This week it all goes down. The special election in Georgia. The certification of the electoral college results. And, of course, Donald Trump harassing the secretary of state of Georgia and committing some blatant crimes. Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman are here to break it all down. To unlock exclusive content, including the new Weekender show on Fridays, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
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Hey everybody, we're about to get to an episode that is way too chock full of just awfulness and things that we have to talk about.
Presidents trying to carry out coups and such.
But we wanted to do a quick bit of house cleaning in the new year.
We are sort of reorganizing things a little bit and we're going to try out something new.
We're calling it The Weekender.
And for our second show of the week, which is usually aired on Fridays, we're now going to make it a Patreon exclusive show.
It's going to be a little bit more casual.
We're going to have some live shows.
We're going to have Q&As from our listeners.
We're going to have a lot of opportunity for interacting with people.
We're really, really excited about it, but if you want access to that extra show every week that comes out on Friday, the weekender, you need to go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
And now, to the show!
You should want to have an accurate election.
And you're a Republican.
We believe, but we don't have an accurate election.
No, no you don't.
No, no you don't.
You don't have, you don't have.
Not even close.
You're up by hundreds of thousands of votes.
I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.
And the people of Georgia are angry.
The people of the country are angry.
And there's nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you've recalculated.
Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong.
Hey, everybody, welcome to the Mockery Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
I'm here with Nick Hausman as always.
I'm so pissed off all the time now at this bullshit coup, Nick.
I don't know how you're feeling.
You know, I'm glad we got this show so we can get on here and we can talk about this.
If you haven't heard already, the President of the United States of America, who, by the way, a couple weeks ago floated the idea of a military coup, Nick, called the Georgia Secretary of State For an hour.
I actually tried to call him, I believe it was 18 times.
Finally got him on the line, and then told him to recalculate the election results in Georgia and hand deliver it over to Donald Trump, and in the process seemed to threaten the Secretary of State while he did it.
What bullshit all the way around, Nick.
What total utter bullshit this is.
Well, you know, it's nice to actually hear it in practice, how he behaves and how he speaks.
We've heard Michael Cohen describe it.
It's the Mafia.
This is what the Mafia does.
They know better not to get caught on tape, you know, saying the very explicit illegal thing, even though they think they got him anyway on this one.
Isn't that incredible how he worked around it?
You know what I mean?
It would be great, it would be great if you were on the right side of this.
Right, recalculate, you know, it's gonna be bad for you if you don't do it.
You know, I'm pretty sure this is what it is, and it's certainly all we need.
Because by the way, he's trying to make it easier on, he's trying to, you know, make it less work for Raffensperger, because he's like, listen, we've won by 200,000 votes, but, you know, just find 12,000.
Make it easier on yourself.
Don't kill yourself with this.
Just find the 12,000 and we'll be set.
We'll be even.
No harm, no foul.
And I want to talk about that message.
I'm glad that you said it that way because the message actually, and if you could have written it down, what Trump was actually saying, he's like, you're a Republican.
You need to do what a Republican would do.
This is about party over country.
And if you don't do this, you're going to get harassed.
Your family is going to have death threats, which we know has happened.
Your entire political life is going to collapse because you didn't play ball.
It is one of the most insidious things I've listened to in a very long time.
Like to hear him try and shake him down.
And besides the fact that he's pathetic.
Like Trump is absolutely pathetic.
But the shakedown was kind of chilling in a way.
Like the knowledge that he has about how bad he can make someone's life and the way that he actually views transactional politics.
I thought this was an incredible artifact for that.
Well here's the thing because obviously to to have a crime there needs to be intent you need to be able to prove that and so I have the only problem I have here is because the notion of the crime trying to be like commit fraud against an election you know because he knows he's lying When you listen to the audio, you kind of feel like he really, deeply, truly believes what he's saying.
He's not lying.
At least, you know what I mean?
He doesn't think he's lying.
The other thing you also get is he's got command of numbers and facts and information.
Now, I know he's probably reading to some degree some of this, but this is not the ranting of a madman who's got dementia.
