Since the attempted coup at the Capitol more details have emerged: Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman sort through the mess, discuss the movement to impeach Donald Trump, and get in-depth as to what dangers America still faces and possible solutions to this ongoing crisis. To unlock exclusive content, including The Weekender show on Fridays, Q&A sessions, and livestreams, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
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The staff went under the table, barricaded the door, turned out the lights, and were silent in the dark.
Under the table this whole time?
Under the table for two and a half hours.
And I think the single most important thing that Republicans in Congress who help facilitate this widespread conspiracy theory that somehow the election was stolen is to stop those lies.
That's an important next step if we are in fact going to have any healing.
Jake, I don't think there's any doubt at all, there's none in my mind, that the president's behavior after the election was wildly different than his behavior before.
He descended into a level of madness and engaged in activity that was just absolutely unthinkable and unforgivable.
Hey everybody, welcome to the McCraig Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton, here as always with Nick Halseman.
Since the last time we talked, Since the last time we convened here on the Muckrake Podcast, we've had a few days to really digest the coup attempt of last week.
Trump's... I don't know, man.
Trump's mob Breaking into the Capitol and trying to overthrow the Democratic process, possibly kidnap and or kill representatives.
We've now learned multiple things about this entire situation, despite the fact, by the way, Nick, that there hasn't been a single press conference, a single real remark from the administration, nothing in the way of an investigation Being of being started.
But what we have learned based on journalism is we have learned that it could have been a whole lot worse than what it was.
We've now learned of multiple explosive devices, including napalm, multiple weapons, plans to, again, kidnap representatives, possibly kill them, people bragging that they were going to go to the Capitol and assassinate officials.
We've now learned that two Capitol Police officers have been suspended for their actions during the coup attempt.
This whole thing, Nick, it reeks to high heaven.
I feel like we're not even close to the bottom of this thing, and with every detail that comes out, it gets worse and worse and worse.
I don't know why you're upset that there aren't any investigations.
They didn't investigate anything like, you know, Benghazi.
Yeah, why would you?
Why would you investigate?
What do we add in death count here, by the way?
Oh, well, is it five or is it more now?
Because the officer died, you know, from from a suicide, right?
And they had to kind of report it in different different ways.
And it sounds like the weight of this whole thing was, was, you know, too much for him to bear, which is devastating.
And we got a lot more information about how this all went down.
Let me ask you this before we get into that.
How do you think that they would have killed Pelosi if they found her?
Yeah, absolutely.
They would have just sort of crushed her.
I think it depends.
And by the way, this is one of the things.
I finally – we talked about this a little bit when we did the emergency podcast and then when we did the weekender for Friday.
One of the things that I'm starting to come around to is the composition of this crowd, right?
So on one hand, we have a bunch of QAnon people who thought they were participating in the Great Awakening, which by the way, the Great Awakening is about assassinating public officials and, you know, killing traitors, all that stuff.
We also have a group of MAGA people who ended up in there taking pictures almost like they were on a guided tour of the Capitol.
They stayed in between the velvet ropes in that one room for a while there, which I thought was kind of crazy.
Madness and then we have a group of militarized white supremacist and white terrorist who are We're bragging openly amongst themselves.
I have to tell you, like, I was looking at this stuff.
People I know were looking at this stuff.
Not a lot of this was hidden.
We're talking about assassination attempts, plans to drag people like Pelosi and AOC out and kill them possibly in front of a crowd.
I think it would have been a matter of who found them and what direction things took.
I think this thing definitely could have been a bloodbath.
Wow.
I mean, I'm trying to sort of picture that because we now have lots of footage and you can see how this is all playing out in real time with the video and the photos.
But I do feel like, yes, that was an absolute, you know, fear and legitimate fear to have and all of them should have felt that way.
And it was clear why the woman who got shot, like, you know, they needed to use force because especially where they were trying to get in there as we got more of a picture of that whole thing.
They get through that barricade, they are now in the chambers where the House of Representatives were still in.
They hadn't gotten out all the way yet.
And that would have been, again, another example where they would have either, like, tied into chairs and they would have, like, displayed them out on the, you know, whatever as hostages.
It would have been, you know, it would have been ridiculous.
And then at that point, they would have had to have killed them.
I imagine the SWAT teams, whatever, would have come in and they would have ended up Killing a lot more of these insurrectionists.
Anyway, I don't even want to think about that too much.
Well, by the way, we haven't even mentioned the fact because we were talking before we started recording how jam-packed this show is because there's so much going on.
There's such madness going on.
We didn't even talk about the fact that a congresswoman who has been linked to these people, who has been bragging about carrying her gun to Washington, D.C., and kind of quietly insinuating that she might go into the Capitol and have armed combat, that while the lockdown was going on, was tweeting out the location of the representatives as well as where Nancy Pelosi was.
And now there is a legitimate concern that she might have been communicating this to the mob in order to give them directions.
The fact that that's even something we have to address is madness.
Well, we also know that Clyburn, Jim Clyburn, was saying that they knew exactly how to find him.
He was not in a marked office.
And they marched right down the hallway.
It wasn't clear if anyone didn't know where they were going, how to find him.
And they did.
So that lends credence to a lot of things, which you could get into conspiracy theories if you want.
But there is something about the whole response to this.
