Steve Bannon is indicted! Another Trump croney is caught in a grift, this time using a build the wall fundraiser to wet his beak. Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss this development, the mindset of greed and cruelty that unites Trump's cesspool, and prepare for the grotesque Republican National Convention. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| I think it's a very sad thing for Mr. Bannon. | |
| I think it's surprising. | |
| I thought that was a project that was being done for showboating reasons. | |
| I don't know that he was in charge. | |
| I didn't know any of the other people either. | |
| But it's sad. | |
| It's very sad. | |
| Welcome, everybody, to the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| I'm Jared Yates Saxton. | |
| As always, I'm here with my wonderful co-host, who I've been spending so much time with lately, and I'm not complaining. | |
| I'll be honest. | |
| I'm tired. | |
| I've had so much politics and so much stress over the past few days. | |
| It's been an absolute joy to hang out with my best bud, Nick Hausman. | |
| Hey, Jared, you know the best part also is that you can walk me through all the little intricacies of a Democratic National Convention, of which I've never really watched start to finish nuts and bolts the whole thing, so it's been really great to have you walk all of us through this, I'm sure. | |
| I have to tell you, for those of you who haven't been partaking, we've been live streaming and reacting and analyzing the Democratic National Convention every night, which means that we have been consuming two, two and a half hours of politics Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and tonight of course it's going to be Thursday. | |
| We're doing it again next week for the Republican National Convention. | |
| What a bunch of crazy people these people are. | |
| It's going to be absolutely ridiculous. | |
| It is going to be must-watch, not TV, but must-watch raging, I guess. | |
| And you can join us if you join on our Patreon and become a patron of the show. | |
| That is at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. | |
| That's all it takes. | |
| Join up. | |
| Come hang out with us. | |
| It's actually a really cool, great community. | |
| And thank God that we have it. | |
| And thank God that we have the support that we do from our listeners, because let me tell you something. | |
| American politics right now is, what's the technical term? | |
| It's batshit insane, is what it is right now. | |
| That's the medical term. | |
| I believe that's actually in the dictionary somewhere. | |
| But we have to start today. | |
| And there's a lot to lament and there's a lot to be angry about. | |
| I mean the President of the United States is embracing QAnon. | |
| The FBI printed the protocols of the Elders of Zion. | |
| The day before the President of the United States embraced QAnon and the day before the chief white supremacist and quote-unquote anti-globalist Steve Bannon was arrested for defrauding Trump supporters and by taking their money and supposedly spending it on building the wall, which no one ever intended to build in the first place. | |
| But he was arrested. | |
| He was indicted. | |
| What a day for America. | |
| We have to take the winds where we can get him, Nick. | |
| You know, someone tweeted that he got arrested by the post office, which I don't think is how that happens. | |
| But wouldn't that be delicious? | |
| It was a postal investigation, which is just a nice little piece of irony. | |
| The great thing about this is not only is this Trumpism defined, right? | |
| It's hiding behind a symbol of white supremacy, xenophobia, and the idea that any of these people are interested in building a wall. | |
| They bilked a bunch of Trump supporters out of their hard-earned money and then used it to buy boats. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Just line their pockets. | |
| It's Trumpism defined. | |
| You can't write the movie because it's too on the nose. | |
| You can't. | |
| You can't. | |
| It's like a course. | |
| The Coen brothers would look at this and they'd be like, no, there are too many comedic coincidences in this. | |
| We just can't get away with it. | |
| But we have to put this out there. | |
| It could not have happened to a worse human being. | |
| Really? | |
| To be perp-walked and treated like the criminal that he is? | |
| And here's the thing about Steve Bannon, and I keep trying to tell people because some people are like, well, they're all in it for the money. | |
| Well, they're all white supremacists. | |
| It's both. | |
| It's the synergy of the situation. | |
| And that is what's wrong with these people. | |
| The ones who actually have an ideology and actually have a mission, they're still trying to wet their beak as they're trying to create a white ethnostate. | |
| They're still trying to figure out a way to line their pockets as they're trying to make America white again. | |
| And, like, it's the conflagration of the two. | |
