As Donald Trump declares liberal cities "anarchist zones" and threatens to defund them, Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the political maneuver and damage it could cause, as well as the growing mess that is the vacancy on the Supreme Court. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| And when you see them cheating on the other side, I don't say if, when. | |
| When you see them cheating with those ballots, all of those unsolicited ballots, those millions of ballots, you see them. | |
| Anytime you do, report them to the authorities. | |
| The authorities are waiting and watching. | |
| Then you have Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who told her granddaughter on her deathbed, allegedly, that her dying wish was to have the next president choose her successor. | |
| How do you think all this plays out? | |
| Well, I don't know that she said that, or was that written out by Adam Schiff and Schumer and Pelosi? | |
| I would be more inclined to the second. | |
| Okay, you know, that came out of the wind. | |
| It sounds so beautiful. | |
| But that sounds like a Schumer deal, or maybe a Pelosi, or a Shifty Schiff. | |
| Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckery Podcast. | |
| I'm Jared Yates Saxton. | |
| As always, I'm here with my loyal and wonderful co-host Nick Halseman. | |
| We have so much going on right now that is frustrating, maddening, demoralizing, crazy-making. | |
| Of course, we came to you with an emergency podcast over the weekend after the Tragic loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which I think I described on the Emergency Podcast as being like a cinder block thrown into a bathtub. | |
| Washington D.C., our political system, and the presidential election have been completely toppled over. | |
| It is mass chaos and anarchy. | |
| There are plans being floated left and right. | |
| Nick, what are you making of the fallout so far? | |
| I mean, it's inevitable. | |
| They're going to have a vote. | |
| Today he called to have the vote before the election on a new Supreme Court justice. | |
| And I don't think there's anything that's going to really stop them. | |
| And so I've kind of like I'm starting to wonder if like the entire American experiment is an inevitable ability of getting to this point. | |
| It's almost like in The Matrix where, you know, when you mix democracy with, you know, the economic system, you know, that we have, you're going to get here like probably different ways. | |
| But I feel like you get here no matter what you do. | |
| Hold on. | |
| Let me check my numbers here. | |
| We're under two minutes in and you're calling for the end of The American Project is what has already happened on this podcast. | |
| Well, you know what? | |
| It could just be a gross rationalization to allow me to sort of not go into a deep funk because it sort of says, well, you know, no matter what we would have done, we're going to get here no matter what. | |
| And that sort of takes away some of the pain that we would probably feel, like, what should we have done? | |
| What could we have done? | |
| And so, I don't know. | |
| I had this moment of sort of clarity this weekend, thinking, like, geez, the way it's set up, someone was going to come around and take advantage of this to the nth degree, and it was only a matter of time, I think. | |
| And here we are. | |
| I mean, Nixon did it a little bit, and then they multiplied that, and then who knows? | |
| It could get worse the next person that comes in. | |
| Well, I mean, I am in the weird spot now of being the optimist here in this situation. | |
| I don't think it's inevitable that they're going to have this vote before the election. | |
| Oh really? | |
| I know. | |
| I actually, I spent the weekend sort of sitting with this thing. | |
| And I started to realize that this actually could be one of the fissures between Donald Trump and the Republicans. | |
| It's not in Donald Trump's best interest to have this justice go in before the election at all. | |
| As a matter of fact, if they get control of the Supreme Court, well, what do they need Donald Trump for anymore? | |
| Right? | |
| Like, it's not really, the entire leverage that he had was that he was going to, like a Willy Wonka of fascism and white Christianity, was going to come in and make all of their, you know, racist, bigoted, patriarchal dreams come true. | |
| I mean, He's waiting for days to name his appointee. | |
| And we all know at this point the possibilities of who this is going to be. | |
| It's going to be an anti-abortion, dyed-in-the-wool conservative who is going to make all those fantasies come true. | |
| But Why is he waiting? | |
| I mean, he said that it's in deference to the funeral plans of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. | |
| Maybe it is. | |
| I have to tell you that Donald Trump is not doing it out of the kindness of his heart. | |
| Now Mitch McConnell wants to get it done because, I mean, I'm sorry, but when you have a good hand, you play the good hand. | |
| Right? | |
| You want to get to it and you want to go and you want to do it. | |
| Mitch McConnell wants to get it done as long as they can get it done. | |
