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Dec. 1, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
41:33
Trump Threatens To Burn It All Down

With Jared Kushner on his way to Saudi Arabia to continue his grift on the tax payer’s dime, Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss where we are headed politically and the dangers that await as Donald Trump continues to erode our confidence in democracy itself. To support the show and unlock exclusive content, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
If you take out the contested swing states' electoral votes, you're back down to President Trump having 232 electoral votes and Joe Biden having 227.
It was 10 o'clock and you looked at the numbers and I'm sure you felt that way.
This election was over and then they did dumps.
They call them dumps, big massive dumps.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Mercury Podcast.
I'm J.O.D.
Sexton, here as always with Nick Hausman.
I hope you had a great Thanksgiving.
I needed it, Nick.
I needed to shut it down for a couple of days.
I needed to re-energize and refocus on the fights to come.
How was your Thanksgiving?
It was all the more.
I mean, I went hiking in the beautiful nature underneath the Hollywood sign and just reconnected with the family, so I can't complain.
I have to tell you, that's undoubtedly what the middle American Republicans think is happening out in California.
I think that's perfect.
Just keep painting me that way.
I'm okay with it.
No, you're living the best life.
That's wonderful.
And I'll tell you who else is living their best lives.
And that is Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of the lame duck president of the United States of America.
Mr. Kushner, who by the way, I mean, really earned his position at the White House.
I mean, really, if somebody If you were to talk about somebody who is going to try and handle not only the coronavirus pandemic, which by the way, bang up job, Jared.
Great, great job.
It's really humming, really kicking ass, whatever he had said.
I would say it's burning.
Right now is what it's doing.
So, you know, this guy who was put in charge of the pandemic and the Middle East peace process, the Israeli-Palestinian problem.
I mean, he proved his bona fides by, of course, marrying Ivanka Trump.
So just totally, totally qualified.
Jared Kushner has headed to the Middle East.
The cover story is that he is there to try and Calm the tensions down a little bit.
And for people who might not have heard, one of the top nuclear scientists in Iran was assassinated recently.
All signs point to it being a Israeli assassination with the total approval of the United States of America.
Which, by the way, just to get everyone up to date, our friend Nick has been predicting war with Iran before Biden's inauguration for God, months?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, yeah, it wasn't hard.
You just looked around at who they want to start a war with, and, you know, that's the top of the list.
But I will take that in the back.
We'll talk more about it.
I don't know if they're necessarily going for war, but it is certainly interesting that as the Trump presidency winds down, that Jared Kushner has taken off, particularly to go talk to the Saudis.
Not that there's anything weird at all between the Trump administration, the Trump family, and the Saudis.
Sure.
Well, the Saudis in the show said, you know, come for the grift and stay for the war planning.
Now, interestingly enough, like the scientist was killed with a remote controlled machine gun, which definitely reeks of like, you know, Israeli technology.
I don't know if we have that kind of thing, but it sounds like they might have operated the entire car remotely to detonate and shoot and all sorts of stuff.
Just real fast on that note and we'll get into the analysis of it just a little bit because because we like to We like to inform our listenership.
We like to educate The official story is that the the scientist was in a bulletproof car Yes, and as he was driving he heard something that sounded like bullets hitting the car and in this scientist This learned man decided to get out of the bulletproof car to see what was happening.
Which, just education for life.
If you were in a bulletproof car, don't get out of the car to see about bullets that were hitting the bulletproof car.
Just stay in the car or drive away.
And every scientist that I know rides around in a bulletproof car.
Well, there's all that.
There's all that.
But what do you make of this entire situation that is developing?
Because it's already getting pretty gnarly.
I think there's a lot of implications to what is happening.
And as always, there are three or four different angles that the Trump people are trying to play.
Well, let's not forget when Kushner went shilling for a bailout for 666 in New York.
It's that big building.
It was the UAE that he put on the terrorist watch list.
It was Bahrain.
One of those countries didn't give it to him, and he probably threatened, if you don't give me this loan, I'm going to put you on the terrorist watch list.
They didn't, and so he did.
Out of the blue.
You remember this, right?
Out of the blue, all of a sudden, they put...