| It's where they meet is where Trumpism exists and where Trumpism was born. | |
| And let's not forget, because Trump is such a ridiculously horrible manager, this is who they can get. | |
| This is it. | |
| They can't hire anybody better than Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller, for that matter, or Paul Manafort. | |
| We mentioned that already in the podcast last time, but it's like this is the real big reason why you can't afford to have a guy like this lead a party. | |
| And yet there he is, and there these people are who are continually to support him and bash anybody who says anything bad about him. | |
| It really is disgusting. | |
| Do you think that the whole conception of this GoFundMe to build a wall is always to be – Do you think that there was a shred, a minute there where they're like, yeah, we're really going to do this? | |
| We're really going to build the wall. | |
| And the other thing is, do you think that they, in order to get legitimacy, they got Bannon to sign on and he was like, yeah, whatever. | |
| I like the wall. | |
| Yeah, I put my name on it. | |
| Right? | |
| Or do you think that this was really clear from the beginning? | |
| We're just going to do this so we can buy some boats. | |
| I've had Patreon on the mind because we launched for Patreon. | |
| I'm just imagining it being like, Steve Bannon is building walls. | |
| It's just like throw a couple of cents his way. | |
| No! | |
| The wall was never intended to be built. | |
| I'll tell you the honest truth. | |
| Not even for like 30 seconds. | |
| 30 seconds really? | |
| I will say this, and by the way, we do not give Donald Trump credit because he's a disgusting person. | |
| But I'm going to throw this out there. | |
| There's been more wall built than I ever expected there to be built. | |
| And it's only, you know, it's like two things. | |
| It's like they've all been knocked over by like a windstorm. | |
| Right. | |
| This entire thing, somebody said it at a meeting. | |
| They were like, maybe you should start telling everyone that you're going to build a southern wall. | |
| And Trump, being an absolute moron who repeats anything that somebody says to him, is like, I'm going to build a southern wall! | |
| And they were like, hot shit, that's like really good. | |
| That's going to get people riled up and they'll chant for it. | |
| No, I don't think anybody ever intended to build this thing. | |
| I really, truly don't. | |
| And if they ever did, it was about redistributing wealth. | |
| It wasn't about actually protecting the border, because it wouldn't work in the first place. | |
| It's completely unnecessary. | |
| But I think Bannon, I think you're right. | |
| They probably got him on in order to make it look legitimate. | |
| And they were like, don't worry, you're going to line your pockets with this thing. | |
| Oh, OK. | |
| And that has to be it, because he's probably too busy to deal with it or whatever. | |
| He's like, I don't know. | |
| But OK, I like the plan. | |
| I mean, I like the idea. | |
| And if you want to put my name on it here, yeah, I need X amount of money. | |
| And by the way, do you know what Steve Bannon's been doing? | |
| Like, really, what Steve Bannon's been doing? | |
| And this is besides looking like death warmed over. | |
| He's been growing his hair. | |
| He's been growing his hair. | |
| Oh, I can't wait to see him after he gets out of prison. | |
| You haven't seen his flowing locks? | |
| It's incredible. | |
| No, I want to see what happens to him after a few years in prison. | |
| And listen, by the way, I'm not under, and I don't think our listeners should be either, I'm not under any false impression that he's really going to, like, suffer the penalty for his crimes. | |
| We understand that. | |
| We are Charlie Brown and we have seen Lucy hold the football enough times. | |
| We understand how this plays out. | |
| It was just really nice to see him in a courtroom rendering. | |
| I'll just say that. | |
| What Steve Bannon has been up to, and again, this is the Rosetta Stone of Trumpism and the Trump movement. | |
| He's been going around the world creating neo-fascistic institutions and neo-fascistic organizations including colleges, academies, training grounds basically for like paramilitary groups and like the neo-fascist of the future. | |
| Now, when I say that to you, I tell you this. | |
| Of all of the people in Trump's orbit, Steve Bannon has an actual ideology. | |
| Right? | |
| It's white nationalism, white supremacy, and neo-fascism. | |
| He still couldn't help ripping the people off. | |
| He still, because he has a deficit of character, because they're all broken, terrible people. | |
| And by the way, he's rich. | |
| If you don't know it, Steve Bannon gets money from every episode of Seinfeld that airs. | |
| He still gets Seinfeld money. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| He is incredibly well off. | |
| But it doesn't matter. | |
| It never stops. | |
| It's like Trump. | |