| All he cares about is seating judges and making sure the judiciary gets taken care of. | |
| There are a lot of Republicans who don't want to take that vote before they have an election or they have some sort of, you know, consequence of that thing. | |
| I actually think that we're going to see a tug-of-war right now between Trump and McConnell. | |
| I think that is almost inevitable at this point. | |
| Does that mean that this justice will get appointed and seated before this thing? | |
| I'm not so sure. | |
| I feel weird about it. | |
| I feel very conflicted about what the outcome of this thing is going to be because Donald Trump is going to hold this up as his trump card. | |
| I mean he's already... I don't know if you've paid attention and I called this the other night on the emergency podcast. | |
| He's already starting to call Democrats baby killers. | |
| I mean he's going after governors talking about like post-birth abortions. | |
| Like literally the slaughtering of children. | |
| The reports that are coming out that I'm hearing Is that the Trump campaign sees this as like the ultimate maneuver, the thing that's going to get them up and out of the ditch. | |
| So I don't know what's going to happen with it. | |
| And I will say, because you more or less said that the American experiment had reached its terminal point. | |
| I think that that is a legitimate possibility, but I also think that this might be the moment where we look at this in abject horror and we say, you know what, this thing doesn't work, and we need to put in some safety precautions, and we need to rethink who we are as a society. | |
| So I still see a reason for hope. | |
| I understand the panic and the fear, but I think there is a reason to hope. | |
| Well, if that's how you're selling it, I don't think I'm buying it, and I'll tell you why. | |
| A, Trump came on today and said he wants to have it before the election, which, you know, I kind of want to take him at his word for some of that bullshit he likes to spew. | |
| But here's the other thing is, we know they're going to contest the election, right? | |
| And I'm of the view that he's going to lose the election, but they're going to contest it. | |
| So they're going to need the friendly, quote-unquote, friendly Supreme Court with nine justices to make a decision and not have it be four-four. | |
| So by putting one in that it's his, it kind of, in his mind, would guarantee that he would be able to win that. | |
| Now here's the thing, the big kicker would be It's not a given, right? | |
| Like, depending on how a case like this would go, it could still very well be voted against Trump because it would be so clear that they should accept the votes that were mailed in and then certified and verified. | |
| So that's the other thing. | |
| But at the very least, he's going to want to have enough of those ducks in a row. | |
| So my take on it would be he would certainly want it as well. | |
| Anybody who would be like, who would dump him if they got the, you know, wouldn't vote for him after they get the So here's the problem. | |
| And maybe this is where the rubber meets the road. | |
| Those people exist. | |
| So here's the problem. | |
| And maybe this is where the rubber meets the road. | |
| Maybe this is where they come together. | |
| Then the compromise between Trump and McConnell is that the justice gets confirmed during the so-called lame duck session, right? | |
| While the vote is being contested. | |
| So we could actually, I mean like, and let me tell you what, those are the elements for a perfect storm, is a giant battle over what happened in the election filled with one lawsuit after another while the Senate meets to confirm a justice as an election hangs in the balance. | |
| And I have to say that that's a tinderbox. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| That's a really bad situation. | |
| And now that we're talking about it, because that's a tinderbox and an awful situation, it now seems like the most likely situation. | |
| It now seems like that might be what we're looking at. | |
| Yeah, because we know the average length is 67 whatever days. | |
| They only have two-thirds of that or whatever. | |
| So, you know, again, just like they're going to get a vaccine faster than any other vaccine ever made by like four years. | |
| Real fast, Nick, let me check my notes. | |
| How many people have died from the coronavirus pandemic? | |
| Oh, that's right. | |
| Over 200,000. | |
| Well over 200,000. | |
| 200,000. Well over 200,000. 200,000 human beings. | |
| Yes. | |
| And so if they can do that, then I guess they can get this Supreme Court justice rammed through in a lot shorter time as well. | |
| But, you know, I just had another idea here with McConnell, since he's being brought up as well. | |
| You know, I think when he set out to do the whole judges thing, which is clearly like, you know, his baby, his whatever you want to call it. | |
| His project? | |
| His afterbirth. | |
| Basically what he's now going to guarantee is it doesn't even matter if Republicans never control another branch of government because there will be so many conservative judges that will overturn stuff that they can get it that far that that almost has the same effect. | |