I looked it up and I couldn't find it easily, but nonetheless, the point being that this is what he has been doing the whole time and there's been rumors and bubbles and even some reporting about how every one of these trips he goes on is just a business trip cloaked in some sort of diplomatic thing on our dime.
And yeah, who pays for that, Nick?
Is it the Trump people that are paying for this trip?
No, I think it's you and me.
I'm also old enough, listen, and I know that our collective memories aren't that strong, it appears that there was an incident, tell me if this sounds familiar, where a United States journalist by the name of Jamal Khashoggi Was not only assassinated but then dismembered.
The Saudis did it and in the United States of America turned the other way.
Donald Trump said, what do you want me to do?
They buy weapons from us.
And of course, Kushner laid the groundwork for that.
Kushner went over, and by the way, the Saudi Crown Prince MBS, who is just a real wonderful guy to be in bed with, that the Trump administration is deeply, deeply in bed with, has told multiple people that Kushner is, quote unquote, in my pocket, has helped him try and track down the people in his family and the kingdom who are his enemies.
And now he's going over there on our dime under the cover of this this Worsening situation which is by design we we have to talk about that on our dime and he's going over there undoubtedly not just for the purposes of Trump's power but also to probably set in motion deals for a post Trump or post presidency situation for Trump and
Undoubtedly their businesses and even the possibility that the Saudis could possibly run interference against the Biden presidency to set up the possibility of a future Trump presidency.
So we might actually have a situation here where this thing is probably bordering on treason.
Oh, okay.
Well, that's one way to look at it.
You know what's funny about all the Saudis coming up in the Middle East now is that I spend a lot of time this weekend looking through stuff from the Jimmy Carter documentary about the Crisis of Confidence speech that we're going to release on Patreon.
If you're not a Patreon subscriber, you should definitely consider checking it out because it's going to be an amazing piece of content.
I'm sorry I'm distracted by our talk because it's making me just think about how all the origins of this were rooted in the early 70s and OPEC and the oil crisis that we had and how Jimmy Carter had to navigate this and ultimately cost him his presidency, which sort of leads us down the path right to where we are now.
And just parenthetically, because you mentioned that Jared Kushner was in charge of the peace process.
And if you do talk to right-wing people, you know, they'll point to how Trump is the most, you know, the kindest, the best president for Israel we've ever had.
Truman rolling around in his grave.
What they did was nothing.
They moved the embassy to Jerusalem and caused some deaths out of that.
If you really want to see what it looks like to try and effect change in the Middle East, it's what Carter did when he brought Sadat and Begin together for a huge summit and a treaty that they actually agreed upon.
Even Bill Clinton did the same thing.
That is what I would call, you know, being involved in trying to affect positive change in the Middle East.
So it's just galling to me that they trot him out, probably because he's Jewish, to point to here's a guy that seems that he knows, he knows how to do all these things.
And meanwhile, yes, it's a big grift.
It's more of the same.
We shouldn't be surprised.
And he just has to hope that he isn't a target of any of these investigations that are going on now once Trump leaves office.
Yeah, we have a really bizarre situation.
And you know, there have been some moments in American history where a couple of presidents, it's weird how these things happen with the Republicans.
Richard Nixon, of course, infamously messed around with the Vietnam peace talks to ensure that he would be elected President of the United States.
Ronald Reagan, allegedly, Allegedly sabotaged the release of hostages so that they would be released after the election in which he beat Jimmy Carter.
And now you have something that we've not really seen that much of, which is a president who has been defeated in an election for re-election, and as they're walking out, they are actively trying to make the situation worse for the president coming in.
Which isn't how this stuff usually works.
Most of the time, a one-term president who gets defeated does it graciously.
Carter made sure that Reagan's people came in and that they were helped.
George H.W.
Bush's people welcomed the Clinton people in and made sure that they were ready to go.
Why?
Because they cared about whether or not the country had a functioning government.
Trump, of course, delayed the certification of everything, the transition even taking off, which undoubtedly will cost us lives at some point, right?
I mean, people are going to die of the coronavirus who probably wouldn't have died simply because Trump, you know, delayed this whole thing.
And now we have a situation where You have Netanyahu, who by the way is in hot water himself, is in a weird situation where he's relied on Trump for a long time.
He needs to sort of move some chess pieces around.
This thing with Iran helps him out if he can escalate tensions with them.