| It's never enough. | |
| It just keeps accumulating and he can't help himself. | |
| I miss the detail of this case though. | |
| How much money did they ultimately raise? | |
| Do you know? | |
| I don't even remember what it was. | |
| Like, it was enough to, like, erect... Yeah, it was enough to erect, like, maybe two or three panels. | |
| And it wasn't gonna get used. | |
| They bought it for, like, one of these Trump boats that people are rip-assing up and down the coast with Trump flags hanging out the back. | |
| I mean, that's what they ended up doing with it. | |
| It's chump change, but they, like, that they stole, but they just couldn't help it. | |
| They had to wet their beaks. | |
| It's just who they are. | |
| I'm looking at the quick title here. | |
| It looks like it was $25 million. | |
| Total? | |
| Yeah, I think they were asking for about $25 million. | |
| But it's a total grift! | |
| Jesus Christ. | |
| I think they were asking for about 25 million. | |
| But it's a total grift. - They might have raised 20. | |
| I mean, they might have raised a lot of fricking money. | |
| Jesus Christ. - Can you imagine? - Who did you come up with a Patreon? | |
| Wait, we have one, hey. | |
| - Well, dude, let's pretend that we're gonna build an infrastructure that nobody, we're gonna build a pie in the sky, everyone. | |
| Send in your money. | |
| Don't worry about your payments. | |
| And by the way, I want to throw this out there because I'm feeling a little live about this thing. | |
| I'm feeling a little hot. | |
| If you were stupid enough, if you were a dumbass enough to send Steve Bannon and these wall people money, You have too much money. | |
| Right? | |
| Because that's a bunch of wealthy people. | |
| You did not earn it. | |
| This is more proof that the meritocracy doesn't actually exist. | |
| Because there's a bunch of people, it's like what, Jimmy Swaggart and like all these old televangelists. | |
| Like those people used to get money from people who didn't have like two nickels to rub together. | |
| They're getting those, but they're getting a ton of money from people who should know better. | |
| That are dumb as shit to ever throw in with these people. | |
| Right. | |
| I mean, I'm definitely glad you mentioned the fact that, like, the evangelicals will suck money in from the poorest of poor people who, you know, don't have anything. | |
| That's the saddest. | |
| I've read those stories, and it's heartbreaking. | |
| You know? | |
| It's a grift that continues to happen. | |
| That's the problem. | |
| There is a part of this country that is so desperate to believe in something and so desperate that they're willing to throw all of their money into it. | |
| And then there's just the other people who are just hateful and ugly and they're like, yeah, give it to Trump, whatever. | |
| And this whole thing is so gross, but it's also so indicative of who these people are and what Trumpism is. | |
| And by the way, Let's go right up to the top with Trump, because we have to talk about it. | |
| Donald Trump endorsed QAnon, which is an anti-Semitic, fascistic, terrorist movement. | |
| They've wanted to assassinate his enemies. | |
| They've killed people. | |
| They've tried to steal children left and right. | |
| They believe in pre-emptive fascistic violence. | |
| And Trump got up there and was like, I think they like me. | |
| And that's all it took! | |
| That's all it took for him to take that. | |
| Because that is how vile and how broken all of these people are. | |
| Well, yeah, and remember, he equated it to like, oh, like the David Duke thing, when David Duke endorsed him. | |
| He's like, I don't know who that guy is, when it's clear he did. | |
| Same thing here, I don't know much about QAnon. | |
| Well, you know, the reporter broke it down for him and explained that the QAnon think that the Democrats are a satanic, ritualistic cult intent on molesting and killing children. | |
| And remember, his response to that was, oh, is that so bad? | |
| The reporter said this is a group that believes the Democrats are pedophiles and cannibals. | |
| And Donald Trump, the President of the United States of America, went right past it. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| It was like the old cartoons where it went in one ear and went out the other and he's like, well they like me so... | |
| No, no. | |
| Well, no. | |
| Actually, no. | |
| I think he was making a joke. | |
| I thought he was sort of like, oh yeah, what's wrong with that? | |
| Isn't that what they do? | |
| But they said they believe you're saving the world. | |
| And he's like, well we are. | |
| We are trying to save the world. | |
| Because he honestly believes it. | |
| That's how narcissistic and vapid and shallow he is. | |
| He's like, oh those people think I'm great. | |
| Yeah, I think they're great. | |
| It's like a kid. | |
| It's like a kid. | |
| It's a child. | |
| But we also are aware of the signals that they're looking for out of the show. | |
| Sure. | |
