Co-hosts Nick Hauselman and Jared Yates Sexton discuss the first day of Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation hearings, the culmination of the Republican Party's project to take over the judiciary in order to protect the Right's control on politics and the economy, how "Originalism" is an oxymoronic concept meant to legitimize oppression, and what the confirmation could mean for politics moving forward.
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Otherwise, this is a charade when they say this is a normal Judiciary Committee hearing for a Supreme Court nomination.
There's nothing about this that's normal.
This hearing itself is a microcosm of Trump's dangerous ineptitude in dealing with the COVID pandemic.
Trump can't even keep the White House safe.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jodey at Saxton.
As always, I'm here with Nick Halseman.
We are taping this on Monday, October 12th as the first day of confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett are being held.
As we all know, this is a stolen Supreme Court seat that should not exist.
And Donald Trump right now, by pushing forward Coney Barrett, stands to change the balance of the Supreme Court, possibly for decades at this point.
So far, it has been rather uneventful outside of the Republicans showing up, including Mike Lee, who is apparently, you know, just tested positive for coronavirus, but showed up anyway, because why the hell not?
What is a disease, Nick?
And, you know, Lindsey Graham, who has refused to take a test.
So, we know that this is more or less a Petri dish, as it's being held, and they're trying to take advantage of Their majority while they still can.
But we're also seeing take place a battle for the future and I don't think that that is at all hyperbolic what we're actually watching here.
The Republican Party is trying to realize a decades-long operation to control the Supreme Court and more or less put democracy and ascending demographics and prior vulnerable populations And a checkmate to try and hold back any sort of progress that they might make if the Republican Party loses elections, as it appears that they will.
I mean, not only is Mike Lee out there without a mask, it's 10 days to the day of being diagnosed with COVID, which is clearly, at the very least, if it wasn't really a severe case, this would be the last day of where he should be isolating.
Shouldn't be in front of anybody.
Ted fucking Cruz calls in.
He has a temerity to not show up, because ostensibly he is concerned about getting COVID, right?
He was hanging out with Mike Lee all that time without a mask.
So he phones it in, in a lot more ways than one, and I have to sit there and watch his face in a close-up on Zoom talking about What this means, and it was so infuriating to me.
In fact, we had paused it for a second.
I had a free stream with Ted Cruz on my screen, and I literally started yelling to the wife to, like, get it off somehow.
Just fast forward.
Get him away.
It really is disgusting what they're doing.
Trump is also out there.
Clearly, he had a severe case.
Without question, he had a severe case.
And he is now, inside of, you know, the 10 days, he's now campaigning again when it should be 20 days of isolation.
Disgusting.
You know, the whole thing is, first of all, how long ago was it that the entire Republican Party caught coronavirus?
Because it feels like months ago at this point.
But all of these people are still contagious.
I mean, Trump just held a super spreader event at the White House, which only like 300 people showed up at, I believe.
And look like Smurfs, by the way, wearing blue shirts and red MAGA hats, which is just a really interesting visual that they decided on.
And now, in order to push through Coney Barrett, and we're going to talk in a second about what her nomination and confirmation means about what the Republican Party has tried to do and what they're trying to achieve right now, but they're trying to push this through as quickly as humanly possible because every poll shows that Donald Trump is going to lose this election
And if he's not able to steal this election or throw America into a chaotic situation and possibly push us to the point of civil war, they might lose their opportunity to realize a project that they have been Operating for and have broken every rule and every precedent and every norm, behaved completely hypocritically and underhandedly for decades.
And that's what this whole thing represents right now.
And we're watching it and they're putting people's lives at risk simply to try and make this thing happen.
Well, there's two ways to explain how they're running this campaign.
First of all, the visual you described as far as the Smurfs, it's in front of the fucking Washington Monument in the background because it's on the lawn of the White House, which is a complete and utter violation of the Hatch Act.
I mean, they've taken a shit on every norm and every acceptable... Do you realize how far we've moved beyond the Hatch Act?
Like, it's just a blatant federal crime and we're just gone.
Well, who's supposed to enforce that?
That's a great question.
Who's supposed to enforce anything?