You also have Biden, who has signaled to everybody who will listen to him, he planned on re-entering the nuclear deal with Iran and completely reversing Trump's direction.
You have the Saudis who, I mean, my God, the Saudis are playing 15, 16 different games all at once.
And so you have this group of people that have been on Trump's side and have worked hand in hand with him.
Now all of a sudden they're coalescing in a way that that might possibly tie Biden's hands as he comes in in January.
It's a really nefarious situation.
Right.
And let's just make that clear.
The tie that button up is tie that button, whatever you want to call it.
The assassination of the scientists in Iran basically makes Iran completely unwilling to rejoin the nuclear deal that they were in before.
Why would they?
Why would they trust anything the United States would ever do?
It would take years to regain that trust, and it's really too bad because any of the evidence—and by the way, we need to talk about what evidence means to Republicans, because you can just substitute that word for feelings, right?
Or fear, even.
It's really never been about evidence.
So when they would point to the evidence of Iran restarting their nuclear weapons program, it was always like really old evidence that didn't apply to anything that was happening now.
And in fact, with the inspectors being able to get in there, it seemed pretty clear to the rest of the world that they weren't developing those weapons.
And for the first time in a long time, they were actually being able to get aid Humanitarian aid to their people which has been a real problem for all these years, so It really is it's it's disgusting how they're this is like their version of taking the ball and going home or Better it worse yet breaking the board so you can't play the game anymore This is what they're doing in this sort of weird fit, and I can't believe that other people couldn't simply well of course I can believe it But you would have thought that there would have been some people who could have been like Trump tells me to do it They're like yeah.
Yeah, we're not doing that You know, and meanwhile, Israel would never have gotten the tacit approval of the Biden administration to assassinate this scientist.
So, of course, that's why they're doing it now.
They're like, let's get all this shit in right now.
It's like, I want to ask you, why are they killing?
They restarted the federal killing program that they hadn't done for decades for, you know, people who are on death row for all these years.
And they're squeezing in like two more killings before inauguration.
And it's like, I can't even quite wrap my head around why that is happening.
Because screw it!
You know what I mean?
Like I think what you just said is exactly right.
Like I remember when I was little and I used to play with like a few of my friends and we'd play like Nintendo or Sega Genesis or whatever and you always had that one friend who like You know, if you were kicking his ass on like Mortal Kombat, he'd quit.
He'd throw down the controller.
He'd break a controller, you know, if all of a sudden he was losing the game and then he'd storm off and he'd say, I don't want to play anymore.
And he would actually screw it up so the other people couldn't go ahead and play because he was so pissed off and so aggravated.
I mean, that's who Donald Trump is.
We've known that.
I mean, we've known that all along.
I mean, what's happening right now is that Donald Trump, I mean, he knows he lost this election, but he's also in his own delusional pocket universe.
We all know that.
It's the two things happening at once.
In order to make the most money possible and to land a TV deal or to gain the most viewership that he can possibly get from Fox News, he's willing to burn everything down.
I have to tell you, by the way, I don't know if you caught this, but he went on Fox and Friends, Fox Weekend, Fox and Fox, whatever in the hell it was.
By the way, she was having a rough time.
And the true believers in this whole thing, it's a really sad situation for them.
But Trump goes on and he talks about this election and it's only sort of half-heartedly.
Meanwhile, he not only runs over Brian Kemp, he puts the truck in reverse and just goes back and forth over Brian Kemp and says he's ashamed.
And I told you, by the way, we did a Patreon-only chat before Thanksgiving.
I said, I thought that Sidney Powell was getting out in front of this thing and testing out those conspiracy theories and Trump would get there.
She just got there quicker than everybody else is what happened.
And then Trump was just like, let's go, baby.
We're going to.
And so that actually was a signal to everybody that's like, oh, you don't want to help me steal this election.
Good luck with your special election in January, everybody, because if you don't have me, good luck, losers.
That's who he is.
He's a petulant child breaking remote.
The problem is.
This could turn into any number of problems moving forward.
We're in a moment of crisis of faith, economics, politics, all of this stuff that Trump has like capitalized off of.
You know what happens from those things?
Wars.
Wars always happen in moments of crisis and moments of desperation.
So what is happening right now over in the Middle East?