| And it makes you pause about going out in the public right now because of what these people might be planning at this point. | |
| I swear to God, it's like, they're looking for the signals, he keeps giving them to them. | |
| What president in their right mind would ever even entertain a question about QAnon, or about anything like QAnon, and make it legitimate? | |
| You just answered your own question, Dick. | |
| Yeah. | |
| The President is not in his right mind. | |
| The old Chief of Staff to the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, I don't know if you've seen him making the rounds lately, but he's going on all these old morning shows and he's like, oh yeah, everybody talked about the fact that Donald Trump was not mentally well and mentally fit. | |
| And there are so many people in these rooms, they all know it. | |
| Pompeo knows it. | |
| What was the oil baron, the one at the very, very beginning who called him a moron? | |
| Oh yeah, our first Secretary of State. | |
| It's been so long! | |
| How terrible is that? | |
| I can see him in my eyes. | |
| Rex Tillerson. | |
| Rex Tillerson putting an oil drill in the ground. | |
| Just yelling and shooting off guns. | |
| Even he said it. | |
| Everybody says it. | |
| They know that this person is unwell and unstable and unfit for this office. | |
| But everybody in the room has some sort of purpose that they want to use him for. | |
| And meanwhile, we already brought this up with somebody like Bannon. | |
| Bannon used him to forward, like, his neo-fascistic agenda. | |
| Stephen Miller has used it for whatever in the hell Stephen Miller is up to. | |
| Whatever in the hell is going on in that man's mind and whatever project he is after, he has used this time and again. | |
| And we've talked about it on the podcast. | |
| They've obviously paid attention to not just hate groups online, but extremist groups and terrorist groups like QAnon. | |
| They play with them, they play footsie with them, they flirt with them, they send them signals, like you were saying, and they do it all knowing who they are. | |
| And I don't think Trump understands QAnon in totality, but there are people around him who do, who say, hey, if QAnon gets brought up, you can either dodge the question or endorse him. | |
| And it is not a coincidence, and I said this earlier on Twitter, it's not a coincidence, The FBI publishes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the original anti-Semitic test that started off all this hatred and genocide in the 20th century. | |
| They post that. | |
| And then the next day, Trump endorses an anti-Semitic fascistic conspiracy theory. | |
| And then Steve Bannon, the quote-unquote anti-globalist, which you know and I know is code for anti-Jewish, gets arrested. | |
| This isn't a coincidence. | |
| Like, this is what they're doing. | |
| And whether or not they truly believe it or not is a different story. | |
| But they are doing it in order to try and create around Trump a strategy or some sort of a movement. | |
| You know, what's funny is we kind of have to interview some people who served in the White House for Reagan because I wonder if the second half of his presidency wouldn't sound a little bit familiar, minus the hatred and spewing of other stuff. | |
| But I think that the diminished mental capacity that they recognize in Trump, I bet you would probably be similar to what we had with Reagan. | |
| And the only saving grace, perhaps, was that like, you know, H.W. | |
| was the vice president and they had some other people who weren't like Stephen Miller, right? | |
| Like, would you think that's crazy for me to say? | |
| No. | |
| And matter of fact, I would even go a step further and say from the beginning of the presidency, of Reagan's administration, and we'll talk about this a little bit in depth when we end up doing our feature-length audio documentaries about this time period and sort of setting out the omnibus idea of what's going on. | |
| When Reagan came into office, he had no idea what he was doing politically. | |
| He just knew he wanted to be President and talk about how good America is. | |
| He was a spokesperson. | |
| He got paid by General Electric. | |
| He got paid by, I want to say, Ford to go around the country and make speeches about how great America was. | |
| And when he was Governor of California, all he knew to do was to criticize pro-free speech and anti-war people. | |
| That's it. | |
| He didn't do anything else. | |
| He didn't have any standard legislation. | |
| He didn't have a purpose. | |
| And he came in and the Heritage Foundation was like, hey, I know you don't really care about politics. | |
| Here's what you should do. | |
| And he's like, that's great. | |
| I can't wait to read this. | |
| And he barely read it. | |
| They had to make cartoons to get Reagan to pay attention to policy. | |
| And he never understood policy. | |
| He was completely over his head. | |