| And so it's almost like he's shrugging knowing that they're not going to win a lot of elections going forward. | |
| But this is their way. | |
| This is in a similar way of how the Daughters of the Confederacy or whatever, you know, had all those statues planted right after the Civil War and that was their way. | |
| Like this is what he's doing. | |
| He's planting all the statues that you can't tear down for decades and decades. | |
| Well, so I think there's a couple of things happening with that. | |
| I think you're right in terms of McConnell. | |
| McConnell is much more of a pragmatic strategist, right? | |
| Like, he's considering, and listen, it's not like he is an ideologue. | |
| It's not like McConnell sits down and is like, the Republican Party is great and we're going to win based on our ideas. | |
| Like, that is antithetical to who Mitch McConnell is, right? | |
| He looks at the numbers. | |
| He has enough meetings with with leadership that he understands that the Republican Party cannot win free and fair elections. | |
| They are not popular enough. | |
| They have a very small niche of people and they can occasionally build up a base that can possibly win elections that are either girded by the Electoral College, which was set in motion to help white supremacists hold on to power. | |
| The Senate, which was set up to help rich white men hold on to power. | |
| Those are the ways that they can win, right? | |
| He knows this. | |
| So he's playing a game. | |
| You're exactly right. | |
| It's the ability to have, you know, the Senate plus one or the Senate plus two, right? | |
| And also start to work within the judiciary to basically legislate from the bench, so to speak. | |
| That's not what other people are doing. | |
| Like, there are people within the Republican Party right now that are like, okay, we are not popular. | |
| We are a demonstrative minority of the electorate at this point. | |
| The best thing that we can possibly do is to make Democrats or Liberals or Socialists or Progressives illegal. | |
| Right? | |
| It's the idea that these people are technically terrorists and that they are conspirators, which we were talking about before we got logged on here today, before we started taping. | |
| I mean, the President of the United States and Bill Barr, the Attorney General today, announced that New York City, Seattle, and Portland are anarchist zones at this point, and they're in danger of having federal funding pulled from them. | |
| Of course, we've also had the President of the United States say that Antifa, which is not a thing, right? | |
| It's a mindset, I suppose. | |
| It makes you a terrorist, right? | |
| And I've had my fair share of people who have come after me and been like, you're an Antifa terrorist. | |
| You deserve to be arrested. | |
| I've been like ratted on as an Antifa terrorist. | |
| I have to tell you, I haven't been to any Antifa meetings because there's no such thing. | |
| There are people who literally want to dominate the political space to the point where there is no opponent, right? | |
| There is no antagonist. | |
| There is only one mindset, and that is the Republican Party, or the right, or white supremacy, or whatever you want to call it. | |
| There's a reason why they're talking about patriotic education, why they're talking about terrorists, all this stuff. | |
| Mitch McConnell is doing what you're saying. | |
| It's not expecting to win a lot of popularity contests and having that ability. | |
| There are other people right now who are trying to author something larger, more insidious, and much more dangerous. | |
| And where I'm coming from, as far as the death of the American experiment, is that this is supposed to be a democracy. | |
| Government is supposed to follow the will of the people. | |
| So, for instance, with Roe v. Wade, we know that 70-whatever percent of the country is in favor of having Roe v. Wade. | |
| And yet, here are this tiny subset of people who are able to dominate and control how our laws are being written, and they don't care. | |
| I mean, they get to hide behind the notion of abortion is murder and that justifies anything they can do to violate any norms or any laws to get their agenda. | |
| And then worst of all, like you said, all of a sudden it's the Antifa people who are the terrorists and all that stuff. | |
| Which, by the way, like whatever, I don't have a problem if you want to criticize the violent protests that are going on, the people who are doing all that bullshit stuff. | |
| But, like, the fact that they're going to so overtly ignore the white supremacist threat is a bigger issue. | |
| Well, and I have to say this because this is something that we keep losing sight of. | |
| It's not just about abortion. | |
| Because listen, the right is not actually pro-life. | |
| It's not about saving children. | |
| They understand that this is a wonderful political cudgel for them, right? | |
| And here's the thing. | |
| I want to make this very clear. | |
| The idea of Mitch McConnell or Republican strategists or electioneers standing around or sitting around in a room They are carving up, and by the way, Nixon was one of the people who pioneered this. | |
