For this episode of the patreon-only Weekender, Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the breaking news that Marjorie Taylor Greene has been stripped of her committees and how the internet has taken over reality. To access this episode and exclusive content, become a patron: http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey everybody! | |
| Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| I'm Nick Hauselmann and this is an announcement to let you know that we are going to be doing a new series called The Weekender over on Patreon that will appear every Friday. | |
| And this is a little sneak preview so you can get a handle on what it's like and why you'd want to go over there and join the Patreon and be part of that community which has been incredible and amazing with a lot of people there and a lot of great conversations. | |
| So Here it is check it out and feel free to check out the actual patreon as well at patreon.com slash muckrake podcast Hey everybody, welcome to the muckrake podcast the weekender edition for patrons only JJ Sexton here with Nick Halseman before we get going This is just really important that I do this. | |
| I wanted to read a statement I know there's been a lot of controversy lately a lot of people trying to Strip me of my hosting duties here at the muckrake podcast | |
| I wanted to apologize and say that though I have been calling for insurrection, the overthrow of the government, I've been painting my colleagues as child-sacrificing monsters who have betrayed the country and deserve to be executed in cold blood, all of it hopefully leading to a supernatural utopia and a white ethnostate, I want to say that I was allowed to believe things that weren't true, Nick. | |
| And I blame CNN and MSNBC and especially morning Joe and Nicole Wallace. | |
| And finally, before you judge me, I would just like to say where we go one, we go all. | |
| It's totally cool, Jared, because I have to admit that I'm guilty of saying it's all about the Benjamins on Twitter, and it's the same exact thing what you just described on all your issues, so it really isn't a problem. | |
| I was allowed to believe things that weren't true. | |
| Have you ever heard a more bullshit, privileged, Like, passing the buck statement than that for Marjorie Taylor Greene. | |
| What a prize she is. | |
| It does sound a little bit like some of the people that when you read about who are in the QAnon, you know, rabbit hole who've gotten out, right? | |
| And it really does. | |
| Now, one thing I haven't seen, I'm going to miss, I really want to watch this Anderson Cooper interview with the guy who was like, yeah, did you, I didn't, I haven't seen, I missed it, I forgot, whatever, but I think it's on YouTube or something where he's literally like, yeah, I believe you were, you were drinking blood of babies. | |
| Of course you were! | |
| I'm so sorry, I thought you were sacrificing me! | |
| Yeah, you know what I mean? | |
| And it's like, so to get out of that, you're like, yeah, I was allowed to believe that. | |
| I was allowed to believe that. | |
| And of course, what we're laughing about, serious, serious business here, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the vanguard of the Republican Party, in a vote tonight was stripped of her congressional committee memberships in the committees of budget, education, and labor. | |
| She was stripped of, actually, last count, I believe, 11 Republicans. | |
| voted to remove her, which is awesome, which is good. | |
| She is not being held accountable by being expelled from Congress, which she should be, but she is actually having her committees taken away, which I don't know how you feel about it, is both good because she shouldn't be on there, but it also goes ahead and makes her a martyr. | |
| For her cause and she can now say that she has been silenced and that she has been persecuted and it gives her a whole hell of a lot more time to, you know, wreak havoc and basically lead this country to a fascistic abyss. | |
| She got a hundred person standing ovation when she appeared on the floor of the house. | |
| It's like, this is where we are. | |
| This is what it is. | |
| And I can't help but think of the connections between 2010, Tea Party, taking hold a little bit, and everyone thinking, oh, this is nothing. | |
| This is some radical fringe that's not going to last. | |
| It ate the party whole. | |
| Spit it back out, and guess what? | |
| This is eating the party a whole again. | |
| I'm not even sure we can say it's Q eating the party. | |
| I don't know if I feel like it's that, but it's, I guess we'll call it Trumpism is what's eating the party and now, you know, spitting it back out. | |
| Well, QAnon is a side effect of Trumpism, right? | |
| There has to be something that squares the circle of Trumpism because Trumpism is all about the idea that Donald Trump is some sort of heroic warrior, right? | |
| Like he's really taking it to the evildoers. | |
| And in order to believe that, you have to excuse so much bullshit. | |