| And the funniest thing about it, when I was doing research on American rule, I found all these quotes because you know what our media does with Reagan. | |
| They're always like, Reagan and Tip O'Neill, they didn't see eye to eye, but they worked together, right? | |
| And Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the end of the Cold War. | |
| I kept finding these quotes where Mikhail Gorbachev was like, Ronald Reagan has no idea what he's talking about, and he's actually really dangerous. | |
| Tip O'Neill was like, it is a sin that Ronald Reagan ever became president, and he should not be president. | |
| He has no idea what he's doing. | |
| It's exactly the same thing. | |
| You take somebody who becomes a figurehead of an illusory myth and you just use them for whatever you need. | |
| It can be tax purposes, it can be reconfiguring the economy, it can be slashing social services, or it can be everything that the Trump Project is trying to do. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, meanwhile, we find out that Stephen Miller, who probably should have been cast as Dexter in the evil version of that show, because honestly, I hate to judge a book by its cover, but Jesus, does that guy look like a guy who's mild-mannered and goes to work every day with a tie on and then at night does serial kills all over the place? | |
| I mean, that's what he looks like to me. | |
| Now, what was reported, though, was that he was the architect. | |
| We know he's the architect of family separation at the border. | |
| That was his baby. | |
| And it was just reported, and of course denied, that he forced a vote from the cabinet. | |
| Basically, the entire cabinet was there, and he forced them to vote who was in on doing this, separating them from the border. | |
| The only cabinet member who voted against it was Nielsen, because she knew what was going to happen, which is exactly what happened. | |
| Kids would be separated and never get connected back to their parents. | |
| you know, here we are. | |
| He intentionally did this. | |
| And people like Pompeo and Kelly and Azar all signed off on it. | |
| Well, and let's really take it to this place. | |
| Because we've been living under this myth for so long that if you work in government, right, if you serve in a presidential administration, if you become president, if you become a representative, if you become a senator, if you become a congressperson, whatever. | |
| We've been working under this myth that you do so because you feel duty. | |
| Because you're a patriot. | |
| Because you actually, maybe we don't agree on how to make life better or how to go forward, but you're doing it to help people, right? | |
| And here's the thing. | |
| Somebody like Stephen Miller uses that presumption and that myth against us. | |
| The cruelty that he has authored, time and time again, and it's not just him, by the way, him and his wife, who have both served in these, you know, different roles, they've both been very open about the cruelty that they see possible through their policies and their power. | |
| These are people who legitimately want to hurt people and they want to see progress through cruelty and fascistic purposes. | |
| I don't know how you do it. | |
| I really don't. | |
| I struggle with that. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| If I hurt somebody, I feel terrible about it. | |
| Listen, I posted a snarky thing about Steve Bannon going to jail and how it made me happy or whatever. | |
| That doesn't even feel great. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| I'm probably going to go delete it here in a second. | |
| It's one of those things where I don't know how they can be so bald-faced Cool. | |
| And how that is a means to an end. | |
| Like it's a different type of existence. | |
| It's a different type of ideology that I'm not comfortable with and that really makes me, it makes me lose sleep at night to know that there are people out there who behave like this and act like this. | |
| Well, I'm going to explain to you where he's coming from because there's some tropes that keep coming back up in this party. | |
| He's convinced that illegal immigration, or undocumented workers coming to our country, will be the destruction of the country. | |
| Literally, like, destruction. | |
| Nothing left. | |
| Now, I've had this discussion with other Republican people back in the day, like when Obamacare was passed, who felt like Obamacare was going to literally destroy the country as if somehow missiles were just going to explode across every inch of the country and that there'd be nothing left. | |
| But that's what they were convinced was going to happen. | |
| So he intentionally did this as a disruptive measure to dissuade people from wanting to even attempt to come in. | |
| Okay, so that's, you know, he has this notion that what's going to happen to the country if we can allow this to continue to happen. | |
| And they say, well, if that's the goal, we have to stop this. | |
| Well, what can we do to furnish that to get to that goal? | |