Maybe it's trying to bind somebody's hands.
Sometimes it turns into war.
Sometimes, if nobody's willing to blink, or if all these situations happen and you're having all these crises, it turns into a situation where it gets really, really deadly very, very quickly.
And we have a world that is on the brink of some really bad stuff.
And this petulant child, it's like instead of throwing down a remote control, it's like throwing down the remote control on a stack of dynamite that just happens to be lying there.
I mean, it's an absolute mess.
Well, you have to actually narrow that a little bit, too, because not only are we talking about war with other countries, but we kind of have someone on Twitter, I'd seen it, I don't even remember who, some random person had coined the phrase, a civil cold war, or a cold civil war, something like that.
Which is, I thought, a really good sort of, this is a smoldering thing where you have, you keep separating the distance between the right and the left, for instance.
It's getting farther and farther apart of who's willing to accept what as a reality.
And at some point, that becomes a real problem.
I mean, I'm sure we all, at least saw the headline today in the New York Times about comparing this to, so we're not at the point of, you know, World War II Germany, or just before that.
We're at the very beginning of Hitler's reign now.
So it doesn't necessarily mean you have to compare Trump to Hitler.
It's simply that the environment is now ripe for someone else, and which is what we've been really worried about, is someone else who's far more charismatic and more of a politician than Trump is, to sweep into that vacuum.
And I wouldn't be surprised if he somehow glommed onto the Trump I don't think you can't possibly be junior to any of those people, but that's what you have to be worried about.
Scaramucci, by the way, was probably kind of that guy, right?
He was such an opportunist.
And I think clearly we know, based on how he's speaking now, that's probably where he leaned anyway.
But he saw an opportunity.
Look how quickly he got in there and became Director of Communications and was right in there, ready to go, and then got kicked out, rightfully so.
At any rate, that's the concern here, is that the embers are now out there to be ignited into something much, much worse, where people are either so cynical they won't believe in any of the foundations of our country and what the Constitution stands for, or they simply are conditioned not to believe what the reality is.
It's very, very concerning.
Yeah, and you know, I've been calling it a precursor, which has become increasingly clear that Trump raged his way into the presidency, a job he didn't even want in the first place, doing incredible damage as he did, and exposing one weakness after another in our institutions.
Now we're in this terrible moment, and I wanted to talk about this.
I sent to Nick this article that I wanted to talk about, which is in the New York Times.
It was a conversation between Gail Collins and Bret Stephens.
And by the way, for our listeners who maybe don't follow this stuff close enough, Bret Stephens is a total piece of shit.
To give everyone a decent idea of who this guy is, like even a passing glimpse, this is the guy that like some professor on Twitter said, like when the New York Times had bedbugs, he said, the New York Times has bedbugs, Bret Stephens is the bedbug.
That's all he said.
Just like a pat, didn't tag him or whatever.
Bret Stephens finds it, sends an email to the dude's boss trying to get him fired.
Then, Bret Stephens writes an entire article that then compares him being called a bed bug to the Holocaust.
Okay?
Like, that's who this guy is.
Meanwhile, this article that comes out And it came out this morning.
It's called, When Can We Stop Thinking About Trump Every Minute?
And these people, by the way, like everybody else on Twitter and around Politicos are like, Trump's old news.
Don't even worry about Donald Trump anymore.
That was just a passing aberration.
Don't even think about him anymore.
Which, by the way, is completely and utterly wrong.
He's not going away.
His influence isn't going to wane among the people who support him, nor the Republican Party.
And then, meanwhile, these two have a conversation.
That is so just irritating and infuriating.
Where all of a sudden they're like, well now that Donald Trump is gone, we can now talk about the future.
And what do we do about the future?
Well, we'll tweak something here, we'll tweak something there.
But you know what we really need to do?
Probably completely overhaul the collegiate system and get rid of, let me check here, bachelors of arts degrees, which Bret Stephens, by the way, calls the bankruptcy by arts degree.
He starts pushing the idea that instead of colleges, maybe corporations like Microsoft can open up apprenticeship schools.
Apprenticeship schools, which is how we end up in a situation where all of a sudden, Nick, what happens if you go to Microsoft Apprentices School and you don't want to work at Microsoft anymore?
What happens?
I guess you're SOL.