| This is a Nixonian special, right? | |
| They look at this idea of creating a demographic niche, right? | |
| We need a little bit from here, a little bit from here, and eventually we will reach the point where we can win an election or we can hold power. | |
| This whole thing with their anti-abortion stuff, their so-called pro-life stuff, it's not a deep-seated belief. | |
| Like, there are evangelicals who, like, weep about this and go into ecstasies about this, right? | |
| The Republican Party doesn't care about this because if they actually cared about abortions, if they actually cared about so-called pro-life ideas, they would help people once they were born, right? | |
| They wouldn't be trying to push people into the maw of a generational pandemic, okay? | |
| The idea that they might overturn Roe v. Wade will surely make some evangelicals happy, but do you know who else it's about? | |
| It's also about white supremacists who believe in white replacement, right? | |
| It's the idea that demographics are going to change. | |
| Well, let's go down the row. | |
| It's about labor rights. | |
| It's about personal rights. | |
| It's about equality. | |
| You would see, I mean, You know, things like affirmative action would be completely gone. | |
| Discrimination laws would be completely gone. | |
| You would have a court that would rubber stamp everything that Donald Trump would want to do. | |
| And I'm talking about destroying democratic institutions. | |
| We can't lose sight of that here. | |
| It's not just about, oh, we're going to knock down abortion. | |
| Because abortion is more of a metaphor for them. | |
| Right? | |
| It's the ability to control, right? | |
| For everyone else, it is. | |
| It's taking away their rights and their freedom of their body. | |
| For the Republicans, it's about control. | |
| It's about taking over a larger sector. | |
| And to piggyback on that, because it's all really great stuff, is Trump was in Bemidji, Minnesota, which I have been to, Jared. | |
| I've actually went to camp in Bemidji, Minnesota. | |
| I had the worst fucking time of my entire life and never went back to camp after that. | |
| Our poor Bemidji listeners right now, who are just so upset hearing their beloved Nick Halseman. | |
| They probably hate Camp Thunderbird, too, because it's like, you know, infringing on there. | |
| I'm calling them out. | |
| I wonder if it's still around. | |
| But nonetheless, it was a terrible time and a terrible camp. | |
| And here we are. | |
| But he was actually doing the calls of, you know, he's like, how do you like all these immigrants coming to Minnesota? | |
| because Minnesota in Minneapolis has a vibrant community of people coming from Africa and just creating these lives that are making the whole fabric of the community much richer. | |
| Ilhan Omar is sort of born out of that exodus from there. | |
| And then he references her. | |
| But he couldn't be talking to a more white, Nordic, Minnesota crowd, and they were eating it up and just cheering him on without even probably realizing how despicable what he was saying was. | |
| But it's exactly what you're talking about. | |
| It's like they just continue to stir up the other and how they'll never win another Republican election again because of this. | |
| And that's what he was saying in 2016. | |
| And here we are where it really is more clear the Republicans are going to start losing more of these elections as we go further. | |
| But the kind of rhetoric he's using just enables them to justify any means necessary. | |
| Any of these things that are really dubious as far as the norms that they're shattering or even outright corruption to secure these elections. | |
| So here's the thing that people need to get is that Trump isn't an aberration in this. | |
| And I didn't understand this until I wrote American Rule, but all of this stuff that Republicans are always talking about, right? | |
| Abortion. | |
| They're talking about taxes. | |
| They're talking about school choice. | |
| The Republican Party, the modern Republican Party, has its roots in desegregation. | |
| They want, oh, small government, right? | |
| Keeping government out of our lives and making choices for us. | |
| Or market solutions. | |
| Right. | |
| All of this has its start from the fact that the modern Republican Party was forged in desegregation, right? | |
| Abortion is a lot more palatable of an argument to be out making for the right than it is to be like, by the way, we truly believe in desegregation. | |
| School choice sounds a whole lot better than we should have segregated schools. | |
| Right, you don't mean desegregation, you want segregation. | |
| You want segregation, is what these people want. | |
| They do. | |
| That is the honest-to-God truth. | |
| The American right wants to get back to a white supremacist worldview and matter of control. | |
| Here's where Trump deviates. | |
| He says the quiet part loud, right? | |
| He doesn't come completely out and say it. | |
| But what Trump is advocating is for a much more honest approach to what the right wants, which is they want to quote-unquote make America great again and they want to get to a point where white supremacy exists, controls everything, and all people of color and women and LGBTQ Americans | |
