Nick Hauselman is out of action this week, leaving Jared Yates Sextont o fly solo as he discusses Trump's "joke" that he would serve another twelve years, the madness of the Trump Administration's stated goals, and the fact that the Republican Party has dispatched of every principle they ever purported to have in the search of power and influence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| If you want to really drive them crazy, you say 12 more years. | |
| 12 more years! | |
| 12 more years! | |
| Because we caught them doing some really bad things. | |
| Well, we were very divided under President Obama. | |
| Very divided. | |
| People have no idea how divided. | |
| They didn't talk about it as much. | |
| They didn't say it as much. | |
| But we were really coming together. | |
| Hey everybody, welcome to the Mookrake Podcast. | |
| I'm your co-host Jared Yates Sexton, a regular co-host, good friend, Nick Kausman, indisposed at the moment, no power whatsoever. | |
| He lives in the Golden State where there are fires and natural disasters and where they are learning about the climate catastrophe probably sooner than a lot of the rest of us. | |
| So unfortunately I'm flying solo today. | |
| My apologies. | |
| I miss Nick as well. | |
| It is weird to be doing this without him. | |
| We're supposed to cover the Republican National Convention tonight, live streaming for those of you who are patrons. | |
| And if you want to join us, that'll be over at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. | |
| Hopefully Nick has his power back by then, because every night this week at 9pm, we're going to be diving into the madness of the Republican National Convention together. | |
| I'm sitting here on a stormy afternoon in southeastern Georgia. | |
| It is gloomy, overcast, apropos for what I would say is the beginning of a national convention, which is more or less a portent of doom, a sign of what's wrong with this country and what danger we're facing as a people. | |
| Um, we, it got off to what I would call an inglorious start. | |
| Uh, they did their roll call earlier in the afternoon and unanimously Donald Trump was re-nominated, uh, for the Republican nomination for president of the United States of America. | |
| There are already rumors that Trump is going to speak every single night of this convention, uh, which I think, you know, as well as I know that it is an exercise in Absolute narcissism and madness. | |
| But he couldn't resist it. | |
| He had to go out and speak today to accept the nomination. | |
| He said that there was no possible way that the Democrats could win the election unless they stole it, saying the only way that they can take this election from us is if they rigged the election. | |
| Pretty rough. | |
| Pretty bad. | |
| Once again already showing that there is no universe where Donald Trump will just simply deal with a loss in an election, which people need to get hip to really really quickly. | |
| People also need to get hip to the fact that I'm sorry to tell you, and this isn't pleasant, he also said in the speech that, he said if you really want to annoy the liberals, don't chant four more years, chant twelve more years. | |
| First of all, I've been on the record multiple times saying that people need to understand that Donald Trump isn't joking when he's saying this stuff. | |
| They need to understand that this is him, in public, openly talking about what he wants and what he sees as a possibility. | |
| He preps us for the possibility that he might destroy democratic institutions and democratic norms. | |
| You need to understand that this was not just a random thing that Donald Trump said. | |
| 12 years is weirdly specific. | |
| It sounds certainly like, I don't know, like maybe he had talked to somebody about how long he planned to stay in power and how long he planned to do this thing. | |
| Twelve years. | |
| He has joked over and over and over again that because he was investigated for Russian collusion and interference with our elections that he should just get an extra four years just to make up for his first term as president. | |
| This isn't a joke. | |
| This has nothing to do with being funny. | |
| And by the way, this is one of the things that happens with fascists is they get out and they project out into the world their fantasies and their ideas and their darkest hidden desires. | |
| And they do it in such a way that they can enjoy a modicum of deniability. | |
| Well, how dare you get upset about this? | |
| I was just joking about it. | |
| Obviously, he doesn't mean to run for 12 more years as president. | |
| Obviously, he doesn't think that he's going to go past the two-term limit. | |
| But it starts the conversation. | |
| It starts the idea. | |
| It allows it to manifest in the public imagination and in the public arena. | |
| And I have to tell you, the quickness with which his supporters started chanting, 12 more years, and the ability of his supporters in both the media and around the country to just look past this. | |
| Their ability to pretend like this isn't something to be afraid of. | |
| This isn't something that is a problem. | |
| This isn't something that actually presents to Americans a threat to our democracy and our open shared society and liberal democracy. | |
| The fact that they can hear somebody say this, when by the way, I mean, you know as well as I do that for eight years under Barack Obama, Anything that he could have possibly said that they could have construed or turned the volume up on the idea that he was somehow or another going to be a tyrant or a dictator. | |