Oh, I guess you're SOL.
And by the way, while you're at it, what would happen if Microsoft trained you and that's the only education you have?
Would they be more likely to pay you more or pay you less?
Like, just help me out here.
Try and work this through.
Would that increase wages or decrease wages?
Well, traditionally, if they get you early in a situation like that, you're going to be underpaid going forward and be in some sort of shitty deal the rest of the time, considering making you think that, oh, you were lucky to get the job in the first place.
So I would suspect that that's what you're getting at.
And if you didn't have a chance to go somewhere else and work for somebody else, wouldn't that also decrease your wages as well if there was no competition?
There's a law about that, I think, too.
And by the way, when you go to these Microsoft Apprenticeship Schools, are they going to give you a well-rounded education, or are they going to teach you how to code until your fingers break off?
Oh yeah, you won't learn anything else.
But hey, listen, English shminglish.
Yeah, right.
And by the way, as a liberal arts professor, I have to tell you that one of the major problems in America right now is we push STEM so hard that we forgot that we need critical thinking and creative problem solving.
But that's neither here nor there.
I want to point this out.
What all of this is to say These things are so gross and so technocratic and all they're going to do is make people's lives worse.
And what happens when you make people's lives worse?
Their wages go down.
They grow more and more frustrated and alienated.
They become radicalized.
The way that you are pissed off listening to this, the way you feel about the world right now, that is the way that other people on the other side feel.
Only they're willing to kill and wear all black with red armbands.
If we keep going down that road... And by the way, Nick, have you heard of China's social credit system at all?
You know, I have not.
Well, let me tell everybody at home about the social credit system that they're working out over in China.
It turns out over in China, like our credit score here, where it determines if you can borrow money and how much you'll have to pay back if you borrow money.
Over in China, they are developing a system where you get judged based on how often you go and visit your parents.
Whether or not you sort your garbage the right way.
Do you jaywalk?
Do you listen to your music too loudly in public?
And so all of those computer programs are going to judge you.
And by the way, I don't know about you, I'm already tired of this shit just thinking about it.
Like all that's going to do is piss people off and radicalize them more and that's what these assholes want to do.
That's what they think the future should look like.
Well, and just to put another button on that, radicalization of these people leads to authoritarianism.
It seems like that's a common theme of people who get to be that radicalized want some sort of strong leader that's a straight shooter that tells it like it is, doesn't need to have scruples or any kind of, you know, ethical
Considerations just get stuff done and that's that's why this is a very dangerous time right now politically You know, you can even transfer that into what we're seeing from the Republicans as far as and we predicted this, you know a year ago saying Oh who Trump who like they'll just kind of forget he ever existed But meanwhile all of a sudden someone like Janet Yellen is gonna get nominated for the Fed chair and they want to see her tax returns Yep.
I mean, really?
And all of a sudden, you know what?
Now that we're getting the new Congress set up, we've really got to be concerned with our spending.
We've really got to figure out how we're going to cut that stuff.
Where did this deficit come from?
What the hell?
Have you looked at the books lately?
Oh my, yeah.
Oh my gosh!
This is crazy!
Somebody should do something about this!
Yeah, so it's just like there's no redeeming qualities to the Republican Party at this point.
And like we keep saying over and over again, and the evidence continues to mount, they don't care about the constituents.
They don't care about them.
They think that somehow there's some scraps that will be thrown to them if they can get all their stuff in there and eventually it'll be okay.
It's like the gravy in the bottom of the turkey thing where you're trying to scrape off to making it something better.
That's not a way for everyone to be able to progress through life and have a chance to improve their lives.
Like you say, we need critical thinking.
We need to be able to have a well-rounded education.
We need access to that.
We need people to be able to have better lives all the way from the bottom to the top.
They don't believe that.
And again, we've also seen that the Republicans will vilify poor people.
Well, it's their fault.
You've got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you've got to find a different job, move somewhere else.
I mean, all the simple solutions they have mean nothing.
And it's time that they would be abolished, if we could.
How about this?
Maybe we should just have two separate countries.
Let's do the opposite of the Civil War.
Let's just say, hey, you go live over there, I go live over there.
Wait, wait, is that a conscious uncoupling?
Isn't that what Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow did, a conscious uncoupling?
Yes.