We had more information from the chief of police, a chief of Capitol Police who had to resign, saying that he did reach out and try and get the National Guard to be on ready two days beforehand.
And Maxine Waters was all over him, making sure that was going to happen.
And then they basically refused.
And somebody at some point higher up, you could blame bureaucracy, but at some point it sounds a little bit nefarious, where they were like, well, A, they didn't want the optics of it, whatever, which is ridiculous, because this started a lot earlier.
And the timeline I saw, it really started to get violent around 1240 Eastern Time, when we weren't aware of it on the West Coast until 1130 my time, which is 1231.
Which is 2.30 which is almost like two hours later.
So this clash started a lot earlier than I had thought in a way that there was a lot longer timeline to get the troops in there to actually respond and they didn't.
So there is definitely a notion that this was intentional and if you want to put this whole thing together with who Trump is and you realize that the main targets of this mob Well, are the two people directly behind him in the line of secession, right?
The Vice President and then Nancy Pelosi.
It speaks to something.
It says something.
I don't know exactly what, but, you know, he didn't seem really upset, at least for most of this, what we heard in the reporting.
Trump didn't, about what was going on.
Well, so there's a lot going on there.
And, man, we love silver bullet explanations in this country.
We want to know the one thing.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, what is the one explanation that takes care of all this?
Because we're not good at multitasking.
We're really thinking about things in a nuanced manner.
People keep asking me, they're like, what happened with the defense of Congress?
Was it intentional?
Was it a lack of coordination?
Did somebody mean to do this?
Was it accidental?
Did the crowd just get out of the way?
It's all of the above.
Some of these people were like, yeah, absolutely.
Here you go.
Have fun.
Do what you got to do.
Other people, and we've seen videos of these people getting beaten, dragged off, just being like, you know, ripped into being crushed, being chased, being stalked.
We've seen that take place.
There's a lot of things happening.
One, it was going to be a white crowd.
And because of the white supremacist background in this country, people are like, well, you know, they might leave some trash or something, but they're not like people of color who are potentially dangerous no matter where they are.
Right?
So there was that understatement.
The second thing is, how many people in Washington, D.C.
are constantly trying to avoid pissing off Donald Trump?
Particularly in his administration or in the Republican Party.
They didn't want to, somehow or another, rub him the wrong way.
Was the National Guard situation intentional?
Yes and no, probably.
There was, you know, this is not a particularly competent government, but there is a certain malevolence to this government.
Did Donald Trump mean to sick his supporters on Congress?
Who the hell knows what that guy thinks?
From one moment to the next, it could change.
Who has literally any idea?
But what we've heard over the past couple of days is he was more troubled that the PGA took away their major championship from his golf course than he was by the fact that he sicked a mob on his vice president and Congress.
So, like, we can't tell what he thinks at any given moment or whatever.
It's a confluence of things and what came together here is the crazy awfulness of the Trump era.
There is incompetence and there is malevolence and those two things work hand in hand.
Absolutely.
And the thing is, you know, when you study the speeches that he had right before the thing and then you throw in Donald Trump Jr.
and Rudy Giuliani, All the key words are there.
All the trigger things that this happened from are clearly there.
And it's a two-fold legal problem for them, which is why Trump had to go on and do this really ridiculous thing to the camera to try and supposedly stop this after it had already happened, which was that inciting violence, inciting mayhem like they did, is illegal.
You can't do that.
But it's also an insurrection.
It's a double thing.
So he needs to be prosecuted for this.
He needs to be impeached for this.
He needs to be taken out of the office as it is.
And anyway, we know that Pence won't do that.
By the way, what does it say about this?
Pence is probably his main motivation for not doing the 25th Amendment is because he's afraid that he's going to get assassinated.
Oh, I guarantee that's up there.
And by the way, what a, what a absolute ridiculous thing it has been with Pence saying, well, you know, I'm not taking the 25th Amendment off the table.
I'm just, you know, I'll, I'll wait and see if he does anything more unhinged than this.
And it's like the guy tried to kill you, man.
Like, like he sent out a mob to kill you.
We had a president of the United States of America sick a mob on his vice president and the legislative branch.
And if, by the way, and I've been on the record of this, Democrats have now introduced one count of impeachment for inciting an insurrection.
What we're looking at, so you'll be hearing this podcast probably tomorrow, which is Tuesday.
Tomorrow, Congress is going to ask the administration to carry out the 25th Amendment.
They're not going to do it.
It's a ceremonial call.
It's like trying to put on a show.
Then on Wednesday, reportedly, is when they're going to vote on an impeachment.
Donald Trump's dumb ass should have already been impeached by now.
Should have already been impeached.
It should have been taken care of the night that it happened.
Period.
I mean, listen, McConnell and Cruz and all these assholes should have shown up at the White House and told them, you have to step down now.
It's time to go.
Yeah.
You know, it's already as bad as it's going to be for you.
You're not going to repair anything in the next two weeks.
Go.
You have to leave.
And that's the other issue.
You know, he learned his lesson, by the way, from the first impeachment.
The lesson was that there's nothing he can't do.
No one will hold him accountable.
So this fucking, you know, Collins in Maine, who's like, oh, maybe he'll even learn his lesson.
Yeah, he did.
And this is what they taught him.