| They want an America that looks a lot like the America we're in right now but there's a matter of control and fear that keeps other people from engaging in the conversation. | |
| But Trump is not an aberration. | |
| He's carrying on the project of the American right. | |
| It just so happens he's less articulate about it and he's more open about what they actually want. | |
| Right. | |
| And it's almost like to be on an even playing field, you almost want to tell the Republicans, just acknowledge it. | |
| Just acknowledge the absolute incredible hypocrisy and the you don't care at all about ethics. | |
| Just sort of go with that and just you know if you want to embrace that I feel like it would make it a little bit easier to have a discussion with the other side because at least now we're on sort of even footing here where we could really have what we're doing and that's what gets frustrating is that it's not to them this is a you know the end of the Republic will happen if a Democrat ever would take over again. | |
| The entire dissolution of our country, which is sort of what I'm saying happens if Trump wins again. | |
| We keep harping on that, how they just mimic what we say. | |
| But that hits me hard when I read those things, where it's the death of a republic, it's the death of every kind of religion you'd ever imagine having. | |
| All the, you know, a Democrat would just end any kind of civil discourse. | |
| It would end any kind of pious living that we might, you know, people would live in and righteousness. | |
| It would just turn into Sodom and Gomorrah, basically. | |
| That really hurts when I read that kind of stuff, because clearly we know that that's not that would not happen if that if a Democrat were to take over. | |
| And that there are plenty of people who are progressives who are religious and who live lives like that. | |
| And I think that's a good thing. | |
| And yet they probably believe that that would happen if they lose this election. | |
| Well, first and foremost, I'm doing research right now on a follow-up to American Rule, and what I am finding is that all of these apocalypses that these people hold in their minds, and I'm talking about Book of Revelation, I'm talking about lesser-known ones like the Apocalypse of Peter, these ideas, right? | |
| Apocalypses are always written in the Christian community when something happens politically that they don't agree with, right? | |
| Because there's like, oh, I don't agree with that, and here is what's going to happen if we continue going down that path, right? | |
| Oh, if we do not win and if we don't have control of society, then eventually we're going to have the end of the world. | |
| It's just a catch-all, right? | |
| Anything that ever happens that they don't agree with, it suddenly becomes the apocalypse. | |
| It's centuries old. | |
| Okay, but then on top of it, you know, we reach this point where you actually look at the Democratic Party. | |
| The Democratic Party has been run by evangelical, openly expressing Christians, right? | |
| Like, Barack Obama didn't give a speech that didn't talk about God and his faith in Christ, and they turned him into an anti-Christ. | |
| They turned him into a Muslim sleeper agent of the New World Order. | |
| Like, they've got what they want. | |
| They have a country where, in order to hold office or to be particularly successful, you at least have to kiss the ring of the evangelical group, right? | |
| That's what they've wanted, but it's not enough. | |
| It can never be enough. | |
| They have to continually accumulate power and influence, or else it's the apocalypse. | |
| And it's one of their most tried and true political maneuvers that they've got. | |
| When I'm saying they, and I think you're they as well, we're not talking about the politicians. | |
| I think you made that clear, and I want to make it clear too. | |
| We're talking about the people who are following the politicians. | |
| And so it's like, I was watching, have you seen the video of the guy who was in the school board meeting and not wearing a mask, and the cops had to come, and it was in somewhere white. | |
| I don't even remember where. | |
| Do you know what city it was? | |
| Anyway. | |
| I can't. | |
| I saw the video though. | |
| And so, you know, and he was sitting like, he's like, you're going to have to tase me. | |
| You're going to have to arrest me. | |
| I want everyone to film this and see it. | |
| He sounded like a fucking freedom rider. | |
| He literally thought he was sitting at a counter in 1955 with black people to sort of make it a point that like we all need to be sitting together or going to sit in the back of the bus. | |
| Literally, that's what he thought he was doing. | |
| That is right. | |
| It's martyrdom. | |
| It's martyrdom. | |
| Because one of the things I keep finding in my research is, again, that like when, you know, this so-called age of persecution against Christians. | |
| But when you actually start looking back in the history of it, it wasn't as bad as it's been advertised. | |
