into a one-stop shop of corruption and profit and power.
That's what he's into.
Meanwhile, people like Bill Barr are interested in this theocratic authoritarian state.
What you just said is exactly right.
It's not even an exaggeration.
People say, oh, we're talking about like the Handmaid's Tale.
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what we're talking about, but without sort of like that old sort of homespun type stuff.
Because here's what you need to understand.
All of this power works on different levels.
This bullshit of, like, Fuddruckers and TGIFs, the things that I'm talking about, like the dumb American spectacle stuff, right?
They want to give that to us while they're living wonderful lives of wealth and power, right?
All they're interested in is that the rule of law and politics runs through the white identity Christian idea of power, right?
That means no gay marriage, that means that women don't have rights, or maybe they have the veneer of rights, but they don't have real rights, right?
Because this is about... They're not going to make enough money to have real rights.
Right, right.
Maybe some of them can have jobs, particularly the middle class.
And actually, it would probably be working class, lower class women and women of color.
Those would be the ones who have jobs because they would be servers, right?
But the middle class, they would buy off a lot of white women by saying, oh, here's your life of privilege.
You also get privilege, right?
And meanwhile, you have like this extra level of all these aristocratic assholes.
Who just like, you know, they basically are Scrooge McDucks diving in their vaults of gold coins.
And what they do, they'll let us have all the slop.
They'll make us settle for everything.
And they'll roll back gay marriage.
They'll roll back abortion.
Which, they don't care about any of this stuff.
They don't actually care about whether or not people get married.
Some of them will say, well, Christ will never come back if they can't.
They care about control.
The Christian religion in this way, for people like Bill Barr, has been perverted into a cudgel for control.
So that's what he wants, and that's what's at stake.
Because if it was just Donald Trump, they wouldn't give a shit about the 2020 election.
If it was just some sort of, you know, bullshit reality TV president who wasn't, you know, they know he's not well.
They wouldn't care about that.
This is about finishing the project.
This is about realizing that you can raise up a faux-populistic, white, nationalistic, fascistic movement In order to have all the power.
It's all that ships into the table.
So absolutely they're going to try and steal the election.
Trump will do it to try and avoid prosecution and humiliation.
People like Barr will do it because it's their life's work.
It's not even just Trump.
They've done this with W. Bush.
They did this with H.W.
Bush.
They did this with Reagan.
They've been doing this since the 1970s.
This is what they want to do.
And real fast, just to give people something if they want to look up on this stuff.
I posted a thread about this.
You need to get familiar with a guy named Francis Schaeffer.
Francis Schaeffer, who wrote a book called How Then Should We Live, it's all this idea that if we don't have a Christian theocracy, society will fall apart.
I don't know.
You'll have uprisings in places like Portland, BLM protests, and you have to suppress them and install theocratic rule, which is what people like Barr truly, honestly believe in.
And by the way, that same ideology applies to, like, Obamacare.
It's going to just destroy the country.
You know what I mean?
Gay marriage is going to literally... and they think the country will simply... will come back in a few years and the buildings will all be, like, falling over, like in... what was that Spielberg movie with Jude Law and the kid is a robot?
You know, that kind of thing.
AI.
Half of New York's underwater and it's completely falling apart.
That literally is, like, the image I think that they have.
And meanwhile, you know, we're talking about things like Obamacare that actually are now really under attack, and that they don't want to actually help people, you know, to not die.
It really is galling, and that's why this election is so important, because you're right, they will be able to do a lot more to get a lot closer to the endgame they want if they get four more years.
And it is complicated, because you're right, Trump's got, his reasons for wanting to win are completely different than what McConnell's would be or Graham's or Barr.
But that is what makes me so frustrated with guys like Barr is that they have the ability to turn these things into, you know, what would happen if he gets another term?
What could Barr then start doing?
You'll start to see the things you're talking about that would start leading on the path, I would believe, towards, you know, what the Handmaid's Tale is like.
It's scary.
And here is the thing, and I want to end it on a note of hope.
You need to hear this, because people have told you whether or not it's pundits, or anchors, or think piece authors, or politicians.