And I don't...it makes perfect sense, based on that experience, why he wouldn't have any clue.
I mean, listen, he was more upset about the classiness of these rioters, or whatever we got to call them.
What are we going to call them?
They're treasonous.
They're traitors, I guess we'll call them.
And he was much more concerned with their appearance and whether they're classy or not.
But, you know, the other thing about the...you mentioned earlier about how these different factions of this group, You know, was the cosplay paramilitary faction of this, which you can see them when they killed this officer, and they march up in one single straight line, you know, much more, everyone else sort of milling about, it's a little bit less, it's a lot looser.
Well, Nick, if you watch the video, they're giving, like, hand signals, they're giving signals with flags.
This was not a completely spontaneous thing for these people.
And they have been talking for a very long time about what they would do if they were to ever actually confront the government of the United States.
This was not an accident.
This was not just totally spontaneous.
And, so, the thing that really killed me was when you watch them, you know, beating, you can't see the officer in the angle from the one video you see, but they drag the guy out.
There's like 20, 30, 40 officers in the foyer, sort of, you know, stopping everybody from getting in.
I really don't understand why They didn't rush out there and grab him, and at that point perhaps use a firearm or something to rush out there en masse with 5, 10, 20 officers and get their guy back.
I suppose it was mass panic.
I don't know if one of the officers was the guy who ultimately committed suicide, but that image has to be seared in their minds.
They must have just panicked and frozen and had no leadership.
That's the other thing is, right?
We saw these, you know, and by the way, there was no leadership, but there also was leadership in the sense that we did see footage of the doors opening, then letting them in.
And you even see one of the officers say, I don't agree with this at all, indicating to me that he was told by a superior, just let him in.
And that certainly seems like a couple other officers got that same message too, as they pulled the barricades back and let them in and backed up.
Meanwhile, the whole faction of other cops are sitting there wrestling and fighting inside the building with them until they couldn't anymore.
Um, if this doesn't have double the amount of investigations as Benghazi did, then it's a complete and utter failure, and it's too bad that we had to get to this point.
How many of these do we have to have?
And 9-11 happens, and oh, we never heard, we couldn't even fathom that this would happen, and yet we find out two weeks later that there was all these reports, everybody knew about it, and the entire government, that this was going to happen, and then they let it happen anyway.
We now know from here, from this incident on Wednesday, that it was going on for months.
Complete and clear evidence that this was going to happen and that that was being monitored.
And I don't know if we're going to have to chalk it up to the ineffectual nature of a government and bureaucracy, or if it is, you know, on purpose.
Well, it's all of it, again.
I mean, part of it is the fact that people who should have known better... I mean, I was just tweeting about this before we went on the air, man.
We've known For, I want to say the first instance that I've found is like 2005, 2006 was the first report that told us that the number one threat in the United States of America was white supremacist and terrorist, white terrorist.
Yeah.
It wasn't people of color.
It wasn't Muslims.
It wasn't foreign terrorism.
It was domestic terrorism.
And people who get those briefings, people who understand this stuff, They still went to their job and they still voted for Patriot Act shit.
They still went and they voted, you know, to crack down on people of color and Muslims and foreign terrorists or whatever, you know, which basically Al Qaeda was more or less a blown up fiction of the Bush administration.
It is both.
Again, malfeasance, but also, and this is one of the larger problems here in America, is people are having such a hard time wrapping their heads around this, because to wrap your head around is to understand that America is flawed, and that America is at a point of crisis right now.
American exceptionalism isn't real.
That's a fairy tale.
That's something to listen to before you go to sleep to help you sleep at night.
And what's more, You know, you were sitting here and you were talking about, like, these Republicans need to go and tell Trump that it was time to go.
I just read this off to you before we got on the air.
This is a Quinnipiac poll.
Listen to this shit.
73% of Republicans polled say that Trump is protecting democracy.
This is post-coup attempt, by the way.
70% of Republicans say that the Republicans voting to reject the electors are protecting democracy.
73% of Republicans asked post coup attempt believe there is widespread voter fraud and that the election might have been stolen and Trump still enjoys a 71% approval rating among Republicans talked to.
Also, by the way, YouGov found that over 50% of Republicans say Trump isn't responsible at all for the coup attempt.
Now, you know, if you want to parse that a little bit, we probably should feel lucky that it went down to 71.
Because remember, he had a 90% approval rating, you know, but just before this.
So that's significant.
But if you want to be done with the coup attempt, or I assume if you want to be done with it, you probably think it was probably a riot that spilled into the Capitol, right?
You want to believe in these fictions.
You have to look at these numbers and you have to recognize that There is an existential crisis in America.
This is, and by the way, like we were talking about this too, the FBI says there's going to be armed protest in all 50 states.
From January 16th to January 20th, which by the way, everything I've seen, all my investigations, all my research, finds that it's not going to end on January 20th.
There are people who are talking about the 21st, the 22nd, the 23rd, the 24th, the 25th.
I saw one person who was talking about violence on the 100th day of Joe Biden's administration.
Like, this is not over.
This thing didn't just... I keep reading these things.
I don't know if you've seen it.
They're like, well, they need to get a little frustration out.
You know, it was just an outburst, Nick.
And when Trump goes, it'll be totally gone.