| They screamed about this over and over and over again. | |
| The fact that they can just watch Trump do this and not call him out on it and not even pause and again just immediately start chanting 12 years. | |
| You need to understand that something is happening in this country, something really large and really dangerous. | |
| And we don't say this. | |
| We've talked about this on the Muckrake Podcast over and over and over again. | |
| We're not saying it to alarm people. | |
| We're not saying it to be provocative. | |
| There are certainly people who talk about this stuff and they do that for profit and fame and power or whatever in the hell these people think that they're trying to do. | |
| When I talk about this 12 years thing, this four more years, this eight more years, another term on top of two terms, we're actually talking... | |
| About something that this country is facing. | |
| And Donald Trump represents a fundamental threat to shared society and democratic institutions. | |
| It is who he is. | |
| And I want to talk about this today because we're getting ready to jump headfirst into the Republican National Convention. | |
| And what we're going to watch over the next few nights is going to be A living, breathing example of the disease that is Trumpism. | |
| And I say this all the time on the podcast and I want to go on the record again. | |
| Trump is not the disease. | |
| He's a symptom. | |
| This thing has been boiling for decades. | |
| It's been here for generations. | |
| This is a democratic rot that we have been fighting and we've been dealing with for a long time. | |
| Maybe we didn't recognize it. | |
| Maybe we didn't know it. | |
| But we know it now. | |
| And we can see it now. | |
| And Donald Trump is the personification of it. | |
| And what we're getting ready to watch with the Republican National Convention, which by the way you'll be hearing this the day after it started, and undoubtedly tonight, Monday night, is just going to be a chamber of horrors. | |
| I said last night, and for those of you who don't know this, I live stream every Sunday night at 8pm on YouTube. | |
| I do this thing called Bourbon Talk where I drink some bourbon and I answer questions. | |
| And somebody asked me this week, they said, what do you think It's going to be like. | |
| And what do you think the worst part of it is going to be? | |
| Like what is going to be the most startling moment? | |
| And I have to tell you, it's probably going to be an open provocation of China. | |
| The Republican Party has already endorsed this paranoid baseless conspiracy theory that China either created the coronavirus or somehow or another let it go unimpeded as a weapon. | |
| The Republican Party, through its think tanks and all of its little tentacle groups, these gross, disgusting groups that guide their strategy, they've released a memo that explicitly said, for the 2020 election, we're going to be blaming China. | |
| Don't even bother to defend Trump, but you're going to blame China, and you're going to basically call the Democrats traitors in the thrall of China. | |
| So they'll hit that tonight. | |
| They'll hit that note tonight, and it's going to be a cavalcade of racism, xenophobia, and just good old-fashioned, faux-populistic fascism. | |
| It is going to be like a transmission from an alternate reality. | |
| And I would tell people this. | |
| I know that some people aren't going to be able to watch it. | |
| I understand that this is traumatic. | |
| I mean, we are engaged in a traumatic moment in American history and American society. | |
| We are being actively gaslit constantly. | |
| We're being lied to. | |
| We're being abused by the President of the United States of America and his enablers. | |
| I would recommend that people watch this. | |
| And the reason why I would recommend that people watch this is because I think we have to know and understand who they are and what they're doing. | |
| And this broadcast from an alternate reality is going to be really telling. | |
| We're going to see not only the lie that they're going to be selling their supporters. | |
| And a reminder, Donald Trump only has to repeat what he did last time. | |
| He only has to win through the Electoral College. | |
| He doesn't have to win a majority of the popular vote. | |
| There's no world where Donald Trump is going to win a majority of the popular vote. | |
| The only reason that he won the presidency and the only way that he could possibly win reelection is through a bunch of interference, a bunch of misinformation, and the Electoral College, which was created in the first place to advantage white slaveholding states in the South, which is his constituency and his base. | |
| You need to watch this and you need to digest this because you need to understand where we're going if he does win or He steals the election or I don't know, maybe we don't even have an election. | |
| Who the hell knows what's going to happen in November? | |
| I mean, he's already promised to send out, you know, federal troops and people with guns. | |
| Undoubtedly, there's going to be paramilitary groups patrolling around the country. | |
| God knows what the country is going to look like in late October, much less early November. | |
| We need to understand the nightmare that is coming and we need to understand what this life might possibly look like. | |
| And to do that, we need to look at what they're going to give us. | |
| What message they're going to try and convey to their base. | |