| You know, you have to look at this absolute idiot buffoon of an incompetent person and be like, no, these misspellings have meaning. | |
| You know, like he's smart enough not to misspell in his tweets and things that he says that are stupid. | |
| And so QAnon ends up becoming like an article of faith. | |
| And what we watched today in the speech that I was just making fun of, she got in front of Congress and basically laundered QAnon into a new era, which is what we watched with the Tea Party. | |
| And I'm so glad that you brought that up because I think there's a lot of similarities there. | |
| And I want people to remember that the Tea Party was a absolute created faux populistic movement. | |
| That was created by the Koch brothers and other billionaire libertarians in order to make people distrust the government, hate Barack Obama, play upon their white supremacist paranoia, while also pushing the country further right and embracing libertarian ideas. | |
| And what did Fox News, who helped create it and helped promote it, and what did the Republican Party do? | |
| They looked at it and they said, we either accept this and launder it into something Or we're in trouble. | |
| And they take it every time. | |
| They did it with the Birchers. | |
| They did it with the McCarthyites. | |
| They did it with the New World Order bullshit. | |
| The Patriot Movement. | |
| They did it with the Deep State. | |
| And now they're doing it with QAnon. | |
| You could set your watch by this. | |
| It's the damage. | |
| It's the normalization of these things which damages us for the next iteration. | |
| And it gets worse and worse. | |
| And you can argue that certainly it's getting worse and worse. | |
| Like what this is now is worse than the Tea Party in theory. | |
| I mean, I don't know. | |
| Right? | |
| We can argue that. | |
| And the tea party, you know, I guess I was trying to figure out like what really was it that made it take hold so well and become such an intoxicating brew for these people. | |
| I have to imagine... Was that a pun on tea party? | |
| Oh, I guess it would be. | |
| Yes, I didn't even mean that. | |
| Wow. | |
| I'm like levels beyond what I meant. | |
| I wonder what the tea party was steeped in. | |
| Well listen, I think that they were able to realize that Okay, the landscape was clear that the Republican Party was not going to be able to grow and get any more new voters, right? | |
| Like, it seemed like, at the very least, it was stagnated and they were stuck with their ideologies that were not popular enough to, like, you know, capture elections. | |
| Well, the Tea Party all of a sudden seemed to, you know, you know, steep or cleave or whatever you want to say into another little branch of people. | |
| Not a ton, but enough of where they could see real growth of voters. | |
| All these, you know, and some of these are the insane people. | |
| And then certainly this one is really where we're getting with the QAnons. | |
| This is a really insane thing. | |
| Again, we talk about it all the time, where people who would never have participated in the political process before, for whatever reason, suddenly are getting energized and want to vote. | |
| And it's opened up a whole, you know, small but a little bit of a world where, at least in the margins, the Republican Party can say, look, we are growing. | |
| Which is, you know, that's what, that must be what was so, you know, made it so they wanted to, you know, accumulate these people so badly. | |
| Well, and going back into 2010 with the Tea Party, it's really important to think about what that grew out of. | |
| That grew out of the 2008 financial crisis, right? | |
| The economy craters. | |
| Who is responsible? | |
| You know, traders on Wall Street, the wealthy and the powerful who were, you know, taking advantage of people left and right. | |
| There was a huge amount of populist anger and it's not a coincidence that the Tea Party happens and the Occupy movement happens. | |
| These things always occur when there's like a destabilizing moment. | |
| I mean, there's a reason why on one hand you have like QAnon, right? | |
| Or Trumpism. | |
| And then on the other side, you have the BLM protests, right? | |
| And you have these sort of Antifa or whatever you want to call them, right? | |
| There's always like a reaction to these destabilizing moments. | |
| The Tea Party, and I want to break it down because we don't do this a lot. | |
| In culture, we just kind of look at the Tea Party and we say, yeah, that was kind of a fake movement moving along. | |
| I want to point out, like, what was at the heart of it, right? | |
| The Tea Party was saying, in essence, that Barack Obama was a tyrant-in-waiting, right? | |
| And it also had birtherism, which said that he wasn't actually born in America. | |
| So let's, like, really, let's break that down, right? | |
| Let's say that Barack Obama actually was, I'm sorry, Barry Sotoro, I believe is what the Tea Partiers were calling him for a moment. | |
| So let's say that Barry Sotoro was born in Kenya. | |