You know what I mean?
This is a guy who can keep these things in his head for the most part.
When he needs to.
Yeah.
And what about him?
Yeah, and so it's like those two things are interesting as far as if they ever, you know, this is a law in Georgia that he's violated that they wanted to actually, you know, prosecute.
But, you know, here's a guy who's already been, you know, they've already tried an impeachment process and he got away with that.
He knows he'll get away with it again anyway.
So again, there isn't any law that boxes him in from doing anything.
No one will do anything about this.
So just, I don't know if he's accepted that or not, but nothing will happen to him from this, right?
Nothing.
Well, first and foremost, I just want to go on the record, they should impeach his ass again.
Yes.
They should.
Just to file a paperwork, just to say that you did it.
Today, his ass should have been impeached.
You know what?
No, no, no.
It's the 25th Amendment is probably what really should be happening right now.
Oh, no.
I mean, the 25th Amendment should have been taken care of a long time ago.
And I want to say that in the most Democratic Party way possible, you just watched all the Democratic representatives being like, we're thinking about the future.
We're not thinking about the past.
And it's like, grow up.
The Republicans wouldn't have waited until the recording was over to have filed the impeachment papers.
Like they would have been on the horn with one another two minutes into listening to that phone call.
So yeah, he should be impeached again.
I don't care if it would get carried out.
I don't care if you, you know, leave office before it was done.
It's the right thing to do.
The next thing that, and you brought it up and you're exactly right on this front, This is not the COVID president who is just like, I hear it's fine.
It's it's probably a cold.
I don't know.
Somebody was talking today.
I couldn't pay attention to it.
He doesn't give a shit about anything besides himself.
He had a total command of the numbers.
He had a total command of the situation.
He's so steeped in the conspiracy theory.
And it's not like it's just washing over him like a pond, you know, over some rocks.
Like, he knows this conspiracy theory front and back.
He knows the narrative.
He is not lost.
He could be competent.
You know what I mean?
Like, if he actually cared and he gave a shit, he could be a competent human.
He just doesn't care about anybody whatsoever.
The other thing I want to point out is this is important.
We've talked a lot about does Trump know he's lying or does he Think he's not lying or is he delusional and I even got a chance to talk of course with Mary Trump about this.
We even heard a president on that recording who believed his own bullshit, who was just gone into his alternate reality.
And the fact that we now know that tells us everything we need to know about how he processes information and why this is dangerous.
This whole thing started off as a grift.
It was a way to get a golden parachute after his presidency and, you know, run around being an anti-president, probably being on Newsmax or OANN.
Now he literally is in the game.
He's actually trying to carry out a coup in this country.
It's jumped the firewall, so to speak, and now we're dealing with an actual coup by the President of the United States of America.
Well, you know, the one thing that jumped out at me when you read the transcript or listen to it is he says to Raffensperger, he goes, and I'm probably getting his name completely butchered.
Raffensperger?
Yeah, that's right.
Raffensperger.
Is there an N?
Raffensperger.
I got it.
So he's talking to Raffensperger and he goes, quote, you're not the only one.
I mean, we have other states that I believe will be flipping to us very shortly.
Because let's not forget, the number of votes he can get, electoral college votes he can get from Georgia, are not nearly enough to overturn the election.
So he clearly, there must be other tapes, other conversations from other states.
Nick, Ravensburger taped the call because Senator Lindsey Graham called him and asked him to fix the election.
A sitting United States Senator committed election fraud and tampering.
By the way, just go ahead and put all this in perspective.
And he's walking around a free man, like nobody's going to do anything to him.
Nobody's going to rebuke him.
It barely even came up like, you know, as a blip on the radar.
That's the only reason we have this recording.
How many other secretaries of state How many other people had to deal with an irate President of the United States of America calling and trying to get these things taken care of?
We've had delegations come to the White House.
He had the Michigan delegation to the White House and tried to take COVID relief and turn it into the theft of an election.
Like, you just said it.
It's not one call.
It's multiple calls.
There are multiple, multiple illegal actions here.