By the way, Chris Martin and I share, we both have the same name for their sons.
So yes, I understand what he's talking about.
Why not?
You know, at this point, I'm like, I'm gonna live in California.
It's basically its own, you know, country as it is.
And that's the only thing that might keep us in this country.
If Trump had won again, like, I would probably want to leave the country.
But maybe we could sort of say, well, somehow California has got this shield around it.
We can kind of, you know, live here.
But I don't know.
At some point, I almost feel like it might be better off, literally, to let those people that are on the other side just have their own part of the country and do what they want to do.
So I want to say this before we divide up the lands, before we decide what visiting rights, who gets to see the Liberty Bell on what day of the week.
I will say that the Republican Party, the only thing that they have to offer anymore, their entire message is things will never get better.
Like, this moment, and by the way, I want to be honest about it.
This moment in human history in America, it sucks.
It really sucks.
And it sucks for a lot of reasons.
Like, you can still have joy, you can still have things you enjoy, but there's a problem going on.
There's an artificial austerity that keeps us from enjoying our lives.
Those of us who have good-paying jobs or decent-paying jobs, we're either underpaid or we're being juiced for productivity.
By the way, I sent this to you.
Speaking of Microsoft, I really enjoyed this.
Microsoft's new suite package, by the way, now involves corporate surveillance in terms of productivity.
This is what they said about it.
The tech giant recently announced the wide availability of productivity score.
Sound familiar?
Declaring, as leaders, it's our job to make sure people have the tools they need to do their best work, but tools alone are not enough.
You also need to help everyone in your organization build the habits that harness the true power of those tools.
You know what that sounds like?
That sounds like hell.
That sounds like hell, is what it sounds like.
It sounds like anti-human, big tech bullshit.
Jared, for years, when you wanted to monitor freelancers, whether they're working, they would log in on their computer, and then you'd be able to see how many hours they spent working when they logged in, because that was really fail-safe.
So we've had a little bit of this notion.
I do want to say that the Microsoft thing, it seems like it can scan where your eyes are looking, and it's obviously much more comprehensive of what you can do.
Now, having employed people in my past, I'm of the mind, I don't care how, when, and where you do it, just get the things done that we need.
But Nick, that's because you're a humanitarian.
That's because you trust in humans and you have empathy.
What we're living in right now is this moment, and by the way, for everyone listening to this, what is it they just passed in California?
It's Uber and Lyft drivers.
What was that called?
Was that like prop?
What was that called?
Oh, jeez.
I have no idea.
You know what?
I voted for it and I'm forgetting the number.
It's one of those numbers.
It's like an independent contractor to make sure that they don't get, you know, any sort of benefits or whatever, and that they can work like 80 to 90 hours, something like that.
We're being juiced for productivity, and as it's happening, it's hurting our economy or whatever.
The Republican message is, shit sucks, but guess what?
It can be worse for some people, and if you vote for us, you and us, we're gonna make it worse for those people.
That's the entirety of the Republican message.
Now here's the truth of it.
The Republican Party doesn't actually have much of a base.
They have a group of people who are incredibly wealthy who want to juice us for everything that they could possibly juice us for, and another group of people who want to turn back the clock to 1950s before Brown v. Board of Education.
That's the only people who should be voting for them.
The other people?
They're just tired of being looked down on and thinking that things can't be better for them.
Guess what?
Things can be better if we stop dealing with this bullshit and productivity scores.
By the way, if somebody asks me what my productivity score is, you know what I say to them?
Fuck you.
That's my productivity score.
We can have a decent...
Human society.
We can afford it.
We can have health care.
We don't need people lining up for food.
Like, that's not how things have to be.
And the Republican Party has this message, which is just screw off and die.
And before you screw off and die, we'll make your enemies' lives worse.
That's it.
That's all they've got.
And so they're not even a real actual party.
They're a party of agreement and fascism.
Right.
And by the way, what we mentioned before about how, you know, there's a lot of split tickets going on because Trump got beat soundly.
But a lot of the congressional races went to the Republicans, which told you a couple of things.
One, this was a referendum on Trump, obviously, which must be devastating to him.
But two, that they were not going to penalize Republicans for supporting Trump.
That was a real, when I looked at this, I'm realizing this is really what they were saying.