| Okay, so how did this Kenyan-born young man come to be a United States Senator and the first African-American President? | |
| The Tea Party and the underlying paranoid madness, right, says, oh, there was a giant conspiracy. | |
| This person helped. | |
| This person helped. | |
| Why are they doing it? | |
| Why? | |
| Because he's a Muslim Manchurian-type candidate, right? | |
| He's the Antichrist. | |
| They thought he was the fucking Antichrist. | |
| And it's the New World Order conspiracy theory and then it churns and churns and churns. | |
| Well, the problem is that the Tea Party happened because people watched Fox News and believed it. | |
| Like, Fox News knew that they were lying, you know? | |
| They knew that they were making all this shit up and they were churning out these conspiracy theories. | |
| And then eventually people were like, why isn't the Republican Party acting like they're watching Fox News? | |
| Like, they go on Fox News and they pay lip service to it, but they're still treating this like normal politics. | |
| So you gotta find people who get high off their own supply. | |
| You gotta get the Tea Partiers in there who believe what bullshit they're selling. | |
| Well, now, it's not a surprise that we have our first QAnon representative. | |
| Our first couple of QAnon representatives. | |
| These are people who continue to believe the bullshit that's being peddled by the right, and they move in front of the right, and then what's the right do? | |
| Are they like, oh, this is disgusting. | |
| Which, by the way, I love that Kevin McCarthy was like, I don't know about this QAnon. | |
| Maybe I'm not even pronouncing that right. | |
| I mean, I've said QAnon 1,500 times I'm supposed to be on top of this stuff. | |
| They're pretending like they don't know what it is while also embracing it. | |
| They're going to use this, and they're going to strip away all the QAnon elements, the name QAnon, and then they're gonna go ahead and keep everything that helps them. | |
| I mean, it's preordained at this time. | |
| Well, one thing we have to be careful about, and when we talk about the Tea Party like eating the Republican Party whole and like sort of, you know, absorbing it into its... Merging into some weird racist Voltron. | |
| Yeah, a cancerous cell perhaps even, but is that, you know, austerity was the name of the game for them, right? | |
| They wanted to slash and cut every kind of government spending as possible. | |
| Not every government spending. | |
| Well, that's the thing, right? | |
| Because that influence certainly never took hold as we went through from 2010 to 2020. | |
| And, you know, they were able to sort of just ignore it. | |
| It's goalposts moving is what this all is. | |
| Either if you're supporting Trump, the only way you can do that is to move the goalposts and say, well, Okay, he did that, but that's okay because he's still trying to get the wall built or whatever. | |
| And the same thing QAnon will. | |
| Nick, there are mole children underneath New York City who need saving? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And you're worried about Jared Kushner selling off PPE? | |
| There are mole children under New York, Nick. | |
| Right. | |
| Mole children. | |
| And just because we can't find them right now, we'll find them. | |
| They'll be there. | |
| And if they're not in New York, they're gonna be in Nebraska. | |
| And that's where we're gonna find them, when that's really where we met. | |
| That is what we're talking about. | |
| And that's that same... Right, and by the way, oh, I understand you saw Tom Hanks hosting the inaugural. | |
| Tom Hanks is dead, everyone. | |
| That's a hologram clone. | |
| Right. | |
| So whatever you need to believe, you believe it. | |
| Right. | |
| Yes. | |
| It's it's fast. | |
| It's kind of fascinating. | |
| But again, this is the kind of there should be a bar that you shouldn't be able to get, you know, be elected to a government position if you're below that bar. | |
| Right. | |
| Like you. | |
| Here's the thing. | |
| Are we talking about First Amendment here or are we talking about like what is the Marjorie Taylor Greene conundrum? | |
| Because obviously she's I think wants to argue to some degree that it's First Amendment. | |
| But aside from the fact that the To turn this into Elon Omar, you know, and trying them both sides is really disgusting, but I don't want to get into that yet. | |
| But, you know, there is this notion of you're allowed to believe what you want to believe in America, and that's what makes America so great, right? | |
| But what are we supposed to do about that when you get someone like her? | |
| And you have been listening to a free preview of our Patreon-exclusive Weekender Show. | |
| If you want to get in on all the fun and get that bonus episode every week, not to mention exclusive content, live hangouts, question and answer sessions, we're even going to do some of these live so you can come and watch how the sausage is made. | |
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| So you should do that. | |
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