But, you know, our norms and our laws and our precedent and our Constitution will save us, Nick.
I'm just, you know, that's what I keep getting told.
Right.
So we have, you know, a couple ways.
Now, it looks pretty clear to me the way they're running the campaign is, first of all, all of these rallies are simply for Trump's ego, right?
That's all it is.
They're not gaining anything from this.
They're not going to reach out across the aisle, whatever, to get more of anybody.
And they're severely cutting their ad spending in a lot of different markets as we get closer to the campaign.
This is a campaign that looks like they know they're going to lose.
And then meaning that the only way they are going to win is either to contest it successfully in the courts or they have Russia to manipulate votes.
And either of those things are to kill democracy in one swoop.
And again, speaking of who is supposed to enforce the Hatch Act, who is supposed to be the person and the entity that's supposed to stop Russia from interfering in our election?
We can't even get that straight.
They won't do anything about it besides sort of, you know, meekly tell somebody about it in a congressional hearing.
So that's what it tells me, is that they already know that they're going to lose as well.
They're going to lose the Senate, probably.
That's what the numbers look like, too.
Or narrowly, like maybe it'll be a tie, and then if they lose the White House, it's not a tie anymore.
So this is where we're at, where I think that's the desperation that you can smell.
And that's what's so worrisome, because that's when they could do the most egregiously horrible things that we haven't even thought about yet.
I mean, the possibilities are endless and nauseating.
And we have a situation where, for all intents and purposes, Barrett will be confirmed.
And whether or not Biden will pack the court, which by the way, just so I can go on the record, Biden's inability to answer the question about court packing and dodging it constantly is such a terrible look.
Like, the Republican Party would not hesitate to promise court packing.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, if the challenger was a Republican challenger running against a Democratic president who would be changing the court, oh my god, if people were asking about court packing, they wouldn't be like, well, I don't know, we'll think about court packing.
They would be like, Vote for us and we will pack that court until, like, nothing can ever be done again.
I don't know if it's an issue.
I don't know if anyone really cares that he's not answering that.
Right?
That's the difference.
I agree, but it is that sort of, um, that sort of trademark democratic hand-wringing.
You know what I mean?
It's just like, please don't call me a liberal, sir.
Please don't call me a progressive.
I'll do anything that you want and sure, we'll go ahead and we'll sponsor, you know, the Iraq War and the Patriot Act.
But in this situation, what is actually taking place with Barrett is if the Republican Party, and they have worked for decades on this judicial project, this is the crown jewel of this anti-democratic judicial operation that they've been running.
They've been packing these courts left and right, On top of that, they've now stolen a Supreme Court justice, right?
Right out from underneath the Democratic presidency of Barack Obama.
They're trying to create a situation.
And by the way, the thing that's getting all the headlines, of course, is Roe v. Wade.
And this is probably going to be a situation where eventually we're going to see something like a Roe v. Wade reversed, or amended somehow, or moved around to the point where life in blue states and red states will be completely different.
Like, that is one thing that's going to happen.
But we're also talking about everything from child labor laws, we're talking about minimum wage, we're talking about taxes, we're talking about representation, we're talking about civil liberties, civil rights, we're talking about the whole thing.
Is what we're talking about.
And the Republican Party is a minority party.
They do not represent even anywhere near a majority of the country.
And that's one of the problems, by the way, is that our media is consistently, because they're one of the major parties, they treat them like they have an equal seat at the table.
No, America is not divided on any of these issues.
Roe v. Wade is supported by a vast majority of Americans.
Minimum wage, all this stuff, supported by a vast majority.
What they are looking for is they're looking to create sort of a stopgap.
They can lose these elections left and right, and then all of a sudden, if the Democrats are in power, they won't be able to do Run the country, essentially, because the Supreme Court will take on every law that ends up happening.
That's what this is all about.
It's about rolling back the clock and we have to talk about the idea of originalism and what it is that Barrett and Scalia before her and what all of these Republicans are actually trying to do because they are trying to recreate a white supremacist aristocracy in this country.
Well, I do like the pivot that you can go to when you're talking about packing the courts, in the sense that they can then say, well, you know, if you want to talk about packing the courts, let's look at what the Republicans are doing, what you just described.