Trump isn't the entire point of this thing.
He's the grifter who whipped them up into a fury.
But a lot of these people have been angry and fascist and racist and dangerous for a very long time.
You cannot look at what happened at the Capitol and not draw a direct line to Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing.
You can't.
You just can't.
Well, you know what's gonna make me sleep better tonight, Jared?
The fact that we have a Department of Homeland Security head who is in power right now helping us devise a plan to stop all this insurrection.
Isn't that amazing that Chad Wolf, who by the way, fuck that guy.
Fuck that guy for his role in the BLM crackdown.
Remember that asshole who was swaggering on Fox News every second they would have him, talking about dominating the war space and all this bullshit, right?
Like what a profile on courage that asshole is.
Has now resigned, which means we're not even going to have an acting Homeland Security Director while we face this threat and leading into the inauguration.
By the way, real fast for those who haven't seen it, Secret Service officers have had to be moved around because they've been seen as dangerously loyal to Donald Trump.
Like, we have an actual fifth column situation in this country, Nick.
We can't trust our institutions right now.
We can't trust that the FBI, CIA, Capitol Police, military, we've seen those reports.
They're filthy with white supremacists.
We know that.
People who, by the way, they take an oath of office to protect the Constitution.
You know what else they do?
They take an oath to, uh, what?
The three percenters.
Or, uh, any... QAnon!
Absolutely!
And they take this oath, and then they take the other oath.
We can't trust any of these things.
Like, this is not a way a country can work.
Here's the other problem with what you're saying.
The real problem here, which is so disconcerting, is that the other side is saying exactly what you're saying.
We cannot trust the FBI, the CIA, the government, the deep state.
For the other reasons, on the other side of this, we're all saying the same thing, right?
And that is really what makes me feel like there's never going to be a way to make this work again, certainly the way it's set up now.
I mean, you know what?
This is a chock-full episode.
There's about 30 other things we need to talk about here.
That we haven't but that's that is certainly a big one But the fact that Chad Wolf is now resigned after having been tried they try to get him out of there this whole time because he wasn't Legally appointed and then all of a sudden he's gonna say.
Oh, well, you know what the whole legally appointing man That was probably pretty right I'm gonna get out of here because I don't want to get you know being in an illegal situation when we know that there's no question whatever is being prepared right now in response to the threat that we have going in and over the next two weeks or ten days and is there's got to be things that are sitting very poorly with a lot of these law enforcement people.
And you have to be wondering what that is and how the response is going to ultimately be.
Now, here's the thing.
Would these people attack the Capitol building again, having now known that there's all this fencing around, they're going to have a lot more things?
I don't think that that would be the target anymore.
And that makes it even scarier because now what is it?
What are they going to attack?
You mentioned there's probably going to be the equivalent Capitol buildings in every state that might have a thing.
that's going to be impossible to manage if if all of them at once.
That's really just a really scary proposition.
And I don't know, you know, short of, you know, staying in my house anyway, because I'm so afraid of COVID.
My life has not changed, but it certainly would have going forward.
I would not have left my house the next 10 days anyway.
I, you know, talking about this and really getting to the nuts and bolts of it, you know, I kept getting asked by people, There's like, is another civil war possible?
And everybody thinks about civil war.
They think about armies lining up, you know, firing artillery at each other or whatever.
Like, we have an insurrection in this country.
The question is, are we going to take care of it before it grows to a level that you can start calling it a civil war?
Because that's what's happening.
Like, when we actually look at American history and we talk about the Civil War, and again, the way we teach history sucks, man.
All of a sudden, it's just like, everyone just got up and said, ah, we're done.
It's like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy in the office, right?
We secede, and that's it, and then suddenly we're in a Civil War.
There were people in the South, some of them were called fire eaters, who just advocated over and over and over for secession and they peddled conspiracy theories and they peddled all these dangerous ideas and thoughts about warfare and skirmishes and altercations.
And it grew and it grew and it grew until it took over the popular imagination.
And that's what happened.
What's happening here right now?
The question is, are we going to actually take on the threat?
Are we going to take it seriously?
Right?
And I was saying this last night in a live stream.
The only way to prevent future coups is by acknowledging that future coups could happen.
Living in denial of it just means that all of a sudden all your soft targets that we're talking about, right?
All of a sudden it's like, well, whatever.
And 50 state capitals, Nick?
state capitals?
Well, at what point – what if there's only 25?
Is there a number because it becomes a civil war?
Is it only 20?
Is it 30?
And then all of a sudden – and this is where it gets really hard to start wrapping your head around.
How many fucking Republican governors have been live action role-playing as seditionists?
You know what I mean?
And on top of that, we've seen that they are totally fine with allowing hundreds of thousands of Americans to drop dead of COVID.
Like, there's so much blood on so many of these people's hands because they want to pretend like they're tough guys, they want to pretend like they're loyalists to Trump, all this stuff.
It's all a big pretend game until it's not.
We are in an incredibly dangerous moment and we have to have, we gotta have conversations about not only how to take it down, and real fast, this is important, I'm not advocating for a new Patriot Act situation.
I'm not advocating for more surveillance.
We have more than enough shit on the books to take care of this.
We have to take it seriously, but we can take care of it.
And then finally, we gotta talk about how to de-radicalize this country and actually figure things out going forward.