The other thing that jumps out at me is that the numbers he throws out are very much like Manchurian candidate style or McCarthy where he basically says anywhere from 5,000 to 200,000 votes.
Communist in the State Department!
And it's like, how could anybody take you seriously when you're just throwing out ranges here?
You know, the number of dead people.
Well, and let's not forget, I've said this before, but the signature thing, because he's trying to get into the tens of thousands of signature issues.
You have to remember that what they're accusing people of is somehow getting the ballot from a real person and then changing their vote and then faking the forging a signature and submitting it, knowing that the actual vote that the person got would have been coming in as well.
And then they would have had two votes, right?
Like he's saying that they're forging these ballots and then forging the signatures.
That is the issue that doesn't make any sense.
You couldn't possibly do that at any kind of, uh, order of magnitude.
So, um, I don't know where he's getting the numbers.
That's the other thing.
The command of the numbers are great on his end, but it's, it's a little bit unclear.
I mean, like, I guess what you're gonna say... Hold on, Nick.
I'm logging online here.
I'll get you some numbers.
Yeah.
I'll get you some numbers.
The internet.
15, 15, 25, 30,000.
15.
Okay.
That's where he gets them, yes.
Numbers.
Yeah.
So he's just getting, yeah, that's the thing.
And we have affidavits.
Affidavits and numbers.
And people tried to engage me on Twitter this weekend, too, about the affidavits.
Oh, they tried to fold in the whole Christine Blasey Ford thing, where you believed her without any evidence, but you're not going to believe these people here who are saying that they're always voting fraud?
You know, that's a hard thing to unpack, man.
That's two things that are mixed that don't need to be mixed at all.
It can't be mixed, rationally.
Well, yeah, but... Okay, so I'm laughing about the internet.
I missed a couple numbers there.
12.
It's like an episode of Lost.
I saw 12 there.
Yeah, it's like the numbers on Lost.
You, meanwhile, have Lin Wood, who... Have you been following this?
A little bit.
So Lin Wood has red-pilled his balls off and is just out in the public sphere talking about reptilian people, Nick.
He's talking about reptilian people.
He's talking about lizard squads.
He's talking... He accused the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America of having a pedophile blackmail I mean, that's legitimately something that Lin Wood's out here doing.
And a reminder to everyone, it's not like Lin Wood is some sort of like crazy kook who has no access or anything to anybody else.
He was out there with the president's representative when this whole thing began.
And we're a two step away from Trump being like, yeah, lizard people.
Absolutely.
I've seen the movie.
I mean, come on.
I've seen the series.
V was a great limited series.
Loved it.
But that is the thing here is they are so far gone in their alternate reality.
And where do numbers come from?
They come from somebody on Reddit.
Enough people retweet it, enough people share it, enough people upvote it.
This entire thing with the Dominion voting system, which is one of the main carriers of the conspiracy theory, that was just somebody talking shit.
Like, there was no background to it.
Ron Watkins, who is the son of the guy who runs Acoon, which is where you have, you know, QAnon, He just got on Newsmax and just started saying a bunch of bullshit that had nothing to do with whatever.
Now all of a sudden you have the President of the United States, who by the way, a reminder that he was originally impeached.
Because he could not tell fact from fiction, conspiracy theory from reality.
Rudy Giuliani was coming in and feeding him a bunch of stuff from the Ukraine that was Russian misinformation.
That was why he got impeached the first time.
We now have him, we have President Akun, or President Reddit, who's up there just Talking absolute nonsense and could very well face actual criminal charges from this thing.
Georgia has opened up an investigation, supposedly, or they're in the beginning stages of an investigation, and that stuff doesn't go away.
Like, that's not pardonable stuff.
Right.
But again, nothing happens, at least for a while, on this thing.
They're going to have to depose Meadows and get all the other lawyers in.
Can I ask you a question?
What do the Democrats have to lose by impeaching him again?
Or at least opening an impeachment?
What?
What do they have to lose?
What do you think the mindset is?
Because I spend so much of my time now trying to figure out why the Democrats are such chicken shit.