They're the ones who have packed the courts in that sense, where they've rammed through all these judges that are either unqualified or so ideologue-ish, whatever that word is.
They're such ideologues.
That they're going to be able to control the legislature without having control of the body.
That's what's really the court packing here.
I don't know if you remember, I'm old enough to remember that, and this also makes a lot of sense, because remember I was questioning, like, how is it possible that McConnell would have known that he could hold up Merrick Garland?
You know, everyone thought Hillary was going to win.
She was going to put him in anyway, but he did.
He held it out and it worked to perfection.
Well, I'm old enough to remember that a lot of senators on the Republican side had said, We could just hold this open forever until we get a Republican president.
There's nothing in the Constitution, which by the way has to be amended now to change that as far as what these protocols are for advising consent for Supreme Court justices, but they could have and maybe would have.
If I'm not mistaken, I think McCain Was part of that saying, well, we don't have to fill it if we don't want to.
We can wait as long as we like.
That's insane.
We need to fix that.
So that's where they're, they're the ones who are actually like sort of packing these courts.
And again, it would be, it would be nice to have some progressive red meat thrown out there and just say, yeah, well, we, we're going to have to do something here.
We're gonna have to add DC and Puerto Rico estates.
We're gonna have to, you know, add, uh, I think that California deserves at least two more senators.
You know, let's go there.
Wait, are you advocating breaking up California?
Did Nick Halseman just break some news on the McCraig Podcast?
You're advocating for California to be broken into separate states?
I mean, listen, or something.
OK, Congress is based on the number of people that live in those states.
And I know that's the whole reason why the Senate is not.
But it needs to reflect, because of what you said, it needs to reflect the will of the people.
And now let's get into the originalism discussion, because It is clear, and we've said this ad nauseum, that the Constitution was written and framed by people who had no interest in democracy, and they simply thought they were smarter than everybody else and needed to control all of this.
Now, you know, is it possible that back in 1776, the way things were done, it was probably a lot closer to what England was then.
You only had a few people that were actually educated.
So they might have actually had some argument to be like, well, we are studied and educated.
We can't let other people who haven't gone to grade school vote or whatever.
But that's clearly not the case now.
And it's time to get away from this and that ideology.
Well, a couple of things that you just said that we need to address.
First and foremost, I think the way you just framed that is one of the reasons why we're in the situation that we are.
It didn't take place in 1776.
We actually had another thing that was in place, the Articles of Confederation, for years after the Declaration of Independence.
It's that marriage between the two that has always sort of clouded things, right?
Everybody always likes to take the Declaration of Independence and the rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson and then sort of wed it to the Constitution, as if this was the same idea of liberty and democracy and equality.
Well, what ended up happening was that the Constitution was put together by a group of wealthy, powerful, slave-holding white men Who got together.
They were not authorized to write the Constitution.
Which, by the way, is the great secret of America.
The Constitutional Convention was not a Constitutional Convention.
They were supposed to go in and edit the Articles of Confederation.
But James Madison's just like, screw that.
I don't care if I have authority.
We're going to do this.
And it was created intentionally, and if you go back and you look at this, and if you haven't already, I just released a lecture on this, The American Rule Lecture Part 2, where you actually go back and you read about it.
Not only were they anti-democracy, they thought that an excess of democracy was the worst possible thing that could even happen.
Which again, I'm very happy that Mike Lee came out in opposition to democracy the other day, because they're only making it clearer and clearer.
I think all the time about something you said.
I want to say it was like on the third time we did a podcast.
You were like, I'm so grateful that they're not even hiding this stuff anymore.
And, you know, I really am.
I'm glad that they feel comfortable enough to come out and say, you know, I think most people should be ruled over and have no voice in this stuff.
That's who the Federalists were.
They created a system where, like you were talking about, the Senate.
The Senate was there for people to be appointed and, you know, quote-unquote, fittest men.
That way you could have the House of Representatives where, you know, the common people, the rubes, could send their people.
But the House was more or less neutralized by the Senate, right?
The Senate was there to let the passions of the people cool, so to speak.
The presidency was set aside for the aristocracy, the Supreme Court was set aside for the aristocracy, and meanwhile you had the House of Representatives for the common people.