They're like, yeah, you know, he's a Republican, but you know what?
He was just following the party line.
He's just, you know, doing what he had to do to whatever.
And that is really concerning because in other times of our history, I would like to think that we would have held these people to a standard.
That they completely failed in that respect.
So it wasn't enough to get Trump out of office.
It wasn't enough for them to say, I'm just going to vote against him.
Or it was enough to just vote against Trump.
And that's the scary thing.
It's going to keep these guys in power or enough power for a long, long time.
It's a thinking system.
It's a way of perceiving the world, which everyone has their own right to think how they want to think.
That's what we should all be fighting for.
But at some point, when you get to the point where there's absolutely no ethical behavior and everything is all hypocritical and there's no relation to truth, here's where we are.
It's really troubling.
So I want to put this in a way that maybe some people haven't gotten it or whatever.
I want them to think about like some of the sports fans who listen to this podcast or people who appreciate it.
Sometimes your team has a really shitty season.
Like a really shitty season and there's not a whole lot to enjoy.
But you have your rival and maybe your rival is having a shitty season too.
You know maybe the rival just sucks.
Well, guess what?
If you can just beat your rival and beat them really badly, that's a win!
You call it a day.
You're like, ah, maybe next year.
This whole thing with Trump has been about nothing but the appearance of victory and driving people insane.
He was never going to build a wall.
He was never going to drain the swamp.
He was never going to do anything besides the things that he did that he wouldn't admit that he would do, which was Deregulating everything, privatizing the country, making things easier for the wealthy and the powerful, and hurting vulnerable populations.
And by the way, they cheered that on.
That was one of the few things that they actually understood.
Everything else was about flipping people off.
That's all it was.
Because we've reached a point in the political process Where people don't feel like anything can possibly change.
So if nothing can possibly change, the least you can do is shit on your rivals.
And that's all the Trumpism is at this point.
And the Republican Party, they have no plan for anything.
They have no principles.
They're not for small government.
They're not fiscally or socially conservative.
They're not pro-troop.
I mean, my god, they're a bunch of losers, right?
They're not pro-America.
They're not pro-life.
They're not any of those things.
They are a means of flipping off your rivals and rubbing salt in their wounds.
Which, by the way, you have wounds too!
But we can't even deal with those.
It's just about shuffling around chairs and flipping people off as we walk out the door.
Yeah, and you can also spell rivals R-A-C-I-S-T, if you want, or however you want to spell that word, because it really isn't always about just the left.
It's about people of color.
And it's about women.
And that's why it feels a little bit helpless, because these are really deep-seated beliefs that can only be shaken, perhaps, if you're not taught them in the very beginning of your life.
And these people have kids.
They have a lot of kids.
And they're teaching these kids this.
I have to say this, you know, I talk about my family and people I grew up with and people I know who are racist and have fascist tendencies.
I have to tell you this, like, you're not going to cure racism and you're not going to cure misogyny.
You can work on it.
I mean, education helps, you know, sort of.
Blending communities works when you start exposing people to other people.
Those things work.
But I'll tell you what.
They will be less fascistic, or at least less vocal about it, and less likely to, I don't know, drive into crowds of protesters and shoot people on the side of the street, or terrorize people, or burn down synagogues, or any of the number of, like, crazy, fascistic, racist, white supremacist things that they've done if they have jobs.
If they can go to work and all of a sudden they're like, well, you know, if I do call someone a racial slur online, it might cost me my career.
And it used to be the thing.
And I tried to explain this back in 2016.
Trump made it okay for them to say in public.
The thing that they would only say behind closed doors.
And they would do the thing where they'd be like, I'm not racist, but... And they would even do that with their families.
Now all of a sudden they're like, what's wrong with being white and proud?
And that changed.
And that's a massive cultural shift that Trump has accomplished.
But they need to get back to the point where they're afraid to do it because there are consequences.
Well, and I wouldn't even give Trump the credit of calling it an accomplishment, right?
Right.
I think they had looked at what Reagan was able to do in the 80s, in 1980, his campaign, to tap into that and wanted to use it.
But I don't think they ever kind of like got any farther than, oh shit, like this is now a movement and people are now completely out in the open with it.
Like they don't care either way.
But that is something you can't put back in the bottle.