| What you actually have is a lot of political persecution and not religious persecution which those two things are a little bit different particularly in that time period but you actually have these Christians in this time period who are going up to magistrates and like emperors and they're like martyr me and they're like I don't Want to. | |
| Like, just hang out and let's have a society where we treat each other well. | |
| And they're like, no martyr me. | |
| Right? | |
| Because the truth is, and this is something I don't think I've understood until very recently, it's perceived persecution. | |
| Right, that's what gives particularly reactionaries and the American right power is the belief that they're being persecuted. | |
| And the reason that they feel like they're being persecuted is they believe that having to tolerate people who don't agree with them. | |
| And by the way, I'm talking about white identity evangelicals here, right? | |
| I'm talking about people who would rather not share a society with black people in which that there isn't some sort of strict racial hierarchy. | |
| They don't want to be around LGBTQ people who are expressing themselves openly. | |
| They'd rather not be around women who are independent and thinking for themselves, right? | |
| And the list goes on and on and on. | |
| They believe that that's persecution. | |
| And as a result, they need to persecute people in order to protect themselves from that persecution. | |
| And there's this weird mindset in it that I've been finding lately, and I've been reading way too much of, like, St. | |
| Augustine of Hippo, Nick. | |
| Like, it's this idea that, oh, when I persecute, it's not bad, because I'm in the right. | |
| But here's the problem. | |
| persecution and that's when I'm being persecuted but when I'm persecuting them I'm actually engaging in holy persecution and that mindset is where this all is coming from and it has motivated and animated this entire movement but here's the problem someone has to be right yes and it feels like we're right and we're we're certainly you know rational and and and you know doing the things that would be on the right side of history and we've been saying that um that | |
| They argue the exact opposite on their side. | |
| And so it's like, what happens there? | |
| How do you get to a place that transcends where we are now, when it seems so clear to both sides that they're so completely right that this is the end of the world if the other side wins? | |
| Yeah, but here's, okay, so here's the main difference in all of that. | |
| Like, when you are a fundamentalist and you believe that everyone who agrees or disagrees with you, or everyone who disagrees with you has to be persecuted and or killed. | |
| Like, I just read about a massacre in Harran where they went in, like, I want to say it's in the 5th or 6th century. | |
| They went in this town and the people who refused to convert, they cut off their limbs and hung them in the streets. | |
| Like, that's not okay. | |
| Right? | |
| Like that's not alright. | |
| I don't care if people go to church and they have their beliefs or whatever. | |
| I'm not going to go out and say, you know what, I disagree with what you do so now I'm going to burn this down or now you're going to have to die. | |
| It's a matter of shared society and that is not what these people are engaging in. | |
| And that's why the things that McConnell is doing and Trump are doing That they don't work within a society. | |
| It's this quote-unquote hardball which it pisses me off every time like Ezra Klein calls it that, right? | |
| And he's like, well you really can't fault what what Mitch McConnell did here. | |
| It's the right decision. | |
| It's like the hell it's the right decision. | |
| It decays society and now we're in a cycle of revenge, Nick. | |
| If we pack the court, right? | |
| If the Democrats pack the court or the left packs the court, do you think Republicans aren't going to pack the court? | |
| Do you think there aren't gonna be terrorist attacks and violence in the street? | |
| No! | |
| It's going to continually cycle through. | |
| I mean, it's really hard to see how this thing doesn't end without, like, mass violence and mass retaliation because they broke the rules. | |
| Right. | |
| And getting all the way back to that, you know, that's why there's nothing that the Democrats can really do. | |
| Now, they could in theory filibuster and somehow just shut everything down and read Harry Potter for the next, you know, three weeks or four weeks, whatever it is. | |
| I suppose that they, I mean, you know, and we've seen that a little bit in the recent history. | |
| But the funny thing was I even called, you know, do an impeachment. | |
| And, you know, obviously the argument is what's the House, not the Senate. | |
| So how does that, Gum up the works for a vote on the Supreme Court. | |
| But Nancy Pelosi came out and basically was acknowledging that that is one of their feathers in their quiver. | |
| Feathers? | |
| No, arrows in their quiver. | |
| Arrows. | |
| And feathers are on the arrows. | |
| And they might use that. | |
| But again, it all just plays into the chaos and the revenge porn that we have to deal with now. | |