| And through that, and by deconstructing it, and by like really parsing through the subject matter, and understanding where reality ends, and where the propaganda fever dream begins, we'll start to have a better understanding of what these people have planned for us. | |
| Now, I took a minute. | |
| I don't know if you've had a chance to see it. | |
| Donald Trump's administration released their... I would call it an agenda, but it's less an agenda, which would be like a list of things you hope to accomplish. | |
| It's less that and just like the most blatant, nonsensical, gibberish of a lie that I think I've ever taken a look at. | |
| I want to go through it really fast. | |
| It's basically a bullet point list. | |
| And I really struggle to explain this because of how ludicrous and stupid it is. | |
| Like all things with Trump, he doesn't intend to do most of these things. | |
| The Trump presidency, the Trump political project, Donald Trump as a person, is more about presenting an illusion while he profits and consolidates power. | |
| That's what this whole thing has been from the very beginning. | |
| And I've tried to tell people this from the very, very start. | |
| Things like the wall, that was a misdirection. | |
| He never planned on building a wall. | |
| It was something he just heard one day and he's like, yeah, that sounds great. | |
| People are going to love it. | |
| And then he went out and talked about building a wall. | |
| It's a matter of faith. | |
| It was never actually intended to be built. | |
| The draining of the swamp or whatever, he never intended to do any of that shit. | |
| All that Donald Trump ever intended to do was to raise his profile and get the necessary attention that he's always wanted because he is a dangerous narcissist. | |
| And hopefully, if he did get elected, which he did not believe that he would be elected, hopefully, if elected, he could dismantle government, eradicate oversight, And pervert our system of government into an organ for corruption. | |
| Which is what he's doing. | |
| Those are the only things that Donald Trump is trying to do. | |
| He is an inherent white supremacist and patriarchal misogynist. | |
| It's like the other stuff happens. | |
| Like, he's going after vulnerable populations, he's discriminating, he's, you know, treating people of color, LGBTQ Americans, and women like garbage because that's who he is. | |
| But that sort of stuff is almost like what he, um, what he busies himself with, what he enjoys. | |
| The entire purpose of the project, again, is to dismantle the government as an oversight and as a public good for the people and use it for blatant corruption and profit. | |
| That's who he is and that's what he's doing now. | |
| I want to take a second and I want to look at this quote-unquote agenda, which again, it's just complete garbage, but I do want to point out that where the lie ends and the propaganda begins what it's doing. | |
| It's instructive. | |
| And by deconstructing this bullshit agenda, and then by looking at what the Republican Party has become, and what the evangelical white identity people have become, which by the way, do not kid yourself, we have to talk about Jerry Falwell Jr. | |
| today as well. | |
| By doing that, we start to find out the truth behind who these people are. | |
| We understand on their face that they're lying to us. | |
| We understand that what they're shoveling our way is not only a bunch of bullshit, it's a bunch of propaganda hiding what they're actually doing. | |
| And I want to point out that it's very transparent. | |
| We're very lucky that Donald Trump is as incompetent and as transparent as he is. | |
| If there was someone who was trying to do what he's doing in the ways that he's doing it, and they were disciplined, and they weren't so transparent, Man, it would be a whole different ballgame. | |
| Our media would stand right by for the things that he's done. | |
| We've seen it with both Reagan and George W. Bush. | |
| They went ahead and these were people who were not worthy of the presidential office, they were dangerous, and they were dismantling the government and hurting America, but they got all of the benefit in the world because they played the character better. | |
| But here's this agenda that Trump has released, and again, he doesn't mean to do most of this stuff, but I've got some highlights I want to look at. | |
| Number one, I mean obviously, you gotta eradicate COVID-19. | |
| Sure. | |
| Which is a great promise, considering that he has failed in every regard, or not even tried to fight the virus. | |
| As of today, I think we're sitting at 170,000 plus dead, and that's only the official count. | |
| Obviously, other people say that it might be, you know, tens of thousands, if not up to 200,000 more. | |
| I love this. | |
| He's promising that he'll develop a vaccine by the end of 2020. | |
| Now, I want to point something out, and maybe you've seen this, maybe you haven't, maybe you've read about it. | |
| It's very hard and time-consuming to create vaccines. | |
| This idea that by the end of 2020 there might be a vaccine created is ludicrous, more or less. | |
| It's fanciful, magical thinking. | |
| It's like believing that hydroxychloroquine is real or that, you know, we should just, I don't know, drink bleach or inject ourselves with UV light. | |
| But you'll notice he doesn't say by November. | |
| He says the end of 2020. | |
| And this is that old tactic. | |
| And for those of you who pay attention to political history, it's like Richard Nixon saying, oh, I have a secret plan to win the war in Vietnam. | |
| But no, you can't really look at it and you can't really hear anything about it until after I win the presidency. | |