Well, here's the thing.
This is what Giuliani has been trying to do the entire time, even when the impeachment was going on at the beginning of it.
There is the legal component to this and the Constitution and all that gobbledygook.
And then there's the political thing.
Sure.
And if you can win the political argument, you tend to be able to win everything.
And so if they use this impeachment, they could use it, you know, to hurt the Democrats because they're going to say, look, it's a political witch hunt.
They're at it again.
It was worthless the first time.
all the bullshit we had to deal with afterwards, even though it was all exposed, they wouldn't even have any, uh, uh, uh, during the Senate trial, they wouldn't have anybody as witnesses.
You know what I mean?
It was a sham, but that's not to the 75 million that voted for him.
Don't feel that way.
I, so here's the thing, man, like you could make the argument and you could convince me that you don't want to file, uh, impeachment charges before the special election.
I, I get that.
You want to wait until today when the election is held or whatever.
But the moment that the polls close, why is someone not standing there with it?
You know what I mean?
Like, I understand the idea that they're radical Democrats or whatever.
They're just coming after the president.
It's a legitimate, impeachable offense.
He is carrying out crimes here.
And if we don't start holding him accountable, even on his way out, hopefully, knock on wood, It just keeps setting precedents.
It just keeps laying the foundation for one person after another to keep pulling this stuff.
Maybe!
Well, it's what you said last week when you're a week ahead of this because only now it's trickling out from these legal scholars who say, oh, you know what?
The Republicans might do this again.
Maybe.
Can you believe that?
Maybe the Republicans aren't going to suddenly – because Joseph Robinette Biden is in the White House, it's like they're suddenly going to develop consciences.
Like that's not going to happen.
But even the notion of like – wait.
It's almost like the Republicans who woke up and realized that we had a deficit.
It's like these legal scholars, like all of a sudden today, we're like, wait a minute.
You know, this could work eventually if, how we outlined it a week and a half, two weeks ago, where we said, you know, if it's a president coming in from one party and the Senate and the House are controlled by the other party, they will simply negate the election.
They will legally be allowed to do that unless somehow they can change part of the rule, which I suppose if they had control of the Senate and the House, and Biden's in the White House, they might be able to adjust the Electoral College rules for that.
And by the way, we have to do this because we're a couple days out.
What a couple days we have.
I hate to say it, Nick.
able to change the ruling where you really can make it pretty much impossible once they're certified by each individual state that there's nothing they can do about it.
And by the way, we have to do this because we're a couple days out.
What a couple days we have.
I hate to say it, Nick.
I hate to say it.
I do feel an emergency podcast is coming in our future.
I I do not see how we're going to avoid that.
I really don't.
I was just reading about civilizations that would see a comet and they would be like, bad tidings are coming.
I kind of feel I'm looking up in the heavens and I see an emergency podcast in our in our near future.
We have a special election.
We have this horseshit thing that's happening on the 6th with the electoral college votes, which, by the way, shouldn't even be happening.
We shouldn't be sitting around worrying about this thing.
Meanwhile, we have now gotten to the point where we have not just Howley and I don't know, the raving loon section in the House of Representatives.
We now have 13 Republican senators who have gone on record saying that they're going to oppose the certification of the Electoral College, which there's no fraud that's been found.
All of these people have told people that they know that Donald Trump has lost this election.
Let's go through this list here real fast.
We've got Leffler, Blackburn, Braun, Ted Cruz, who by the way, just in case people haven't been paying attention to politics over the past couple of years, Donald Trump accused his father of killing John Fitzgerald Kennedy and called his wife ugly.
I don't know if he accused him of pulling a trigger, but he was hanging around.
Then we've got Steve Daines, we've got Haggerty, Howley, Johnson, Kennedy, Langford, Loomis, Marshall, and Tuberville.
Meanwhile, by the way, for anyone who's wondering, you didn't hear Rubio there.
That profile in Courage, Marco Rubio, has not come out to support the Electoral College certification, so that's a grab bag to find out what happens.
We have no idea what's going to come out on the 6th.