| Well, we'll make it so horrible that they won't come. | |
| Like, in his mind, he's probably thinking it's a humanitarian thing. | |
| Like, eventually they'll stop. | |
| But we realize that they don't stop. | |
| And now, obviously, what did stop it was fucking COVID, right? | |
| There's less people now trying to cross into our country for now. | |
| But that's where they're coming from. | |
| And it's so far away from any kind of a human foundation that I agree with you. | |
| It's impossible to understand how anybody who has an education or has been raised in a certain way would ever feel that way. | |
| And here's the problem. | |
| This guy, his family has disowned him. | |
| He's from Santa Monica down the road from me. | |
| He's had these hate speeches since high school. | |
| And so there's probably just something wrong with him. | |
| It's probably something spectrum wise that they could diagnose him with. | |
| And yet again, because it's the Trump administration, people who would not be hired normally for these kind of things get in and screw you around like the little rats they are. | |
| So there was a. - I'm like, So back in the day when I was reporting on Trump campaign rallies and the Trump movement, you know, I had a lot, and I was talking about this actually, I'm not going to go into the full story here because I have sources that I want to protect and I don't want to get into the specifics, but I had members of the Trump campaign who | |
| reached out to me to try and tell me the story about how the Trump campaign changed over, you know, the course of Trump entering the campaign and then eventually becoming the president. | |
| Here's the thing. | |
| In the very, very beginning, when Trump started running for office, nobody who was serious signed on to his campaign. | |
| They knew that if they were part of this campaign that it would be like a scarlet letter next to their name for the rest of their career, right? | |
| And they knew that this would be something where like, oh, you worked for Trump? | |
| Well, you're never getting another meeting in this town, right? | |
| You're a joke. | |
| You joined up on the circus. | |
| So the people who did join were people who either hadn't worked in politics for years because they'd more or less been thrown out of politics, people like Paul Manafort, right, eventually joined the campaign. | |
| You had Roger Stone, who, of course, was lurking in the shadows for years and years and years. | |
| And then you had a bunch of young operatives. | |
| You had a bunch of young operatives who, and by the way, to tell everyone this, a little bit of inside baseball, it's really hard to get a higher-up job in a presidential campaign. | |
| It's really hard. | |
| Like you have to, you know, you have to pay a lot of dues. | |
| You have to work your way up. | |
| The people who joined the Trump campaign did so because they were like, well if I go in here and I nail it, maybe I'll be able to carve out my own life and my own career. | |
| Or, number two, this was actually what most of them thought. | |
| They thought Trump would lose and then he would start his own Trump TV. | |
| They thought that he would make an alternative to Fox News. | |
| So they thought that they were actually joining a multimedia company, you know, that was camouflaged as a presidential company. | |
| It was opportunist. | |
| It was always opportunist. | |
| Because nobody who believed in like the regular rigmarole of a campaign was going to sign their name up on the bottom line. | |
| campaign but expecting him to become a media company and here's the thing it was opportunist it was always opportunist because nobody who believed in like the regular rigmarole of a campaign was going to sign their name up on the bottom line it was people who were either looking for like that vault over or who saw potential in trump and they thought that they could use him for their own ends that's how you get this really toxic stew around him | |
| and you notice it trump doesn't bring in a lot of people he keeps it very small he keeps it very intimate and like a crime family like a criminal organization the only way that you get in is you show that you're willing to crime you show that you're willing to break eggs and you're willing to hurt people and you're willing to bilk people and And so when he says, I get the best people or whatever, he's getting the people that he knows will trust him because they're blood brothers at that point. | |
| They know that they will hurt people and they know that they are ruthless and that they're not going to turn them over to the feds or to law enforcement. | |
| Unless anybody wants to dispute your characterization of things, we know that the whole point of the campaign, up until the minute he won, was to create a media empire. | |
| They already had had the casting calls out. | |
| They did, for this new conservative station that was going to rival Fox News. | |
| So he was literally, that's all he was doing was to try and get name recognition and build up a brand enough where they could then launch this thing. | |