Because I'll tell you what the Forever Wars taught me, Nick.
I don't know about you.
They taught me one big, giant lesson.
And that's, you can kill as many terrorists as you want.
But that doesn't mean that you have less terrorists.
Right.
That means that you get more.
If you don't take care of the material conditions that are radicalizing people, they don't just go away.
As you kill them and their children and their families, it grows and grows and grows and grows and these people already have martyrs, they already have symbols, the movement is coalescing.
You cannot ignore this anymore and you can't just kill them or lock them up and make it go away.
That's not how this stuff gets taken care of.
I say a prayer every day that nothing happens between now and the inauguration outside of this country as well to cause a crisis because... Oh, can you imagine?
Why wouldn't it?
You know, the thing when you mentioned, you know, COVID kind of goes in and out of this conversation back and forth a little bit here, but I do want to paint this picture that in the midst of an insurgency in the Capitol where the lawmakers were You know, as we found out more, like it was close.
They almost became face to face with this angry mob.
And a lot of the people who work below the Congress people were stuck in that building a lot longer, you know, under desks, under chairs, barricading doors.
But we had Bonnie Watson Coleman, who's a congresswoman from New Jersey, had to hide in a room with a bunch of Republican lawmakers who all refused to put on masks.
And she gets COVID as a cancer survivor in her upper 70s.
Like she is at grave risk.
She already has symptoms and she's at home.
And it's like, what more?
How much worse can this get?
At the very least, if you're in the midst of this, I always feel like in that kind of situation when it's dire and you kind of would get into that mode where you're, I want to help as many people as I can.
I want to, okay, I'll put the mask on.
At least I'll do that.
I know the COVID thing is an issue.
And they don't.
And I think it was clear that she said you got to put a mask on and they wouldn't.
So I just think that it's fundamentally broken from a psychological standpoint, right, from a personality disorder standpoint, from a cult standpoint.
And there just needs to be a whole deprogramming of things, starting from our kids, and you're talking about teaching history.
And going forward we have to stop the parents of these kids from continuing to pollute their kids minds and creating more generations of this, I guess, which it sounds exactly like what we say to the, you know, extreme Muslim terrorists.
No, it's our own Al-Qaeda.
It really is.
It's our own Al-Qaeda, our own ISIS.
We have a homegrown extremist fascistic movement.
And, you know, I've been trying to tell people for a while, the way that you de-radicalize in this country is you take away, you help the material conditions of the people who are radicalized.
That's one way that you take care of that.
You start investing in these places.
Because what we've seen, and by the way, this is also what happens in countries where Al-Qaeda and ISIS were taking off.
It's what was happening in Italy and Germany when fascism took over.
Or in any number of other countries, by the way, where fascists ruled over their people, and the United States helped them come to power and helped them stay in power.
What we find is that people who are desperate start to become radicalized.
And this is an important thing, and I've been screaming this for days now.
Fascism, and this type of insurrection activity, it's a weapon by the wealthy and the powerful.
They use these people.
And by the way, maybe this will be controversial, it shouldn't be.
Those people, they have a reason to be pissed off.
Yeah.
They have a reason to be pissed off at our government.
Our government is bought and sold and it does not serve in the public interest.
Period.
We all have a reason to be pissed off about it.
The problem is we should be talking with these people about what's actually going on in the country, which is what we do on this podcast.
We actually should be having a conversation about this with them.
Instead, the wealthy and the powerful, including Donald Trump and the Koch brothers and any number of malevolent assholes, have given them another story.
And that story is about pedophiles and Satanists and Clinton crime families and who knows what they're saying about Hunter Biden today.
I assume if you turn on Fox News right now, Hunter Biden is probably on.
Right?
This is a fiction.
And you can't deal with it.
You can't argue with it.
The only thing you can do is make sure that you tamp down any threat that's out there, keep it from erupting, while taking care of the material conditions that lead to the radicalization of these people.
This isn't rocket science.
It's how politics works.
It's what history shows us works.
But we can't sit here and pretend like this thing isn't ongoing and it doesn't need addressed.
If I had to generalize how these protests, the differences between Black Lives Matter protests and the, I don't know how we, the multicultural protests versus clearly white anger, you know, protests that we've seen in Michigan, we've seen now this past week, you know, those protests are rooted in anger and hate.
And so when you get them all together, the energy around there is a complete different energy.
I was protesting at the LAX against the Muslim ban.
And it was sort of like righteous anger, but it was more about, like, let's come together and make sure our voices are heard and we are, you know, in a lawful way.
I mean, it was clearly, you know, there was no, it didn't have the, you know it better than I do because you were in those pens, you know, around Trump, you know, during 2016 or in the election.
But it's rooted in hate and anger.
And that's why it's so easy for this leadership and these guys to have a speech with just the right amount of words in there that can get them whipped up so completely into a frenzy.
Now, you know, however percentage of that got caught up in the moment, right?
We hear that a little bit, right?
The guy hanging from the balcony got caught up in the moment.
My bad, I suppose, is what he's trying to say.
And that might happen to a number of those people.
But certainly, when you're talking about the organized paramilitary force that was going in there, these guys are not, you know, getting caught up.
They had this thing from the beginning.