The Republicans, they have no reason to ever concede an election again.
Or ever admit defeat again, or even actually participate in good faith politics.
The way that we are going right now is every precedent is being set for acting in bad faith and reaping all of the rewards from it.
Absolutely.
That's the biggest issue because, again, we get back to that political thing where the law really doesn't mean anything anymore.
The law doesn't mean anything because if the political power is great enough and the right people are in the right spots, then nothing will happen to these people.
Now, we've been yelling this to the high heavens for the last four years.
That's why they have to prosecute the fuck out of Trump.
To dissuade anybody going forward from doing this.
Again, it might not completely do that because, again, if they calculate it right and they can get, you know, the House and the Senate right in the same party, the Republican Party, and God forbid a Republican gets back in the White House, you know, there's ways they could do it.
Again, you could have a guy like Bill Barr who will not prosecute the President and he'll be free to do whatever he wants to do.
And then if the House is in control, there's no impeachment there.
So, again, This is the downfall of our democracy because out of all of this, independence is not in a vacuum.
This is not just a bunch of politicians yelling and screaming into a nice leather-bound chairs.
There are the tens of millions of people who are now completely signed on to this and will not change.
Right?
Maybe their kids, if they do a bad job educating their kids the way they like to in their misogyny and in their racism, we can only hope the kids will not listen to that as well.
Maybe that next generation, but you're talking about a generation of people that it's gone forever, doomed to not participate in democracy like we used to.
Well, before I jump into that, because all that's very important, I want to point out that We are legitimately talking about a Secretary of State refusing to steal an election, and we're like, what a hero.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, what a hero.
And it's somebody who has just decided not to go along with a coup.
And the truth is, he did it in a pretty heroic way.
He actually did.
He exposed the corruption.
He said, I will not participate in it.
His career is probably over, by the way.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's probably done.
Like, that's probably it.
And he'll probably He'll probably deal with death threats for the rest of his life.
Him and his family are now targeted, and it was all because.
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, who, the only reason why Mitt Romney can come out and say that these things are wrong, and all the kudos to Mitt, by the way.
Like, good for him for coming out and saying this is wrong.
The only reason he can do it is because the state of Utah would vote for him regardless of anything he did for the rest of his life.
He is a prodigal son of Utah, and he will just, he's not going to lose his seat no matter what he does.
Everybody else has to sit around and with the abacus, is that what they call it?
Is that an abacus?
They have to be like, well, I have to support this coup attempt until this day and then I can go over here.
It's not going to stop.
The Republican Party is not going to fracture in this.
They're going to go further right.
They're going to embrace this.
Whatever happens over the next couple of days, which by the way, everybody be safe out there, because God knows what's going to happen after they certify these votes.
We've already heard about street gangs, we've already heard about domestic terrorists who are active and planning stuff.
God knows that things could get bad in the next couple of days.
Wait, we just had a, we had a Senator call for violence in the streets.
Wait, who just came out?
Someone just came out of that and just said that.
If this doesn't go the way we want it to, then people are going to have to go out on the streets, take to the streets with guns.
Well, I mean, isn't that why you put on your camo fatigues and you go into the state legislature with your semi-automatic weapons?
You just remind people if things don't go the way that you want them to, like, blood could run into the gutters.
I mean, that's what they're doing.
Like, Trump is not going to go away.
I keep telling people this, and I keep wanting people to get it.
Just because Trump lost this election, just because Biden is going to be inaugurated, doesn't make everything fine.
He's not going to simply vanish.
There is a possibility.
We talked about, you know, like, there's rumors that he might escape to Scotland.
And God knows what he's going to do over there or how long he'll stay there.
But this thing is not going to just abate because there's way too much money in it.
There's way too much political power.
And I have to say one thing.
I do think you can get millions of the people who have supported this.
I do think that you can peel them away or at least a fraction of them.
I think there are a lot of people who are gone that you're not going to reach.
And those are people that we're going to have to deal with for the rest of our lives.
I do think that there are other people you can deal with their material living conditions.