Well, that entire thing is about white supremacy, Nick.
That entire thing is about creating an aristocracy where certain people rule over others.
But it was hidden in the mythology that America was about freedom and equality and liberty.
It was a bunch of bullshit.
It was a sales pitch, is what it was.
It was propaganda.
And what the Republican Party is trying to do right now, the same way that the Federalists did, The Federalists hated the people.
They were constantly terrified of the people.
If you look at John Adams, who, by the way, HBO did a massive favor by creating that miniseries and sort of whitewashing his history.
Adams was like the first proto-fascist president, more or less.
He took away people's rights.
He was trying to throw people out of the country who criticized him.
The Federalists were afraid of democracy.
And then it wasn't until Thomas Jefferson came in in 1800 that we started moving towards this idea of populism and democracy as a good thing.
So, originalism is all about trying to move back to that white supremacist aristocracy.
And that's what we're watching with the Republican Party right now.
They don't trust the people because the people reject them.
Sounds, yeah, I might make that point too.
It sounds so familiar now that we have a party that thinks they know better and thinks that they know, oh, we don't need to pay attention to what the will of the people want because when we get our stuff involved, you'll see, it'll be so much better and this is the way the country is supposed to be run.
The problem is, is we've got a lot of evidence already To prove that these things don't work very well at all, and are certainly not balanced and fair for the majority of Americans.
And that's where they don't care, right?
At that point, you can't drill down deep enough to let them understand that they have any sense that, oh, what your policies will do will simply punish poor people and black people and Hispanic people and Asian people.
Like they don't care about that.
They cannot have any sort of self-reflection because it seems so clear to them that what they want to enact will just simply be better in some weird, vague, general sense.
And of course, everyone must be better off for that for sure.
And then you hear it in Trump's voice when he keeps trying to trumpet that unemployment rates are sinking amongst the minorities as if this is now the end all be all, that there's no more racism anymore.
Like that's basically the tone he enacts when he references that.
And it can't be more wrong.
Yeah, it's that concept of colorblindness, which of course is what Reagan sort of ushered in in the 1980s.
The idea that racism's gone, and misogyny's gone.
Like, everybody who's still talking about that is playing a race card or trying to gain an advantage.
Well, it's the idea that Hollywood would be allowed to do the movie Soul Man.
Soul Man was, mildly put, a poor choice of a main movie.
Not one ripple, right?
Not one ripple racially as far as I remember from that either.
And, you know, the entire idea was to have a racist system and tell everyone that there's no racism.
I mean, that's what it was all about.
It was about covering that up from the very beginning.
And you see that now with this idea of, like, patriotic education.
We were talking about it before we started taping.
You know, Trump has released this, like, pro-Columbus statement where he's like, liberals are trying to destroy history and rewrite history.
And it's like, no, you have a completely fictional history.
Right, where white people are the champions of everything.
And that's that idea that you were talking about, the idea that if they are in charge, everything will be better.
That's fascism.
When a minority, when a former majority starts to lose power and becomes the minority and thinks the world is going to end, this apocalyptic idea, right, that if democracy takes over, everything will end.
They start believing that democracy is a poison, and so they start destroying democratic institutions.
So what we're watching right now is a group of people who believe that they have righteous truth, divine truth, that God or some sort of spirit reveals to them.
A higher truth that other people just can't get.
And everybody else is stupid and incompetent and incapable and they're just going to ruin everything if they have power.
That is the basis of the Republican Party and that's no way for a country to work when one of the major parties truly and honestly believes that everybody else is unworthy of representation.
There's a reason why Trump came out the other day and said, not only are we going to beat them, we're going to destroy them to the point where they're not in government anymore and they're completely gone.
That's what they're trying to do.
Where do you think that people, whatever people we're talking about, where do they get this notion that there is some sort of higher calling that can speak to only very specific people as long as they're pious enough to hear it?
Where do you think they would get that ideology?
You know, it's weird.
It's almost like religion is being used as a cudgel for fascistic uprisings, and it's almost like it always has since the fall of Rome.