But it's all because, that's the biggest difference, is that what they're marching for and that they're trying to express is such horrible anger and disgusting hate.
And that's in complete diametrically opposed to what we see in most of the other kind of movements.
That's all it takes.
And I suppose what your point you're making is that with proper leadership, then those people get put back into the holes, right?
Tamp down, I think is what you said.
And so we have to acknowledge that it exists.
I think in good times, quote unquote, they kind of those people go away, right?
But they don't go away.
They're just tamped down and sort of stewing.
You know, oh, eight years of Obama caused a lot of stewing, right?
A lot of sort of simmering anger.
And all it took was a guy like fucking Donald Trump to unleash that anger of those eight years.
And that's where we are.
Well, and, you know, we talk all the time about political and financial incentive.
The Republicans kept those people at, like, a vibration.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, they were just, like, they would hint at conspiracy theories, they would, you know, traffic in dog whistles, all that stuff.
And all it took was somebody like Donald Trump saying, there's an advantage to be had if I, like, lean into that.
And other Republicans were like, well, you know, we talked about this, there's like a gauge, right, that's like, There's like the red and you just you get it as close to the red as you possibly can.
But then other people are like, fuck it, let's get in the red.
You know what I mean?
And see what happens.
You're not going to.
And listen, this isn't going to be the most inspiring thing I'm going to say on this podcast, but it's nonetheless true.
You are not going to eradicate racism.
You are not going to eradicate misogyny.
You're not going to eradicate fascistic ideology.
And we've seen that in this country.
We've seen where there are people who are like, when you actually start talking about things like white supremacy, they run away from it and it pisses them off.
And they double down on these ideas, right?
Well, you can, however, convince people that white supremacy in this division that has currently been sown by people like Donald Trump and the Koch brothers and Fox News and the Republican Party, it's making sure that they make less money.
It's making sure that they live shorter lives.
Like, this whole thing, race and racial differences and racism are creations that keep us from working together.
They're intentional.
They were created as cudgels to keep people from engaging in solidarity and advocating from the powerless against the powerful.
You can have those conversations.
When you start having the conversations based on those cudgels, sometimes it works and you can occasionally save some people from it.
But I'm telling you that you can turn the temperature down on this by taking care of material conditions, and then if people aren't struggling to survive, all of a sudden you can start having conversations about race.
You can start having conversations about sex and power and all of that stuff.
But the problem is right now, they feel powerless and they feel alienated.
And again, people come along.
I've talked to enough neo-Nazis.
I've talked to enough white supremacists.
They say, you're not alone.
You're not powerless.
Put on this armband.
Don't you feel powerful now?
Don't you feel like you are part of, like, you're stronger than death.
You wear the skull and crossbones on your military uniform.
You can go out and kill anybody and conquer anybody.
You're not powerless.
What are you talking about?
And that's what we're looking at right now.
And I'm glad that you brought this up.
The paramilitary groups that were there, they took advantage of the anger.
They use the rest of them as human collateral.
They use them to push into the Capitol.
They use them to distract.
They use them to kill officers.
Things like that.
Those people aren't necessarily on the same page.
They don't believe in Donald Trump.
They like that he's a racist, but they know he's an idiot.
They're taking advantage of the people who actually do believe in Donald Trump.
The people who have been manipulated and brought into the fold of the Republican Party and Trumpism.
They're not the same thing.
And the people that are taking the most advantage of this whole situation are these fucking Republican legislators and lawmakers because they're now, all of a sudden, calling for unity.
Unity!
Yeah, you know, anything else is censorship and anything else is just, you know, you can't put us down for having our own opinions, you know, and that's really, and they always say this, oh yeah, keep saying that, Trump's gonna win again, you'll see, like whenever you try and criticize him for racism or misogyny or any of these terrible things.
You're not supposed to be as a human, but that's an affront to them and to this notion of unity.
And so you have these guys like Marco Rubio who keep coming out there and trying to slam Biden for calling out Trump for what he's doing.
And you have...
Cruz.
It's so disgusting.
And Holly and these guys are going to be seated as senators.
They're not going to get kicked out like they should.
They should not be seated.
They should not have this position.
And there's almost a notion that maybe they can have a recall.
I know they had a recalls of governors.
I don't know if you can do recalls of senators.
But it seems like there might be a notion in Missouri.
They should not be seated.
But here's the other thing that's coming out too from all of this.
You know, now that we're realizing who organized this whole thing, you know, you're on the hook legally, potentially, for that.
Charlie Kirk, Turning Point, you know, had to delete a tweet that said he had 80 buses that's, you know, busing these people in, and then you have... Clarence Thomas' wife?
Yeah, Ginny!
Ginny!
Multiple, multiple conservative PACs contributed to this thing.
And by the way, you again, going back to like the Timothy McVeigh, the line from the Oklahoma City bombing to this situation.
There's a line from 2010's Tea Party, which was cultivated, created and focused as a weapon by the Koch brothers to deregulate and lower their own taxes and to drive America to the right.
There is a group of people who are wealthy and powerful who have created this situation and played it like an instrument.
You're absolutely right.
There are people who put people in this situation and riled them up.
Fox News has blood on their hands.
Canadian Ted Cruz has blood on his hands.
All of these people who have profited off of it.
Jim Jordan, who today was talking about bringing the country together?