And you can start to de-radicalize them, which is exactly what we need to do.
But we have to get serious about those material living conditions instead of playing these incremental games, which are only going to create more and more radicalization.
It was Louie Gohmert, by the way, who is your friend and mine.
Of course it was Louie Gohmert!
He's calling for blood in the streets.
Yeah.
Roll that beautiful bean footage.
What did Gohmert say?
Oh, he basically had said, you know, if we can't get what we want on this one, we're gonna have to take to the streets.
But he even said violence.
There will be violence in the streets.
He explicitly called it out.
It's, you know, the thing we were talking about as far as hitting home, hitting it where it hurts, you know, we've already heard how much more could it hurt when you talk about a thing like COVID?
You know what I mean?
In terms of the economy and in terms of death, in terms of sickness, you know, people are not getting unemployment insurance.
Multiple reports coming out in a lot of different states where people are not, they've been waiting since, you know, for months and months for anything to come in because the governments are so impossible to, that they can't be getting anything done.
So I don't know if that's, that should be the thing that you're talking about that would kind of move the ice a little bit.
It's not.
I suppose the numbers we're talking about of the 75 million that voted for Trump, maybe we only need to find 10 million or something.
And that would, that would probably irrevocably change the elections going forward if that's all.
Well, and possibly change culture because I have to assume there are 10 million, uh, former FDR Democrats among those people that like, if we could have like a sort of a new deal, you might be able to make a difference.
By the way, just for everyone who wants to keep up informed, I'm going to read this bullshit.
Um, and, and, this right here, this right here is the modern American moment in a nutshell.
Um, the bottom line is the court is saying, we're not going to touch this.
You have no remedy.
Louie Gohmert told news max.
Of course he told news max.
Of course he said news max.
And so, Essentially, the ruling would be you have to go to the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM.
Good job, Louie Gohmert.
I assume no teeth fell out of his mouth as he was giving that.
That statement to Newsmax.
Of course he was on Newsmax.
He knows where his bread is buttered.
Because Newsmax and OANN, if you turn them on right now, they're talking about the Mark of the Beast and vaccines.
They're talking about Bill Gates sterilizing people.
They're talking about, I mean, reptilian people.
There's probably a segment at 8 p.m.
tonight that is about Chief Justice Roberts getting, you know, pedophile ransomed.
When the story broke about the call for Georgia, we were kind of curious.
We went over to FoxNews.com.
Let's see how they're covering it.
You couldn't even find it for at least 12 hours on their website.
They didn't even... Was it War on Christmas?
Yeah, and that kind of stuff.
Totally, you know.
So it's like that's what that's what's so dangerous about like the Fox News crowd.
I think it's not even necessarily misinformation.
It's just an absence of information.
They simply will not report stuff.
And so the you know, all the ideas get solidified in the heads of people watching absent all this important information and that's as dangerous as giving them the lies.
Well, and I think Fox News, and this is important particularly as we're talking about the Republican Party, that base, and also like Newsmax and OANN.
I think Fox News actually had to learn a hard lesson that I think everybody else knew but they didn't know, which is nobody watches Fox News for the news.
They watch it for the poison.
They want the cultural rage.
They don't want to know what happened in the election.
They want to hear, you know, that like jackbooted thugs are going to break into your home and, you know, steal your elf on the shelf or something like that.
That's what they're that's what they're obsessed with in Fox News.
They don't have a choice.
That's the direction they're going to have to go in.
And I want to point out, by the way, that I've been thinking about this a lot.
So this is going to air on the 5th.
And I live in the blue state of Georgia, the liberal haven of Georgia, where I've already voted to end the Socialist Democrat agenda.
I've already tallied my vote.
I think right now, If I had to put money on it right now, I would say that Osif and Warnick win.
That's where I would put my money right now.
It doesn't mean it's going to happen.
I think there's still a possibility of a split thing.
And in that case, I would say it would probably be Warnick and Purdue.
Even though Loeffler, by the way, has just unloaded every racist, scaremongering idea you can ever imagine.