| So, my fear, and listen, I understand the whole, like, we have things that we could possibly do that Pelosi is saying, but I'm also afraid of making impeachment just a political maneuver. | |
| Do you know what I mean? | |
| Just like, oh, let's slow this down. | |
| Because here's the thing, if Trump wins the election or steals the election, you have to have impeachment there as an option and it has to seem legitimate. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| Like, if you just pull it out in order to try and delay something, it's pretty transparent. | |
| What I would say at this point, and I have to say it at this point, I still think that the American people themselves have to do something. | |
| I think it might be time for mass protest if they try and push this thing down. | |
| I really do. | |
| And we have to change the narrative and we have to make it very, very clear that they are acting outside the scope of representation. | |
| And I think a lot of these maneuvers that we're talking about, maybe they would work, maybe they wouldn't, but also that would result in loss of trust And loss of legitimacy. | |
| And then I think we just cycle and cycle and cycle. | |
| I mean, yeah, it's a long game if you play it that way because you're trying to turn hearts and minds and create a groundswell. | |
| And that's what do it. | |
| And by the way, you could say it doesn't work, but look at what happened in Minneapolis with all the protesting. | |
| They agreed to go and look at how they're going to structure the police department and train. | |
| So there was movement. | |
| I mean, I haven't heard much since then, but certainly that was interesting to think, oh, OK, well, these protests and even, you know, somewhat, you know, with a little violence popping out every now and then. | |
| Had an effect. | |
| People listened and people tried to do something better. | |
| Now, the thing in Portland is interesting because they keep doing the protests and I don't even know at this point if they're having meetings, if they're demands, or if the local government's trying to figure out what they want so they can maybe reflect the will of the people. | |
| But at the very least, I've been advocating for that for a long time. | |
| A million person march on the mall. | |
| Yeah, I don't know that anything is apparent right now. | |
| to make our voices heard. | |
| It still seems like that would be up for discussion to do. | |
| But again, I don't think it would achieve the goal of overturning an election and making sure Biden wins. | |
| Yeah, I don't know that anything is apparent right now. | |
| The race is so close right now in all the key places. | |
| Well, and I tell you right now that I truly believe Joe Biden will win, particularly if it's free and fair. | |
| But I have to tell you that this cinder block in the bathtub, it feels like this is going to lead to more radicalism, more violence, more chaos in the streets. | |
| I truly and honestly believe that, particularly if that justice is unseated. | |
| The more that the government does things that does not reflect the vast majority of the country's beliefs, the more you're going to have civil unrest. | |
| That's that long game we're talking about. | |
| We'll have protests every night for months and months across the country. | |
| and again I you know Trump would probably just shrug and be like I mean listen he does have his ego and he does like being worshipped and it does have an effect like he sees those things but it also probably gives them another sense of oh look at these snowflakes and we're really getting them mad it's great like that's what I worry about too it's like it's almost like a They're getting off on that. | |
| And it encourages them in some weird way, too. | |
| And then, again, eventually they lose, right? | |
| Eventually, if this is going the way it looks like it's going, there'll be hardly any of, you know, evangelicals left in the country. | |
| There'll be hardly any of these, you know, conservative Christian people who are, you know, basically driving these elections. | |
| And they'll lose. | |
| But, you know, at what cost? | |
| By the time we get there, this whole country will be like Handmaid's Tale. | |
| You know, it's funny that you bring up The Handmaid's Tale, because I think that is obviously the pop culture sort of understanding that we have of what could potentially happen in this country. | |
| But you know, I was talking about that this weekend. | |
| I think Gilead, which is of course the dystopia in The Handmaid's Tale. | |
| It's a little bit different than what we're looking at in America, because I think the people that we're talking about, they depend on the mythology of America to survive, right? | |
| They need an America that looks, feels, smells, appears to be America, right? | |
| The way that these people, Donald Trump, a Bill Barr, a Pompeo, any of these people involved in this overarching project for power, they are interested in creating a situation Where it appears that all of our freedoms are intact but people are too afraid to use them, right? | |
| And that vulnerable populations are kept in check. | |
| People of color, LGBTQ Americans, women, poor people. | |