| So it's fact. | |
| It's frightening. | |
| And then he wins. | |
| And they had that picture of him looking completely shocked because he knew what was going to happen, which is where we are. | |
| I don't know. | |
| The stuff at the border just stabs me in the heart. | |
| Deeper than any of the other shit that we've seen from this administration. | |
| It really did because it was intentional. | |
| And what's even worse is when you try and get to both sides of like, well Obama did the same thing. | |
| And you have to try and patiently explain to them that they did not do the same thing and it lasted for like less than a month and they immediately put them all back together because they recognized how important that was but they kept it organized at least so they can put the kids and the parents back together in the family. | |
| They did it to be traumatic. | |
| They did it to be traumatic. | |
| It's like Nixon's madman theory. | |
| They wanted people to look at America and say, holy God, these people are cruel. | |
| Do not run across them. | |
| They're likely to do anything. | |
| And that's the thing. | |
| We say this all the time. | |
| You and I can criticize these people, you know, or whatever. | |
| We would never do that in power. | |
| We would never even consider doing that in power. | |
| It would never be... like, you can make arguments, you can do policies that don't work, you can do policies that fail spectacularly and accidentally hurt people, right? | |
| But if you did that, you apologize and then you take your licks. | |
| You take your licks and you try and get better. | |
| These people are... they don't have the shame to do that, and on top of that, Everything is on the board, and we talked about that. | |
| I want to say, going back to our original podcast, one of the defining characteristics of Donald Trump and people around him is the corporate ethos, which is, we're willing to push it to another level that other people aren't willing to push it to. | |
| And that's why we profit more, and that's why we succeed. | |
| These other people are afraid to push it to that extra level, but we'll do it, and we'll hurt people if we have to. | |
| We're not afraid of that. | |
| And that is the defining ethos of these people. | |
| Yeah, and here we are, and those people are 30% of the country, or the voters I suppose, whatever that number is, a radical fringe, and yet here we are with an electoral college that's designed to allow them to have a victory if we're not careful. | |
| No, it absolutely is. | |
| I just want to put this out there. | |
| So we're taping on Thursday. | |
| We're heading into the final night of the DNC, which by the way, again, if you want to listen to the RNC with us, just become a patron over at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. | |
| It'll be, I don't want to say fun. | |
| I want to say it'll be an experience. | |
| But last night we watched Barack Obama, the last president of the United States of America, And people need to understand this because, you know, it's like Obama's not going to come out and be like, fascism is on the rise. | |
| Like that's not his game. | |
| It's not his sport. | |
| But you need to understand that Barack Obama respects the office of the presidency and has mostly bit his tongue when it has come to Donald Trump. | |
| Because there's a grand tradition of ex-presidents not criticizing the current president. | |
| Barack Obama has made some mistakes being too cautious in doing that. | |
| We've talked about that. | |
| Like, leading up to the 2016 election, he did not go public with the fact that Russia was interfering in the election and that Trump's campaign had relationships with him. | |
| He was like, the American people will figure this out, whatever. | |
| Barack Obama got on TV last night and was like, listen, we're in real trouble. | |
| I'm sounding an alarm. | |
| This is really, really bad and democracy is in trouble. | |
| I wish people, I know people heard it, but this goes back to everything we've been saying now for months, which is we're not being alarmist. | |
| We're not just being reactionaries. | |
| We're not overreacting. | |
| We're in a real moment right now. | |
| And you need to understand that these people, what you have seen from them, the cruelties, the senseless, senseless cruelties, and the craven greed, and the lack of humanity, it's gonna get worse. | |
| You have seen them at their most restrained at this point, and they've destroyed every democratic institution they've come across, and they have hurt people, and they have bled people, and there's no telling what they've done that we don't already know about. | |
| We have seen them at their most restrained, and you need to understand that the alarm is ringing right now, and you need to answer that alarm. | |
| I mean, that is really well said, because we keep imagining Trump is going to behave worse and worse. | |