They'll talk about hope, they'll talk about coming together, you know, building a better America, or doing whatever.
I want our listeners to hear this, and I want you to hear this, and you know, this project we've been doing with the Muckrake Podcast, I've had so many good conversations with our listeners, and I believe that they are just Fundamentally good loving people.
It's really shocking how uplifting they are.
I want them to hear this.
You deserve better.
You do not deserve a world like this that is designed from the top down to exploit you and the people you love.
You do not have to clutch onto with fear what little you have.
This can be a better country.
You can live a better, more fulfilling human life.
It's within our grasp, but the first thing that we have to do is we have to understand that we deserve better.
And after you deserve it, get pissed off!
We should be pissed off!
This is a thing to be angry about.
They've done you wrong, and they've done the people you love wrong.
So get pissed off, get educated, and then get organized.
And when we get organized, these people... And by the way, Barr and Trump and McConnell and all of these assholes, the only way they win is if we don't come together.
They're very good at making sure that we don't come together.
That is their entire project.
They want to convince you not to vote.
They want to convince you that you don't have power and that you should never get with another person because you're in competition with that person.
Right?
You and that person are fighting over scraps.
And maybe they're of a different gender than you.
Maybe they're of a different faith system.
Maybe they're of a different color than you.
You can never trust each other because you're in competition.
And so you should vote for us.
We will at least give you scraps.
You deserve better.
I promise you.
But then, OK, we have to throw on top of that really quickly, you know, the notion of, like, Russia being involved in this election.
And then the false equivalency of, oh, well, China also wants to be involved just because they said publicly that they might prefer Biden.
Or Iran is also involved because they said publicly versus what's going on with Russia behind the scenes and manipulating.
And then you have someone like Barr who won't even say that it's inappropriate for candidates to accept foreign interference in an election.
So it's a lot of cards are being stacked on both sides and it's just crucial.
And so whatever motivates you to do to make it happen and get other people to see this, you know, if it's hate or if it's worry, anxiety or love of the country that you want it to be, whatever that is, fill that in and make it work.
Listen, I'm so glad that you said it that way and I just want to put this out there because I've been thinking about this a lot.
I have a lot of people who, you know, I have these like weekly talks where I drink bourbon on Sunday nights at 8pm and people are like, well what do we do?
What do we do?
And I think the closer that we get to this election and the more that it's apparent that Trump is more than willing to steal this election, and everyone around him is more than willing to steal this election, We need to pledge that if it's not a free and fair election, that there will be mass action.
We have to.
That's what the truth is.
And that doesn't mean that if Trump wins, it's not fair.
We cannot be like the Republicans, right?
Which is, if our guy loses, it's not a free and fair election.
We need to pledge that if it's not a free and fair election, that there will be mass action.
Because we'll never get away from this if we don't.
We just won't, Nick.
If you watch democracy in any shape and form, a democratic representative government, if it gets wiped off, we're done.
That's it.
So people need to be ready for that.
I keep telling them, you need to vote early on election day, that way you can be ready to be in the streets if need be.
It is an absolutely essential thing, and we need to start working towards that, and we need to start preparing for that.
All right.
So, on that note, I just want to say, as a note of hope, again, you deserve better and I've got to know you more, Nick has gotten to know you more.
We know that you deserve better.
We thank you so much for continuing to support this podcast.
Again, the Patreon thing has been so unbelievable and affirming and just...
It's really energized me and it's made me believe more and more in this community that we're building.
If you're interested in that, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
We had our first bonus episode where we talked about Jaws and Watergate and hyper capitalism and the corrosive effects of I thought it was pretty good.
I think people enjoyed it as well.
We're going to be doing a Q&A here pretty soon.
We're going to have some more exclusive stuff.
So if you want to be part of this, go on over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
In the meantime, we really need people to keep liking, subscribing, commenting, and tell people.
Tell people we're having conversations.
You're not hearing another podcast.
It's built up an audience already.
It's built up a lot of momentum.
Keep doing it.
In the meantime, if you need us, Nick is over at Can You Hear Me?