I mean, this thing has been in place for as long as mankind has been around, and we continue to fail to understand that the people who say that they're hearing these voices or that they have some sort of revelation or divine truth, when they get into a place of political power and influence and wealth, They're lying.
They're lying and they're using it to legitimize anything that gives them power and further wealth and further influence.
And the two go hand in hand.
Are there any other places around the world that might also follow this kind of pattern of leadership?
maybe they're hotter more consistently around the year, that would use the same kind of religiosity and tropes like that to convince young men to join their cause.
Does that sound familiar at all to you?
You know, it's really weird because in the places that we're talking about where we have like radical fundamentalism, what you end up doing is you tell people who are frustrated and feel powerless that if you join their group and you – What is it?
You get in trucks and you go out and you terrorize people.
That you too can be powerful and you too can be part of a larger movement and you too can determine how things work.
And the weird thing about that, Nick, is when you pair that fundamentalism with that minority rule, that fascism, when those two things come about, there's a weird Tendency to start telling people what they can do with their bodies.
You start telling people what freedoms they have and what freedoms they don't have.
And you start brutalizing people whenever they question you and your theology of divine right and divine rule.
So you're absolutely right.
It's a different side of the exact same coin.
It's almost like, and hear me out here, It's almost like that over in the past couple of decades in these forever wars, right, it's almost like we were actually engaged in a holy war that further radicalized a project that had been in place for decades before it.
And that we were always heading in that direction and we sort of found each other like two magnets coming together and we radicalized one another at the exact same time.
But that's just me.
That's just me.
That's just something that somebody could say.
Now Trump is also a magnet and the people who follow him are the other edge of that magic magnet.
They've recognized each other and they have now come together and then as a result they've sucked all the other fringes of the Republican Party into the same magnetic force.
Which is the other reason why we need to argue that most of this Republican Party needs to just go.
Because they've also, just by wallowing and being around it so long, they now are reeking in the same smell.
And that's really a bigger issue as well because we keep hearing, well you know what, there are Republicans out there that are holding their nose, they acknowledge that Trump's a terrible person, but they must have the policies.
And that's why we have to just simply vote for him because we're going to get those policies no matter what we do.
But the other problem with that is that those policies that they want also have magnetism.
And you're talking about forced hysterectomies.
You're talking about torture at the border.
You're talking about mass murdering people with COVID.
And that's where you get to the point where I think people want fascism.
They don't necessarily, and they might not be able to put it into words, but we've seen it time and again, even in Russia.
Russia had a revolution, and they went to communism, and then that fell, and they were really excited to, you know, have a glass nosed and actually open it up.
But what did they do?
They fell right back into Tsarist Russia.
Almost like it's in their DNA.
And I feel like that's sort of what we have here with a certain section of this country is there's something about the need to have this dear leader thing that appeals to them so greatly.
But again, it's also connected to the religion part that we talked about.
And that's why that's so dangerous.
And that's at least why the founding fathers got that part right, right?
They understood or they said it, I don't know if they ever meant it, that they needed to have a separation between church and state.
And that just never took.
Well, they fought that fight as deist.
I think it's interesting you brought up the fall of the USSR and how Russians felt about it and how, of course, it led to Vladimir Putin.
There were a lot of Russians, and I feel like you go watch interviews with them and you read articles about this stuff.
You had a lot of Russians who, during the USSR, were oppressed.
They didn't have much.
Of course, they were living in abject poverty in a lot of ways.
They were in a system that didn't work anymore, right?
It was a failing nation in every way, shape, and form.
There were a lot of them that were pissed off that the dream ended.
They wanted to live in the fantasy that Russia was still a powerful place, even as their own eyes told them it wasn't true, even as their own experiences told them it wasn't true.
They wanted to be in that bubble.
Right?
Because at least thinking that the Soviet Union was big and powerful and strong, even as they knew that it wasn't, made them feel occasionally big and powerful and strong, right?
Well, guess what?
America's a failing nation.
And I'm so glad that we're talking about magnets and we're talking about the Soviet Union.
I say this all the time.
We pretend like we won the Cold War.
What actually happened is we dealt each other mortal blows.
The Soviet Union bled out before us.
We've been bleeding for the last 30 years is what's been happening.