| I'm more or less holding this plan to win Vietnam hostage. | |
| By the end of 2020, after he's been re-elected, he'll, uh, you know, he'll have a vaccine by then. | |
| And we've already heard a little bit, and I think that we should already expect this to happen here before too long, he's more or less embracing a Russian vaccine, and I'm using air quotes because Everyone knows that it probably doesn't work, it hasn't been tested, but of course he's going to embrace an unethical, haphazard, dangerous vaccine or faux vaccine from Russia. | |
| Of course that's what he's going to do and we need to be prepared for that and understand that this is where it's going. | |
| He also says, and right after this, and again this is the important thing, He is promising a return to normal in 2021. | |
| So in this magical world, which is where hydroxychloroquine, UV light, bleach, God knows what else he has said. | |
| At this point, it's almost impossible to remember what all Trump has said because of magical thinking. | |
| It'll disappear overnight. | |
| Maybe we'll only have one or two people who will get sick. | |
| But we'll just go back to normal in 2021. | |
| Everything will be fine. | |
| Everything that has happened, it'll just be like it never happened again. | |
| It's almost like Make America Great Again, which was itself a completely hollow promise that had no basis in reality and he had no intention to ever do. | |
| It was just saying, I'm selling you nothing. | |
| Here are some magic beans. | |
| Be happy that you have beans. | |
| But even in that case, you would have beans. | |
| We only have beans in this situation. | |
| We just have a promise of quote unquote normal by 2021. | |
| Well, how are we going to do that? | |
| Who the hell knows? | |
| So then we obviously we're going to hold China accountable. | |
| That's one of his big promises. | |
| We're going to drain the globalist swamp by taking on international organizations that hurt American citizens. | |
| I read that a couple times, so I'm going to read it one more time. | |
| We're going to drain the globalist swamp by taking on international organizations that hurt American citizens. | |
| What are those organizations? | |
| What is technically a globalist organization that hurts American citizens? | |
| And here it's another one of those things. | |
| He just throws that out there. | |
| There's no moment whatsoever that even begins to clarify Who or what he's talking about. | |
| You can just fill in whatever you want. | |
| It's almost like thinking that everything will be fine by 2021. | |
| This fanciful, faraway place that you have to have faith in even though you don't even have an idea of how you're going to get there. | |
| A Xanadu, if you will. | |
| Some sort of city of gold that doesn't exist. | |
| And of course, we gotta throw in those keywords like globalist. | |
| Right? | |
| Which you and I know is about the New World Order. | |
| It's about anti-semitic conspiracy theories and of course going back to our good old friend Putin's Russia this has become the cry and and cause celebrate | |
| of this quote-unquote anti-globalist white nationalist movement which is now taking over around the world and not just providing safe harbor for white nationalists and white supremacists but also leading to neo-fascism and leading us up to the brink of a neo-fascistic world movement. | |
| That's what he's promising. | |
| So we got that. | |
| He also promises to innovate for the future and this is fun. | |
| This is really fun. | |
| He's going to launch Space Force, which by the way, I thought Space Force was already launched, but I mean, what the hell? | |
| You know, he, he takes credit for the things that he didn't really do and other presidents have done. | |
| He's constantly recycling his quote unquote achievements. | |
| So he's going to launch Space Force. | |
| But here, here's where it gets really good. | |
| He is going to establish the first manned presence on the moon. | |
| The first man president's on the moon. | |
| So we're going to have a moon base by the end of his second term, apparently. | |
| Or, I don't know, he's got, you know, 16 more years as president. | |
| So maybe that's what he's thinking about. | |
| Maybe he's going to make that moon base within the next 16 years. | |
| Which, I would love to know where the money comes from. | |
| We can't even protect Americans. | |
| We can't even help people who are getting hit by hurricanes or getting hit by earthquakes. | |
| We can't help people during a pandemic. | |
| We can't even afford to begin helping people during a pandemic. | |
| I would love to know where this money comes from. | |
| And of course, it's obviously bullshit. | |
| He doesn't plan on putting a manned presence on the moon. | |
| It's like these old hucksters who used to sell people property on the moon. | |
| It's not going to happen. | |
| It's a lie. | |
| And then a more obvious lie. | |
| He's going to operate the first manned mission to Mars. | |
| Do you know how far away we are from possibly sending someone to Mars? | |
| A long way. | |
| It's not going to happen, particularly in the next four years, but who knows, if he has 20 years, maybe, maybe Donald Trump is going to be the one to send somebody to Mars. | |
| I don't know. | |
| If that happens, I'll eat crow on that. | |
| If somehow or another Donald Trump is responsible for the first manned mission to Mars, I'll eat crow on that. | |
| He then promises an American first foreign policy. | |
| And here is, again, this is the fanciful thinking. | |