Jim Jordan!
Great.
You want to bring the country together, put Trump in jail, Hawley is defrocked, whatever you call that.
You know, the guy, Ali Alexander, who had organized the Stop the Steal thing had been boasting for weeks before that he was in cahoots with three or four major Congress people.
And Congressman, and if that's really the case, and they're part of this, and they're also on the hook potentially legally for all this thing, if they ever decide to do that.
Now, I don't know if you've seen these videos, but they're pretty crazy.
In airports around the country, as these people are landing from being on tape ransacking the Capitol, they're being arrested.
Which is, like, hard to believe that they're actually really doing this and they're able to figure this out.
The real question, I guess, is why the fuck were they ever allowed to leave?
Why?
Why were they taking selfies with cops?
Like, you know, it really is, you know, you don't want to believe it.
You don't want to believe the Fight Club thing where, you know, the cops are also, you know, they're doing the white power symbol, too.
You know, they're all part of it.
But I got to tell you, some of those cops doing selfies must have been, you know, obviously sympathetic.
I mean, heck, the cop that got killed was a Trump supporter.
Yep.
And here he is getting beaten within an inch of his life and then dies later because of this.
And, you know, they didn't even fly the flags half-mast until they finally got shit for it.
I mean, what is this?
You know, this isn't going to go away by Trump leaving office however he leaves office.
It's not.
You know what I mean?
It's already done.
The norms have been broken.
The pattern has been set.
And these Republicans aren't saying anything near appropriate what they should be saying.
And I don't see how it gets worse.
So what you're saying is that 71% of the Republicans that approve of Trump still right now, the only question we might have is, well, what is that percentage?
How many Republicans are left?
Right?
There might not be a ton of them left.
I assume that there are, but I don't know.
Yeah, I – you know, what really frustrates me in all this, man, is it's for Donald fucking Trump.
Just a completely principless guy who has exposed the rot at the heart of the Republican Party.
He has exposed that the Republican Party has no actual principles beyond the accumulation of power and profit.
He doesn't give a shit about his supporters.
He wouldn't, he wouldn't, he wouldn't spit on one of his supporters.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, he really wouldn't.
He's taking advantage of these people.
He thinks they're stupid.
He thinks they're rubes and marks because he's played them in his grift.
And it's gotten us to this point.
And meanwhile, because of grifters, and for those who don't know, we've talked about QAnon in the past and those who aren't aware, QAnon was just a lark.
on a website, on a web forum that somebody put together.
And then all of a sudden people started forwarding it around.
They started taking advantage of naive, hopeless people.
And they use the Christian evangelical religion to play upon what these people, they feel alone and abandoned, particularly by the Republican Party and the Democratic Party and the political process.
Even though they still have power and they still have privilege, they've been told the apocalypse is coming.
By the way, by an entire shitload of grifters who have paid for megachurches all over the country telling them the apocalypse is coming and Satan is doing this, Satan's doing that.
Like, it's just a giant pinball game of grift.
And here's the thing about pinball, Nick.
Pinball doesn't end.
There's no end boss for pinball.
You just keep doing it until the game dies.
That's the thing.
It's not going to end with Trump.
Trump is going to be the anti-president who is unfairly removed from office, right?
The election was stolen from him.
There's your bloody shirt that you can wave.
And by the way, the Republicans are going to wave that bloody shirt.
Probably for the rest of our lives, Nick, as long as there's the United States of America for them to wave this bloody shirt of the quote-unquote stolen election in 2020, they'll never accept another loss.
Meanwhile, you have a religion that has grown up around Donald Trump, a cult that has grown up around Donald Trump.
These people are, I mean, that woman who died, that woman who got shot, was a firm believer.
By the way, a multi-time veteran of Who served this country in one of, you know, I think both of our forever wars.
I think she served in both theaters in our forever wars.
Also, by the way, we haven't even talked about this fact.
How many veterans do we now have in this country who have not been taken care of?
Oh yeah.
Who have been immersed in conspiracy theories and white supremacy.
It is not an accident or a coincidence that Timothy McVeigh was a Persian Gulf veteran or that veterans become integral parts of fascistic paramilitary groups because they don't feel like the government's taking care of them and they have this conspiratorial radicalized mindset.
Where the hell is this going?
And all we're talking about right now are facts.
We're not even talking about conjecture at this point.
We're talking about what we've seen and where this thing is actually going.
We haven't even, like, game-theoried this out to where it could go.
Oh.
Like, we're just talking about immediate facts in this country.
That's how bad this is.
Let's talk about that for a second because the last time we were in a situation like this was 1864.
You know, right after the Civil War.
Do you know what all the calls for unity back then got us for 50, 60 years?
Yep.
Jim Crow, right?
We got a complete oppression in a new way of black people in this country, even though we had just fought a war supposedly that was supposed to solve all that.
And by the way, it was also out of the election of 1876 when they did the Electoral College rules and they tweaked those.
And in return, The North takes their soldiers out of the South that at that time were ensuring that they weren't doing all the horrible shit that they wanted to do and that led to Jim Crow and then that led for you know decade upon decade of just the worst conditions of which by the way in there somewhere it was make America great again.
So here we are, and we're going to repeat the same thing if we're not careful in a wholly different way.