I agree.
I mean, listen, you can make it go back into the shadows a little bit.
OK.
But that said, we saw what happened in that context with Obama winning.
And for eight years, having a black president for a lot of these people was so bottled up and raging that it just explodes in this notion.
So it kind of like Bodes poorly for the next president we might have who is not white or is a woman.
It's a little bit scary because you could see just how it bubbles up into these uncontrollable fits which then lead to misinformation and propaganda and the belief of all these things.
It's much easier to believe that when you're already really angry.
And you're, like, sort of predisposed to be angry about stuff.
You know, my father is not racist, but he would say shit, you know, being born in the 30s, that would be considered racism.
But I can tell you right now, he is pretty woke.
I mean, he has come all the way forward and really understands what he's talking about, because he was already predisposed to understand that and be able to move.
That's what we're missing right now.
I was watching, by the way, Bad News Bears this weekend.
We have to remember that it was not very long ago that the N-word was easily permitted by any company you want to say to say out loud.
It was not the N-word.
It was literally, you'd say it.
We have not moved very far from that time frame of that happening.
So it's like, you know, we have a long way to go before we can get anywhere away from this kind of behavior.
Well, and by the way, we moved beyond it and then we circled back is what happened.
Because you're exactly right.
It was like Obama's presidency was the worst possible situation that could have happened to these people, right?
And by the way, it's a lot like watching the other team win the World Series or win the Super Bowl or win the NBA Finals.
Hey, I applauded the White Sox when they won the World Series in 2004.
I was like, that was great!
Chicago Solidarity!
But man, I turned out later.
I couldn't believe how many Sox fans were trying to shit on the Cubs when they won later on.
That's uncalled for.
And by the way, now we're talking about in-groups and out-groups, because I'm right there with you, brother.
I'm a Cubs guy, and I'm just like, no, we can't even have this conversation on this podcast.
That's a can of worms we can't even talk about.
But I will say the least that we can do is get rid of some of the infuriating elements that are just unnecessary.
The idea that we need to be controlled or juiced for productivity or dehumanized any more than we already have been is insanity, particularly at this moment.
So we've got to keep our eye on the cushioners of the world who are over in the Middle East.
We have to keep an eye on big tech and all the people who are profiting off all that.
And by the way, I know that Facebook has done a great job at everything that they've dealt with.
They are just a pinnacle company.
They have a spotless record.
They care about democracy and human dignity.
It's not like they are just an absolute An absolute villain corporation that destroyed democracy and dehumanized and atomized society.
But we have to do better and this whole incremental technocratic bullshit is only going to make it worse.
I agree.
I mean, I think now you're getting to the root of why the left or the people on the far left are not happy at all with what's going on, because it's just sort of run in the middle right back to where we'd started, you know, 20 years ago, kind of policy stuff.
And that is troubling.
And you only have to hope that, you know, we're going to progress.
We're supposedly founded on the progression of these ideas and values.
And that's what's so scary is when you get a guy who can win and win 74 million votes by saying we have to go backwards.
It's just it feels like it's the the what's that the steamship is now switch the Directions and it's like can you imagine how much energy it's gonna require to get back going forward?
I'm such a downer man.
I feel terrible.
Maybe maybe you should have your own podcast or something or just have one No, I don't think so, because I think what you just said, I think we're at a point actually, somebody asked me last night on the Bourbon Talk livestream, they were like, what's the best case scenario for Biden?
And we've talked about this before.
I think an LBJ presidency without the Vietnam is probably the best case scenario for Biden, where you have like an unlikely figure who ushers in like a massive, massive progressive change.
That's the best case scenario.
But I have to tell you, if Biden simply repairs everything that Trump did wrong and then we move forward in 40 years, I think that's a success as well.
But we have to start building the thing on the ground towards a better, realer, more human future.
And if we can do that, I mean, my God, I don't want a productivity score.
It just pisses me off, Nick.
I just, it's not how I work.
Awful, awful.
But we will be back.
Hopefully, hopefully we're not at war with Iran, where we have to do some sort of emergency podcast to talk about this bullshit that Kushner's over there doing.
We'll be back on Friday.
In the meantime, everybody, you can find Nick over at Can You Hear Me?
SMH.
You can find me at JY Sexton.
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