| And I want to bring up these plans so we can talk about the disease that is Trumpism that is currently threatening America. | |
| Here are three things that you have to believe at once. | |
| And part of the problem, and this is one of the reasons why Trumpism is a problem, and one of the reasons why it has grown out of the Republican Party, and why the Republican Party is no longer an actual political party. | |
| It's a fascistic white identity power movement. | |
| You have to believe these three things are possible all at once. | |
| Are you ready? | |
| Three contradictory ideas all at once. | |
| He will stop endless wars and bring our troops home. | |
| Okay, so those wars like in Afghanistan and Iraq and you know operations that we have in dozens of other countries. | |
| He's going to stop all of those. | |
| They're just going to come to a grinding halt and our troops are going to come home. | |
| Which, by the way, is actually like an anti-Republican plan, because let me remember real fast. | |
| Who was it who sent all of those people over for the endless wars in the first place? | |
| That's right. | |
| It was the Republican Party, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and all of the neoconservatives, and a whole bunch of Republicans who are still in office today. | |
| That's an anti-Republican plan. | |
| End the endless wars and bring our troops home. | |
| Which, by the way, I'm all for it. | |
| Do it. | |
| Please. | |
| We should have done it a long time ago, so let's do that. | |
| So, well done. | |
| This is actually a liberal leftist sort of an idea. | |
| Okay, good job. | |
| Number two. | |
| Even though he's going to stop endless wars and bring our troops home, Donald Trump pledges to maintain and expand America's unrivaled military strength. | |
| You know as well as I do that our quote-unquote military strength is going around the world and carrying out a hegemony project. | |
| We're going around the world with military presence. | |
| We have bases. | |
| We go into other countries. | |
| We're America's police or the world's policemen. | |
| And so that entire project is based on interventionalism. | |
| And sending troops abroad. | |
| So, somehow or another, we're going to stop all those wars. | |
| We're going to stop interfering in other countries' businesses and bring our troops home. | |
| But yet, we're going to send them out into other places. | |
| Which, again, is completely contradictory. | |
| But you have to be able to hold those two ideas in concert, simultaneously, because that is what it is like to be a Republican right now and to be a Trump supporter. | |
| Number 3. | |
| Even though we're going to bring home all of our troops fighting these endless wars, and even though these troops are going to come home, we also have to wipe out global terrorists. | |
| I'm real fast just trying to remember. | |
| Let me check my notes. | |
| Why did we end up in forever wars and endless wars? | |
| That's right, because the Bush administration created the lie of global terrorism and needed a crusade in order to carry out the project for a new American century power project. | |
| So, some way or another, we're going to bring everybody home. | |
| We're going to end all these wars and all these interventions and somehow or another we're also going to wipe out global terrorism while expanding our power around the world. | |
| That is impossible. | |
| There is no world where those three things can happen simultaneously in concert with one another. | |
| They are completely contradictory. | |
| There's no way to do it whatsoever and to believe that means that you have to twist your reason completely into a knot until it's meaningless. | |
| Which is what Trumpism is and what the modern Republican Party is. | |
| Now how does that happen? | |
| How do we get to a... Oh! | |
| Yeah, I forgot my favorite one, which is actually, um, how do you do it? | |
| How do you do it? | |
| The answer is American exceptionalism. | |
| One of the things that Trump promises to do is to revamp education. | |
| And it's funny, by the way, that there's like all these bullet points and then there's two for education. | |
| One, of course, is the Betsy DeVos special, which is school choice, which means that the government will start paying for private schooling. | |
| Which means that a bunch of wealthy kids are going to get their educations paid for and this old segregated idea that started with desegregation. | |
| You're going to see a lot of white only academies and things like that. | |
| So that's a promise. | |
| But the second promise is that they're going to make schools teach American exceptionalism. | |
| They're gonna make schools indoctrinate their students into the idea that America has been chosen by God to be great. | |
| Which, if you remember from past podcasts, and also this is something that I took on in my new book, American Rule, comes out in a couple weeks, you have to remember that American exceptionalism is the propaganda by which America has allowed itself to go about dominating the globe, interfering in elections, interfering in other people's businesses, It also means that the President of the United States, because America is chosen by God, is more or less holy and unquestionable. | |
| Let's take a look at the Republican platform for the Republican National Convention. | |
| Which, I don't know if you've seen this yet, but this is special. | |
| This really, really is. | |
| Because you need to understand something about the Republican Party. | |
| The Republican Party used to be a political party that could at least claim that it had principles. | |