You know, I don't know what to make of this, and, you know, that's the problem.
And I understand why people would be frustrated with a guy like, you know, Joe Biden, because he's not really the guy that's going to lead us the proper way.
Well, he can't tell a different story, Nick.
That's the problem is the story.
And this is why it feels so hollow among the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party have more or less been telling the same story for decades now.
The story is that America is exceptional.
There's nothing America can't do.
We just need to hold hands, Nick, and suddenly everything will be fine.
The American character is good.
By the way, this is the entire thesis of the documentary that we're getting ready to release, which is Ronald Reagan comes around in the 1980s and is like, don't worry, America's fine, we're great, we're the most perfect nation in the world.
It's a lie!
We're just a nation!
We have a really problematic past.
All of our past is completely mythologized, and we're waking up to that fact.
People are suddenly looking around, they're like, that old bullshit doesn't play anymore, and that's the problem.
That's why it rings so hollow, is because when Biden says there's nothing wrong with America that America can't fix, What country are we talking about?
Because this country, that mythology, is the same mythology that is breaking over the knee of these insurrectionists.
These people have been fed a false bill of goods and they're realizing it's false.
Just as we've been talking about for months now, a year now.
It's a false bill of goods and the moment you recognize it and that America can be better and America has problems is when you can start doing the hard work.
That's the reason why it feels so hollow because it's not true.
But the problem here is we're both, you know, both sides are coming to a similar position where they both realize how much of a sham a lot of this is.
But because it's so diametrically opposed and how and why and the solution is untenable as well, right?
That's where we're at, too, in a weird way.
And so I say this all the time.
It's like, yeah, they are complaining the same exact way that we are, but for the exact opposite reason.
And that's when it feels like you need somebody who is going to be able to really unite people.
And inspire and do all those things over a eight ten twelve.
It has to be a lot longer than just a two-term president And that's where it feels like you know who would want to be in politics these days right anyway Who are these you know the best and the brightest that would want to get in the ranks anyways at this point?
But that's what we have to fight against.
I hope there's some man.
I hope there's somebody listening to this podcast right now who?
Here's all of this.
Here's the actual dire nature of things and it's like I want to fix that shit Because I mean that's why else are we doing this?
Like we're not doing this for our health.
I don't know about you, but this is stressful talking about this and paying this close of attention.
There are times I wish I could press a button and just be like, ah, Saturday morning cartoons.
Here we go.
And it doesn't work because if we don't do the hard work, we're screwed.
We are literally screwed because I have to tell you that illusion that is breaking.
There's no alternative right now on the left.
There's the idea that we can change the economy and make it fairer and start to tax... By the way, I don't know if you saw this, Nick, and this is important.
While people are breaking into the Capitol because they do not believe the government is representative of them, which is true, Elon Musk was talking about his Mars colonies the other day in an interview, and people are like, well, how are you going to get people to Mars?
It's very expensive to take a rocket ship to Mars.
He's like, oh, we'll give out loans and they can work off the debt.
Work off the debt, Nick.
Because what is actually happening is that the clock is winding backwards.
We're going back to a time where people are going to be indentured servants, where they're going to be sharecroppers.
And the only solution, and the people who broke into the capital, this is important.
Their solution is things suck so I think we should probably take people of color and just push them down violently and we'll put them back in their place and you know maybe slavery wasn't the worst thing and we'll go ahead and take what they have and take their opportunities.
That's their solution.
Our solution has to be a radical transformation of this country that actually leads to something real and that's where they have to come on board.
They have to.
Well, I don't know where else to go with it after that.
I don't know, Nick.
I have hope.
Do you have hope?
Do you have a little bit of hope?
You know, it's the slightest sliver that pops up, like life, you know, before everything else goes to shit again, you get a little, you know, it's like that, you know, I think Dennis Leary had said it in one of his stand-ups, it's that cigarette, it's, you know, after sex, or it's that, you know, little tiny moments.
You're not going to be happy, no one's happy in life, but you get, you have to be able to recognize and accept and enjoy the little moments when they come.
And, you know, we got a couple, you know, we got Biden winning, we got Ossoff and, um, We're not winning.
I mean look those are those are things to be encouraged from and and build on We do and by the way like I'd be remiss if I didn't say that like we have we have We have a really good group of people who listen this show and are supportive and kind and loving and I think that's important and the fact is people are waking up and and and you know history tells me this things get really bad and really shitty before all of a sudden we have a reaction to it and Like, that's the thing.
There is anger right now.
If you want to take anything from this that's positive, understand that, like, anger erupting in the public sphere means that people are tired of the bullshit.
That doesn't mean that good things are gonna happen because fascists come in and scoop them up and radicalize it, but I have hope.
I really, really do, and I hope you do as well.
We're gonna be back later this week.
A reminder that our Friday show, The Weekender, is now a Patreon exclusive.
If you haven't already, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
You'll get that, tons of other stuff.
We have Q&As, we have live shows, we have get-togethers, we have live streams, and way too much free activity over there.
But if you will, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
In the meantime, again, knock on wood, no emergency.
Podcast, my god, man.
I could use a... I could use a little bit of a week off.
I think it's gonna be... we're gonna have one.
Alright, if you need us before then, you can find Nick at CanYouHearMeSMH.