And so now we're in this place where the nation is failing and the rest of us are screaming, my god, this thing is running towards a cliff and we're going to go over the cliff if we're not careful.
We need to do something.
We need to do something.
And all of these, and by the way, the Founding Fathers and James Madison, I love how for years there's been one class after another and all these aristocratic, megalomaniacal guys are talking about the genius of Madison's system and What a beautiful system of control James Madison created.
Probably the most beautiful system of government ever created.
Where are those people right now, Dick?
What are those people doing today?
Why are they not talking about the fact that this was a perfect system to jam up when we needed it the most, right?
Because all those things they actually worked on, like we've talked about this multiple times, an idea of shame and a sense of honor and good faith behavior within the system.
So now all of a sudden you have a point where they understood how to game the system better than anybody.
The Republican Party.
They've excelled.
This is why Mitch McConnell is like one of the most powerful people probably in American history, right?
What he has been able to do is exemplary of how you can game the system if you don't care about shame and you're not interested in engaging in good faith politics.
Donald Trump is as well, right?
There are two sides of that coin.
So we now have this moment where they have gotten control of this system through bad faith politics and through a lack of shame.
And now we're rushing towards the cliff and that bubble, that cult that doesn't want to wake up to the reality of America as a failing nation, because that's what Trumpism and fascism is.
It's a gnashing of teeth as a nation fails and a violent denial that the nation is failing.
We're heading towards that cliff right now and this whole confirmation is another, you know, mile marker on the way to that cliff.
Well, I'm determined to believe, and you might have to change my mind or try and change my mind, but I'm determined to believe that the Founding Fathers would not have agreed with originalists now.
The people that want to read the Constitution as if it's a dead document, exactly the way it was written then, versus interpretation as we go forward, I can't believe the Founding Fathers would have agreed with that notion.
They already had lived through centuries of what the English rule was like and the monarchy, and they'd seen that, and they wanted to reject that.
So in my mind they would have been saying we need to establish a form of government that we can have that's interpreted and that's what the bodies are.
So it's just mind blowing to me and also just disgusting that we have people of import who have influence who are continually trying to peddle this notion that we you know and by the way on the fucking Supreme Court itself that we must simply read every word and every phrase the way it was written then and with no interpretation of it.
So, actually, it's a really interesting story to answer what you just said.
It depends on which side of the divide between Jefferson and Adams you are, right?
Because, I mean, Adams was a Federalist who believed that the system was, you know, nearly perfect and about the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of mobs and the American people were dirty and stupid and dangerous, right?
Jefferson, you know, while he was in France, and by the way, there's a reason why he wasn't, like, at the Constitutional Convention.
He was in France starting the French Revolution.
You know, like, he was just, like, mad with revolution.
Let's go take care of it.
He's writing letters back, which, by the way, scared the living shit out of people like Madison.
He was like, we should have a revolution every ten years.
We have to water trees of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
And everybody, like, all the very, very rich aristocracy that was being benefited by the Constitution, they were like, Yeah, I can do without that.
Yeah, I can do without, you know, the poor rising up and killing us and slaughtering.
We'd like to pretend that the Founding Fathers were pretty much in agreement of this.
And, like, we even look at, like, the letters between Jefferson and Adams and we pretend that everything was fine.
Well, one of the reasons why the Supreme Court actually looks at the constitutional idea, like whether or not these laws are constitutional in the first place, wasn't what they were originally supposed to do.
It's actually funny that people who are originalists go ahead and ignore the fact that originally the Supreme Court wasn't supposed to look at laws, right?
That was Marbury Madison.
This was an idea that was put in place in order to hold back populist presidents like Thomas Jefferson.
And that divide is what ends up making the Supreme Court what it is.
So first of all, originalism is straight bullshit.
It's just a way that white supremacists can go ahead and try and turn back the clock to a white supremacist aristocracy and try to sort of maneuver their way around things like conscience and basic human dignity and empathy.
It's a complete and utter lie and smokescreen that, of course, Antonin Scalia more or less brought about.
Isn't it weird?
It took off in the 1980s around Reagan.
That's weird, isn't it?
Isn't it odd how all this just always comes back?