I mean, it is ugly down here.
What do you think happens to the Republican Party if Georgia gives its electoral votes to Joe Biden?
Probably that will happen on the 6th.
They'll probably have an election result on the 6th or on the 7th.
What do you think happens if the Republican Party and its base has to deal with a complete repudiation all within like a 24 to 48 hour time window?
Well, okay, so you're proposing that Purdue wins.
No, I'm saying if Ossoff and Warnock both win.
Oh, I see.
And the votes are certified.
Like, what do you think is coming over the next couple days?
Because I have some thoughts on this.
Well, you know, it would have to be, again, a solidification of the base.
Again, they have to, like, close ranks, get the wagons circling.
You know, there's going to be caravans coming from South America again.
Like, that's the kind of shit Iran is going to have a nuclear bomb.
The caravan's here, Nick!
Like, they're in your neighborhood if that happens, right?
Yeah, exactly.
China will be, you know, doing something.
50,000 Chinese troops coming over the border and getting killed with bunker busters, right?
Yeah.
That will probably be – although the Iran thing will probably end up being that's the more – they're already kind of set up for that.
Even though somehow miraculously they were de-escalating some of the movement that got rid of an aircraft carrier from the area.
But still, that's a real interesting conundrum.
So I think, yeah, you're going to ratchet up all the old greatest hits.
Hell, they're going to probably find WMD somewhere that they're going to have to go in and get.
So here's the thing is everyone thinks about elections in these moments – They think about them and like, oh, they're just ratcheting up for that day.
And then suddenly they'll stop, which is what it kind of used to be.
Do you know what I mean?
Like they would they would every now and then pull out their scaremongering, you know, in case they needed to oppose a bill or, you know, something evil like universal health care.
But now it doesn't end there.
Right?
So, like, if Warnick and Ossoff win, and some of the polls are showing us that's a real possibility, and we've been, and by the way, the base has been told that they are just, I mean, they're comparing them to Fidel Castro, Nick.
They've claimed that Ossoff not only takes money from China, but is just under their control, that he is a Manchurian candidate, and that Raphael Warnick is basically Jeremiah Wright on steroids.
Right.
Paradoxically, the thing I did see on Fox News, aside from without, you know, they didn't have anything about the call, but they did a thing about Warnick talking about how in 2007, he said, we run the risk of losing our soul if we don't get our troops out of Iraq.
But that was that was the scare mongering tactic that they were putting on.
Well, they just had they just had a thing that aired the other day, which, you know, I thought I had seen everything.
I thought I had seen Everything down here and apparently Warnock and I don't know if it's his estranged wife or if they're divorced they had had an argument in a driveway and she had told the police they ran over her foot as he backed out the driveway and And the ads, once they discovered that, like, I mean it was all, it was done.
You know what I mean?
Like, it was the most disgusting group of ads.
And even she, she was out in public and she was like, you have to stop misrepresenting what happened here.
And so that was really bad.
So I want people to think about that.
You have Asif who, and put yourself in the mindset, which we always ask people to do.
So, you believe Trump, you believe the Republican Party, you even believe that Fox News might be fake news, right?
You're watching OANN, your grandkids showed you how to put it on your Roku, and you're watching all this stuff.
You've got Ossoff, who is a Chinese Manchurian candidate, Raphael Warnock, who is not just radical, he's dangerous.
Then they go ahead and they certify the votes from a stolen election, which they have told you that isn't, you know, gonna happen.
They're gonna stop this deal.
What happens the day after that?
Because it doesn't end.
The narrative's not over.
They don't release the tension or, you know, any of the steam that's building up.
What happens?
And there's no thought within the Republican Party of what you do with the narrative.
The Republican Party is just like, keep it going until you can't do it anymore.
And that's where we are right now.
Yeah, I suppose that that steam gets trapped and it keeps building and that's when you get these hot spots that erupt out of these things.
So the next time you see guys with guns showing up at the statehouse, it isn't going to end so peacefully.
I mean, that is certainly where it feels like it is going because it's that helpless feeling.
this time.