| The Republican Party would present itself to the American people as being fiscally and socially conservative. | |
| They didn't want to raise up budgets. | |
| They didn't want to spend money unnecessarily. | |
| The money belonged to the people. | |
| They shouldn't be spending it. | |
| And they were socially conservative in that they believed in quote unquote traditional families or Judeo-Christian patriarchal families. | |
| They were also obviously against LGBTQ ideals. | |
| And they used to be pro-troops, right? | |
| At all times, they would wave the flag and talk about how you had to support the troop and you could never call that into question. | |
| They were pro-life by their own definition, saying that they were anti-abortion. | |
| And they were pro-free markets, the idea that markets should exist by themselves and the government shouldn't get involved. | |
| The less government in business, the better. | |
| Well, you know as well as I do that all of those quote-unquote principles Have turned out to be complete horseshit. | |
| They don't follow any of this stuff. | |
| In every single way, every time they have any power, they blow up the budget and run up deficits. | |
| You know, you can watch Fox News and basically watch them all get a little misty over the idea of Ronald Reagan riding a horse into the sunset or whatever, but Ronald Reagan ran up the deficit to huge levels. | |
| George W. Bush did the exact same thing. | |
| These people are not fiscally conservative. | |
| They're fiscally conservative when democratic people are in power. | |
| They don't want to spend money on democratic projects. | |
| They don't want to spend money on people that they don't care for. | |
| It's a malleable ideology. | |
| They're not actually socially conservative as you've seen because I mean they have a president who obviously had a tryst with a porn star and had to try and pay her off and has obviously not been socially conservative himself. | |
| So what they've done is that they've become quote-unquote tribal with him and they've protected him because they want him to be their warrior and they'll do whatever to keep him out there fighting for them and giving them power. | |
| So again, they're socially conservative in terms of scolding other people. | |
| They're not actually socially conservative in action. | |
| It's a malleable ideology for power and influence. | |
| They're not actually pro-life because they're not interested in helping anybody, and as soon as you're born they don't give a shit about you or what's going to happen for the rest of your life. | |
| Oh yeah, and also that's the thing. | |
| Do you remember when the pandemic started and they were like, old people maybe they should die because the economy is more important than them? | |
| It's almost like their ideology is malleable and it's more about being used as a political cudgel for power and influence. | |
| When it comes to Pro-free markets? | |
| We've seen that's not true. | |
| They're actually more hyper-capitalistic. | |
| They're more about damning up markets to pick winners and losers. | |
| They help giant corporations destroy smaller businesses and they pick winners and losers and favorites. | |
| So they're not actually for free markets. | |
| They're actually for chosen markets because it's malleable ideology for power and influence. | |
| Well, so, this has been going on for years. | |
| The Republican Party has been putting forth this principled face and then behind the scenes doing everything they can in order to carry out this project for more power and influence. | |
| It's caught up with them. | |
| They can't hide behind it anymore. | |
| This, uh, this paradox of what they say and what they do, it's undeniable now. | |
| And this is what has not only propelled Donald Trump into the presidency and allowed him to take over the party, it's brought them to the end of the line. | |
| Ideologically. | |
| This is one of the reasons you see these never Trumpers. | |
| It's one of the reasons why diehard Republicans have left the party or have said, I'm not going to vote for Trump. | |
| I'm going to vote for Biden or whatever they're going to do. | |
| The Republican Party is not a political movement anymore. | |
| It is a fascistic, white identity movement obsessed with power and influence. | |
| And if you doubt this whatsoever, we have to take a look at the 2020 platform for the National Republican Convention. | |
| A quick word. | |
| These platforms happen every four years. | |
| The parties adopt them and it says, this is a snapshot of who we are and what we believe. | |
| And if you want to be a member of this party, you have to, you need some semblance of these ideas. | |
| This is how we, not only are we governing, but it's how we're going to govern. | |
| Here is an idea of what you are voting for if you're voting for a Republican party member. | |
| This year, this year before the convention, which is just going to be the worship of Donald Trump, they released this. | |
| Resolution regarding the Republican Party platform. | |
| Whereas the RNC has significantly scaled back the size and scope of the 2020 Republican National Convention due to strict restrictions on gatherings and meetings and out of concern for the safety and convention attendees and host. | |
| Whereas the RNC has unanimously voted to forego the convention committee or platform in appreciation of the fact they did not want a small contingent of delegates formulate a new platform. | |
| Whereas all platforms are snapshots of the historical context in which they were born and parties abide by these policy principles. | |