| But what the offshoot of that is, is that, yeah, the people you're talking about are going to be emboldened even further. | |
| And it really is, you know, it's those moments when you start to think about whether you want to live in this country. | |
| You know, this is a wake up call for the people who are on, who are progressives, as much as it was for the people on the MAGA side, because I think that for a long time, we sort of assumed we lived in a certain kind of country with certain kind of people and certain kind of values. | |
| And in the last four years and five years, we've sort of woken up to the notion that we don't at all. | |
| And perhaps that will be a good thing. | |
| You know, we've been able to establish certain things like Black Lives Matter. | |
| Imagine that four years ago, To hear the Republicans smear football players for kneeling during the National Anthem. | |
| And now, I think we've come all the way around to where it's pretty accepted across a lot of every other sport as well. | |
| Can we hang our hat on that? | |
| Is that something to be proud of? | |
| I don't even know at this point. | |
| It's a nation where the other side really, truly believes that we are cannibals and pedophiles. | |
| It comes down to the QAnon thing. | |
| I hate to say this, but for so long, members of the media and politicians and pundits and other people just kind of turned up their nose about the QAnon thing. | |
| Well, meanwhile, a lot of us were screaming about it. | |
| It's like, listen, this is the alternate reality that they're living in, and pretty soon it's going to affect you. | |
| Like, maybe you don't feel it right now, but the President of the United States giving it legitimacy and endorsing it and, you know, bringing it to the mainstream, this is just the beginning. | |
| It doesn't end here. | |
| We don't just stay on a plateau and it just doesn't go on cruise control for the next four years if he wins or if he steals it or whatever. | |
| It gets worse. | |
| And that's what people need to understand. | |
| If you want anything approaching a country that you can recognize and that you can live in with ethics and morality and with safety, we got to get moving right now. | |
| Because this thing, this thing's only going to get worse. | |
| It just is. | |
| Do you want to talk about tonight for a second and what's going to happen in the DNC last night? | |
| It's going to be interesting. | |
| We talked about it a little bit on the live stream last night. | |
| We were talking about the fact that Joe Biden is probably not going to get out and talk about an existential crisis. | |
| He's probably going to be the happy warrior. | |
| God knows what that's going to look like. | |
| But I will tell you, you're going to want to hang out with us next week to watch the RNC because here's the thing. | |
| The Trump-MAGA-Propaganda-Conspiracy-Theory-Alternate-Reality is going to be in full force next week. | |
| You're going to need help digging through it, understanding what's happening, what they're trying to do, and moving and sorting through the bullshit. | |
| So I really, really hope you come hang out with us. | |
| For sure, well off the balance being able to listen and talk at the same time, because there's going to be a lot to have to process through. | |
| Even their, I'm sure their pre-edited packages are going to be filled with all sorts of stuff that's going to be wrong and misrepresented. | |
| And so it's going to be an interesting thing. | |
| But I thought I told you we're not going to be allowed to call it a Republican National Convention. | |
| It has to be called what it is, which is, what did I say, the Nazi Party and KKK hootenanny? | |
| That is rough. | |
| That is rough. | |
| And if we're going to make it through four straight nights of that, it's going to take some liquid courage. | |
| I'll just say that. | |
| I hear you. | |
| I might not be with you for all four nights, Jared. | |
| I've got to tell you right now. | |
| You might have to watch some NBA playoffs. | |
| Well, you got to do what you got to do, but we're going to, one way or another, helm the ship, and we're going to make this thing work. | |
| Again, we hope you will join us. | |
| All you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast, become a patron. | |
| I mean, we're hanging out for two and a half, two hours, 45 minutes, talking with people, getting to know people. | |
| We appreciate you so much, all the support. | |
| Again, these are rough times. | |
| Building a community and building relationships with people you can trust is at the utmost. | |
| And we're so appreciative for all the people, all the kindness. | |
| We've been seeing you share in our stuff, saying very, very kind things. | |
| We started this podcast hoping to make a difference and hoping to fight back on things. | |
| And you're helping us. | |
| And we're so, so happy that you are. | |
| And we thank you. | |
| Until next time, you can find Nick over at Can You Hear Me? | |
| SMH. | |
| You can find me at JY Sexton. | |
| Listen, everybody. |