So, um, yeah, that's, that's the, or the next person's going to abduct the governor, you know, all those different things.
Yeah.
I mean, that, that is certainly where it feels like it is going because that it's that helpless feeling.
There's no leadership that would try and explain, you know, a peaceful transfer of power that we used to have, you know?
And so as - As a result, it's just, right.
There's nowhere for it to escape.
It is frightening.
It's enough to not want to live in this country at some point.
Or again, like my proposal, let's just have our civil war.
Let's have our two separate countries.
Let them all live somewhere. - Yeah, we would not coexist peacefully.
And it would be really, really bad.
I think eventually we're gonna figure our way out of this.
And eventually we're gonna deal again with material conditions and we'll go from there.
But this thing, the lack of leadership by the Republican Party to really grasp what they've created and what they're living within.
I mean, I'm sorry, but fuck Ted Cruz.
Like that guy knows better.
Why are you apologizing?
He knows better.
He knows better than all of this.
He knows he's on the wrong side of history.
But he could be president later, Nick.
He was appointed by God to be president.
That's what Howley's doing.
Howley's sitting over here and he's putting the bib in his shirt and he's sharpening up his knife like he thinks he's the heir apparent to Trump.
You have so many people who think that they're going to have to continue flirting and courting this Trump base.
They know better, but none of them None of them have any sort of an endgame in mind besides them coming to power.
And they'll fix it, you know, because they're ordained and they're perfect and they're great and they're special.
They'll be the ones who will put things back together and they'll win.
They have no endgame that actually reflects any sort of reality or any sort of a peaceful transfer of power or compromise or working government.
It all has to do with wealth and power.
And that's that's the end of it.
That's all that they care about, period.
And it's so blatant what they're doing.
And, you know, Kasich was on one of the CNN or something, you know, calling them out for it.
Just blatant political party over country.
But here's the thing.
You know, they're kind of operating under the assumption that Trump is not going to run again.
And I suppose you've got to be prepared in case he doesn't or in case he's in prison.
So I guess you get all your ducks in a row.
But can we just say for a second, can we just remind everyone for a second, Trump doesn't actually want to be president of the United States of America.
He actually does not want the job.
He doesn't want to do the job.
He wants to be celebrated.
He doesn't want to put in the work.
He also doesn't want to be a loser.
He also doesn't want to be prosecuted.
And meanwhile, you're exactly right.
He might run again!
He might run again!
Jared, why do you suppose he's still raising money today?
I mean, we're taping this on Monday night.
He's probably raising money right now.
He is.
I saw the things today.
They're sending out fundraising emails every day now.
Doesn't tell you exactly why they're raising the money, but you better get it in before this X amount of time goes by because we're trying to match the funds, whatever.
I mean, it is a fundraising thing.
And again, what are they doing with this?
Short of simply, he is going to take the money.
We know he thinks it's his money, regardless.
And that will also be something they could have ultimately prosecuted him for.
By the way, I want to point out that we have made the mistake of not wishing our listeners a Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
But I do want to point this out.
It is only January 4th while we're taping this.
2021 is already exhausting.
Yeah.
It's just already so damn exhausting.
And these couple of days have been so bad.
And it's been it was right around Christmas was when, you know, we started hearing like that the Republicans were going to oppose this thing.
We have no idea what's going to happen on Wednesday with the certification.
We have the special election, which, knock on wood, hopefully the tide of power will change in the Senate and Mitch McConnell can crawl under a rock and decompose and just go away.
But we just want to say thank you and happy New Year's.
Like I said, Nick, I hate to say it, man.
I feel an emergency podcast just blazing across the sky.
Yeah.
No, there's no question.
They're planning something.
It probably won't work, but something's going to happen.
So, if you're interested in that, maybe we'll do some exclusive coverage, but a reminder that this week's Weekender will be over at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
That'll come out on Friday.
We'll react to all of this stuff and maybe take some questions from listeners.
Again, if you have not already, like, subscribe, share, talk about rate, tell people we're having good conversations, bring them in, have them be part of the Muckrake community.