| Whereas the RNC, had the platform committee been able to convene in 2020, would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the party's strong support for President Donald Trump and his administration. | |
| Whereas the media has outrageously misrepresented the implications of the RNC not adopting a new platform in 2020 and continues to engage in misleading advocacy for the failed policies of the Obama-Biden administration. | |
| Whereas the RNC enthusiastically supports President Donald Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden administration. | |
| Resolved that the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President's America First agenda. | |
| Resolved that the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform. | |
| Resolved that the 2020 Republican National Convention calls on the media to engage in accurate and unbiased reporting. | |
| Resolved that any motion to amend the 2016 platform will be ruled out of order. | |
| Your ears do not deceive you. | |
| What you just heard, in a little bit of flowery language, a little bit of a rhetorical appeal, Was the Republican Party admitting that they don't have principles? | |
| Except for one. | |
| And that principle is to support whatever Donald Trump does because Donald Trump is in power and Donald Trump is the only avenue through which they understand how to achieve power at this point. | |
| The reason that they say it like that is because the Donald Trump is not ideologically concrete. | |
| His ideology, like the Republican Party over the past few years, is malleable. | |
| It is in search of power and influence. | |
| In the morning, he can be left. | |
| He can be liberal. | |
| By afternoon, he can completely contradict himself and be so far right-wing that it falls off any recognizable scale. | |
| You need to understand something. | |
| That's how fascists work. | |
| Fascists are constantly changing their ideas. | |
| They're constantly changing who they are in the moment based on whatever will gain them power and influence. | |
| When you start messing around with the idea of malleable ideology, you start messing around with a fascistic project because it's all about power. | |
| And one of the things that they need to do in order to continue with power is they need to control history. | |
| So they're never wrong. | |
| So they go in with things like, oh, I don't know, American exceptionalism. | |
| And you better believe that if Donald Trump gets his way, and if he gets those 12 years that he's hoping for, and by the way, I don't know if you've seen it, the speakers at this year's Republican National Convention, it is a murderer's row, man. | |
| Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Tiffany Trump, who knows? | |
| They'll probably dig up some other Trumps or find some Trumps under rocks. | |
| They'll probably try out some new Trump characters before this thing's over. | |
| This is being turned into a fascistic heritage project. | |
| There is a real possibility that we're going to see one of these Trump children, or both of them, vie for the presidency at some time. | |
| We're going to set up a hierarchy that is going to be based on genealogical ancestry. | |
| That's what they're going to try and do. | |
| And they're not interested in democracy. | |
| The Republican Party doesn't appreciate democracy anymore because the principles that they used to have have been rejected by the American people. | |
| They've done the numbers. | |
| They've released the testimonials and the reports. | |
| You can go look at what happened after 2012 when they were beaten. | |
| They released an autopsy of the 2012 campaign, and they said, We know the Republican Party, as it works right now, can no longer win presidential elections based on our appeals. | |
| So what did they do? | |
| They talked about possibly broadening their appeals. | |
| They talked about possibly opening up the umbrella and not just becoming a white identity fascistic movement. | |
| And they rejected that idea. | |
| Instead of embracing the idea of a more pluralistic Republican Party that could possibly win elections and wasn't disgusting to most of the American people, They jumped deep into the fascistic route, which is using faux populism with a power group that feels like it's losing power, white people, or in particular white evangelical people, and said, we're not really going to have free and fair elections anymore. | |
| We're going to disenfranchise. | |
| We're going to gerrymander. | |
| We're going to flood the zone with shit until there's so much misinformation. | |
| Nobody knows what's going on anymore. | |
| This is a rough time. | |
| And listen, I promised I was going to talk about Jerry Falwell Jr. | |
| and I'm not going to do it from a point of view of making fun of what we've learned today because, quite frankly, I don't think that we should discourage people and what makes them happy and what sexual practices they're into. | |
| We learned of course today that Jerry Falwell Jr., the scion to the Falwell name who was one of the evangelical white identity neo-confederate leaders who started not only the cult of the shining city that currently holds so much sway and power over the American project, we learned that He engaged in a relationship with his wife and another man and they were engaged in sexual practices together. | |
| In evangelical terms this is of course sinful and damning and you know what will probably happen is they'll probably you know They'll form around them and they'll protect them because that's what congregations do. | |