I don't know.
And now that Amy Coney Barrett has made it the centerpiece, she has said that it is my ideology, it's my view of the law, all of that bullshit.
It wasn't even an original idea that the Supreme Court should be doing what it is, so they're just trying to work around and they're trying to use it as a lever of power.
And by the way, even packing the courts is a ridiculous statement because there's nothing in the Constitution that mandates nine judges.
So if they were going to do it, it would be perfectly legal.
That's not a problem.
Meanwhile, the precedent they keep arguing about being able to put somebody in during a presidential election year is also nonsense because there's certainly no precedent to confirming a judge three weeks before the fucking election.
There's no precedent for that.
Ted Cruz can babble on all he wants with his ugly beard about it.
But, like, that's not going to do anything.
It doesn't prove his point.
You know, and Pete Buttigieg is going on Fox, you know, and trying to, like we've said before, slaying them and giving really, you know, pretty good insightful reasons for that, which also makes me wonder, like, why couldn't we just have, maybe it's gotten Pete in there instead of Biden.
Like, Pete in a debate with Trump would have been awesome.
It would have, you know what I mean?
I think Pete would have destroyed him.
It would have been quick.
It wouldn't have missed opportunities.
It would have spoken, you know, you don't think so?
I think he would have.
I think anybody younger would have done that.
I think maybe he would have beaten Trump in debates.
But Pete Buttigieg, I said this on our last podcast, in a sane America, he would be the leader of the Republican Party.
I mean, he's more or less like a center-center-right kind of a guy.
The reason why he goes on Fox News and hands them their lunch is because he's what they claim to be.
Right.
You know?
He's pro-military.
But they buried the fact that he's gay.
Yeah, no, that wouldn't even be a problem because actually if the Republican Party believed what it says, they would be all for people's privacy in deciding what they want to do.
If they actually believed in small government and libertarian values, they wouldn't care what happens in your bedroom.
They're doing it because it's a political cudgel.
They actually don't care about things like abortion outside of what it can do to women.
It can make women stay in the home or it can keep them from engaging out in the marketplace or whatever.
It's a measure of control.
They don't really care about gay marriage except for it's a measure of control.
It's a way to have in-groups and out-groups.
Like, if in a sane America, Pete Buttigieg would be a Republican.
And that's the crux of this thing.
They don't actually have principles.
They have a pursuit of power.
That's why this party can't be allowed to do any of this anymore.
They can't be treated like they're acting in good faith.
They don't actually have the principles that they espouse.
And they haven't for a very long time.
And the key with Pete is that he simply has to hide it.
Don't flaunt it.
You can't really talk about the fact that you're gay.
It just has to be closeted.
And we're okay with that.
I just don't want to see it.
I don't want to ever hear it.
I don't want you to bring attention to it.
It's almost like with women.
I don't even want to know you're a woman.
You have to hide anything about feminism in front of me.
I don't want to be able to deal with it or see it.
But it's okay.
Don't worry about it.
It's okay.
But you can't see it.
You can't acknowledge it.
It's not going to be there.
I will say that on our first day of the Barrett confirmation hearings, we're watching a really twisted thing happening.
Right?
This is the person who Trump herself and the Federalist Society saw as the person who could deal the death blow to the feminist project of Roe v. Wade.
Right?
I mean, like, you know, to just go in and carry out the most, like, patriarchal, like, search-and-destroy mission in the history of America, right?
They are already trying to build her up as, like, a feminist alternative to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
And they're doing it by being like, you know what?
You know, she has a lot of children.
And you know it was really hard for her to work as hard as she did.
But she worked as hard as she did while having all of those children.
So maybe you can have a right-wing feminism.
Which, by the way, is something that you're probably going to hear over the next couple of years.
Particularly if Donald Trump loses in a landslide and they start to realize that white female suburban voters have abandoned him.
Right?
And that he has done damage to a standing with a certain type of female voter.
You're going to see this idea of right-wing feminism that is going to gather around Amy Coney Barrett, and it's going to have parts of Phyllis Schlafly thrown in for good measure, and Elizabeth Adole, or Barbara Bush, and Nancy Reagan.