| That all of those people are sort of like made to shut up because of the threat of violence or actual violence, right? | |
| It's the 2 plus 2 equals 5 and if you don't see it we will beat you until you see it or we'll kill you. | |
| And so The Handmaid's Tale is a decent analog, but we have to remember it's actually even more insidious in that it can happen without us realizing that it's happened. | |
| Managed democracies take over and then one day you look around and you realize that you're living in a facsimile of what you used to know and what you used to believe was real. | |
| And that's exactly what Trump is trying to, you know, push us into, that mindset where we simply just want to, you know, be so concerned about ourselves only. | |
| And that, well, right now, like, I have a job, I can make some money, and I can, you know, whatever. | |
| There is no sense of community or self, which, by the way, isn't necessarily Trump. | |
| That is the Republican Party, in my mind. | |
| And that's the path. | |
| And then when we start to lose the notion that we are of one nation and one community, And then, you know, and our place in the world, you know, is important as well. | |
| Then you're on that path. | |
| Now, you might never get to the Handmaid's Tale path, but you're starting on it and they're laying the groundwork for it. | |
| And so, at least, I think you're right as far as, you know, we can't let it happen and we need to be able to do, like, to physically do things To stop that from happening, and whether that's marching, because again, it could feel very futile. | |
| Like, what can you really do in the face of the entire bureaucracy of the United States government? | |
| It feels overwhelming. | |
| But then again, like I said earlier, these protests have effects. | |
| They actually do get things done. | |
| Not all the time, but enough times to show that there is an effectual reason for doing them. | |
| We have to figure out how to get more organized, I suppose, and figure out how to have a free and fair election, certainly in a month. | |
| I'm so glad that you said it that way, because one of the important things to understand is that the American right wants us to feel powerless. | |
| They want us to feel apathetic. | |
| They want us to feel like politics is a spectacle that we watch on TV, but God forbid we ever get involved in it, right? | |
| Because it goes back. | |
| We did a Patreon-only episode talking about network, right? | |
| And Howard Beale has that moment in his rant where he says, just leave me alone in my own house, right? | |
| Just go ahead and do whatever you're going to do. | |
| Leave me alone in my own house. | |
| What they want to tell us is the austerity that we're going through, which by the way is artificial and created, that doesn't need to exist. | |
| It's all because they take so much of our money and put it in national security and all their projects. | |
| That we're so concerned with our jobs and our livelihoods and our fates that we don't recognize in one another that we're living, breathing humans who deserve respect and love and dignity. | |
| And the antidote to all of this is community. | |
| It's building community. | |
| It's building connections. | |
| It's repairing the atomization of society. | |
| Because the more that we feel powerless and apathetic, the more that they win. | |
| And I'm so glad that we started having this conversation today because on Thursday's show, I'm sorry, Friday's show, it's hard to remember. | |
| What is time? | |
| On Friday's show, we're going to have Robert P. Jones, the author of White Too Long, The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. | |
| We're going to talk about a lot of this stuff and how this movement has come about and even some ideas about how we might be able to weather the storm. | |
| That's going to be really important, so please check it out. | |
| Also, we have to mention, I shudder thinking about this, Nick. | |
| We're a week away from the first presidential debate between Trump and Biden. | |
| I still have doubts about whether or not it's going to happen, but it sounds like it's going to happen. | |
| It sounds like hell or high water it's going to happen. | |
| Here's the thing. | |
| I feel pretty rough about politics right now. | |
| I know you do as well. | |
| I mean, we weren't a minute and a half in before you were calling for the end of the American experiment. | |
| I assume some of our listeners are as well. | |
| We have an option here where we have a community that we're building over on patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. | |
| A bunch of muckrakers who get together. | |
| We watch this stuff together. | |
| We're going to be offering that for every presidential debate. | |
| You can come and watch it live with Nick and me and for free analysis and instant reactions to this whole thing. | |
| We'll get through it together. | |
| That is patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. | |
| Go over there and check it out. | |
| In the meantime, you can find Nick over at Can You Hear Me? | |
| SMH. | |
| You can find me at J.Y. | |
| Sexton. | |
| And seriously, it's rough out there. |