| I think a lot of us ex-evangelicals were in our own congregations where that type of power corrupted and there was a ton of scandals and a ton of misdeeds. | |
| And what did you do? | |
| You formed around them and you pretended like it either didn't happen or you pretended like sinners sin. | |
| But when it happens on the outside, again, malleable ideology is a weapon. | |
| Uh, if this happened to, I don't know, a person on the left, of course the right would talk about moral decay. | |
| Here, they'll just say, well it was one man's failings and sinners are sinners, all of that stuff. | |
| I want to point something out though. | |
| The hypocrisy that we're talking about with Falwell Jr. | |
| is a problem. | |
| A major, major problem. | |
| And I said this on Twitter earlier. | |
| If white identity evangelicals who were thirsty for power weren't scolding people, telling them they were going to go to hell, trying to legislate their bodies and their actions, if they weren't using their own obvious self-hatred to project on other people and continue gaining power and influence that way they might not, you know, hate themselves or their actions and try and take it out on the world, it'd be a much better place. | |
| We'd be in a lot better place as a country. | |
| But we can't. | |
| We can't see a way out of this right now where these people who obviously don't actually believe what they say they believe, their ideology is only used as a way to gain power and influence. | |
| Right now, we can't get a way out of this. | |
| We can defeat Trumpism at the ballot box if we can have a free and fair election, and we don't know that we're going to have that. | |
| But this is going to take a massive societal-level, country-level rejection of this nonsense. | |
| It's going to take a complete reconsideration of not just who we are, but who we have been. | |
| Because all of this is based on that myth of American exceptionalism. | |
| The people on the right that I'm talking about right now, the people involved in white identity, neo-confederate evangelicalism, the cult of the shining city, the people who are Trumpists, the people who are in these conspiracy theories, New World Order, Deep State, QAnon, any of that. | |
| They are in denial about the reality of the country, and they are embroiled, ensnared, and drowning in conspiracy theories that emit from the myth of American exceptionalism. | |
| Hear this. | |
| They can't win if they tell the truth. | |
| They can't win and they know it. | |
| All of their reports, all of their studies, all of their strategies admit that they know this is true. | |
| They get rejected because their appeals are racist and toxic and ugly and disgusting. | |
| They can only flood the zone with shit, misinformation. | |
| They can only lead people astray. | |
| They can only rely on these conspiracy theories in order to disenfranchise and mislead people. | |
| And it is an ugly moment right now in this country. | |
| But we can get out of it. | |
| We can reject it. | |
| And we can start reconsidering who we've been and who we are and where we're going. | |
| But I can tell you from this agenda, what the Republican Party is doing, and the internal moral hypocrisy of both the evangelical white identity right and also the political right, I can tell you that they're going to continue leading us down this path of destruction. | |
| And it's going to get worse. | |
| And we need to pay attention to what they say because it is going to be a preview of what could possibly happen in this country if we don't reject it, if we don't reconsider, and if we don't find something better and realer and more human. | |
| Now, that being said, I would advise you to watch this thing, this Republican National Convention. | |
| It's going to be a disgusting display. | |
| It's going to be a broadcast from an alternate reality. | |
| But that alternate reality could be your future if we do not reject this, if we don't fight, if we don't change things and find something better and realer and more true. | |
| Again, you can join hopefully Nick. | |
| I hope Nick is there tonight because otherwise you're just gonna be hanging out with me and I don't know. | |
| I think Nick's a good time. | |
| But you can join Nick and me for these live streams of the Republican National Convention. | |
| All you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. | |
| Sign up. | |
| We'll have a link on the Patreon page tonight, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday all the way through from 9 p.m. | |
| On we have a good time come join the community I promise the stuff feels better when you do it with each other and you find your your people and your crowd That being said we are so thankful for all of the support that you you all have been showing us We hope that somehow or another we have helped And this is a really frightening time watching | |
| Trump obviously angled for power and used fascism for his own advantage and watching the American right just collapse in on itself has been just an awful, terrifying, at times demoralizing thing. | |
| But if we know the truth, if we know what they're doing, if we know what they're up to, we can fight it, we can confront it, and we can change it. | |
| So thank you for all the support, all the encouragement. | |
| I cannot tell you what it means to me and what it means to Nick. | |
| If you need us, until next time, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me? | |
| SMH. | |
| You can find me at J.Y. | |
| Sexton. | |
| We'll be back in a couple of days. | |
| Hang out with us at the Republican National Convention. | |
| You won't be sorry. | |
| Alright, everyone. |