You're going to see this new sort of right-wing, quote-unquote, feminism, which isn't feminism at all.
But it's what's probably going to be peddled as an alternative project in the next couple of years.
Oh, then you're describing Handmaid's Tale.
That's how Handmaid's Tale starts.
And then, you know, as if under the guise of, you know, we're going to empower women to be this way.
But, you know, no.
Next thing you know, they are handmaids, which is kind of what Amy Coney Barrett is, right?
She was actually part of a society that's called Handmaid's something or other.
Like, it is, you know, and the idea, by the way, that if you watch these opening statements, which, by the way, Trump, I agree with, Trump is complaining about all the bloviating that they're doing because it is a waste of time.
But you hear them, the Republicans, screaming at the Democrats for her, you know, somehow criticizing her religion when they've done nothing but... they've not spoken about religion at all.
They've completely ignored that, which is politically advantageous for them, I suppose, and only focused on the ACA and her overturning that.
And they happened to talk about Roe v. Wade.
It's really just about the people losing their health care, which is a great way to go about this because they don't have to go sully themselves with attacking her record, which is very public and in a rare instance of a potential justice having a pretty solid record of politically speaking which is very public and in a rare instance of a potential justice having She didn't even reveal some of the stuff on her.
They discovered that now there were some things that she didn't reveal on her, things when she was being confirmed as a circuit court judge.
And it's like all those things should serve to hold this up and stop this from happening anyway, but it's not going to.
And just to bring this thing full circle, her past rulings have already shown that she explicitly believes that some people are worthy of rights and self-determination and self-rule, while other people are not.
There's a reason why she's the perfect Supreme Court Justice for the Republican Party, and particularly the Republican Party in 2020.
She is the ideal, and she is the perfect person for them to put on the Supreme Court, and the reason why she is the crown jewel of this project that has been carried out over the past decades.
Yeah, and they're making a big deal about how she's the first woman nominee to have kids in grade school.
And all that says to me is that, yes, because they simply want someone who's going to be there for 50 years.
So they have to pick someone young enough to have kids in grade school or whatever.
Meanwhile, they're using that as a reason to explain why she, of course, she wouldn't get rid of the ACA.
She understands the value of protecting children and having health care.
Meanwhile, she takes her kids unmasked to the White House in this super spreader event.
And wouldn't you know it?
There's already been a breakout in the school that her kids go to because of, I mean, there's no doubt in my mind that there's a direct connection between those two things.
I could be wrong.
I'm not an epidemiologist.
But it certainly is, there's something there.
There's some smoke to that fire.
And you can't tell me that all of a sudden here's a mother who's so concerned about her kids, but she doesn't, she's ignoring the protocols that they should be doing to protect them.
No, I mean, there's a lot of smoke to this fire, to the point where we're looking at the flames.
I mean, she is a really dangerous member of the court.
She is going to be a really dangerous member of the court.
And we're going to keep an eye on this thing in the coming days, but we have some unfortunate news for the Muckrake community, which is that my lovely co-host, Nick Halseman, is going on vacation.
A much-earned vacation.
A lot of people don't know this necessarily, but Nick Hausman is also Coach Nick, one of the most famous and revered and beloved NBA analysts in America.
Nay.
Nay.
The world.
And with the NBA Finals coming to an end, he's going to take a well-earned vacation.
Nick, how long are we going to be without you?
Well, we'll see.
Because, you know, there is technology to be doing these things from the road if I'm available.
But I am leaving, I believe, on Wednesday.
And then I will probably come back about 13 days after that.
Okay, well, we'll have him back before the election.
Fret not, he will be with us the night of the election when we all go through this collective trauma and horror together.
In the meantime, send your thoughts and your prayers, everyone.
To me, as I try and hold down the Muckrake Podcast, hopefully Nick can make a cameo or two over the next couple of weeks.
We have a couple things in the works that we're kind of excited about.
We're holding out hope, knock on wood.
But in the meantime, if you need us, you can find Nick at CanYouHearMeSMH.
I hope you have a wonderful vacation, buddy.
I hope you come back well and rested because this election is going to beat the living hell out of us.
So come back with a tan and come back just ready to fight.
