On this Weekender edition of the Muckrake Podcast, Nick and Jared get into the newly-signed Relief Bill, welcome Salon politics writer Chauncey Devega, and wind the week down with viewing recommendations. To access the weekly bonus episode, additional content, and support the podcast, become a patron at 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 this edition of the Weekender Muckrake podcast. | |
| I'm Joe Gay Sexton here with Nick Halseman. | |
| We've got one of my good buddies and one of my favorite writers out there, salon political writer Chauncey DeVega, host of the Chauncey DeVega podcast. | |
| He's going to join us in a little bit. | |
| Personally, when you hear this, I will be on spring break. | |
| The life of an academic. | |
| I am transitioning right now into what I call vacation, Jared. | |
| I'm letting life flow over me, Nick. | |
| I'm trying to be present. | |
| I'm going to enjoy a week of watching the NCAA tournament and just engrossing myself in that. | |
| But before we get there, before I earn my break, Nick, we have to talk about, in the words of Joe Biden, a big fucking deal. | |
| We have to talk about the COVID relief bill, which was signed into law today. | |
| There's a lot to go over with this, a $1.9 trillion relief package. | |
| I would argue it probably should be even larger than $1.9 trillion, but that's neither here nor there. | |
| It is a massive relief package that got passed with... Nick, can you check our stats here? | |
| How many Republicans voted for that? | |
| None. | |
| Wait, wait, no, that can't be right. | |
| We're in the middle of a generational pandemic and a bleeding economic crisis. | |
| Let me check. | |
| Let me check. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Zero. | |
| Zero. | |
| Zero? | |
| Yep. | |
| Zero. | |
| Didn't stop, um, you know, is it Portman from, uh, celebrating the part of the bill that helps people, uh, working in the restaurants? | |
| Oh, man, they are. | |
| Wait, was it Portman? | |
| I think it's Portman, right? | |
| I've stopped keeping track of these people. | |
| I'm just, it's more or less a nebulous blob at this point. | |
| But we have this, you know, we have this relief bill which was sorely, sorely needed and meanwhile the reaction to it, I don't know if you've been paying attention to it, it has been Frustrating in a lot of different ways on one hand you have You have a lot of people now who are writing articles Nick that say the era of big government is back | |
| And that welfare entitlement reform is a thing of the past, and the government's going to start spending a lot of money on people from now on. | |
| I don't buy it. | |
| Meanwhile, you have Ben Shapiro and the rest of these people who are saying it's unnecessary, unneeded, that it's giving money to people who are having children out of wedlock. | |
| Oh no! | |
| Not that! | |
| My god, I mean, I thought I supported this bill. | |
| Nick, what are your thoughts as this becomes law? | |
| How are you feeling about the reaction? | |
| How are you feeling about what this is doing? | |
| You know, it's especially compared to like TARP, which, you know, people were criticizing it back then coming out of the financial crisis of 08, wasn't like big enough either. | |
| I mean, it kind of got us out of where we needed to get to, but it was a slow, slow process to do that. | |
| So this is like... That doesn't comport with my understanding of history. | |
| My understanding of history was TARP and the Obama administration was a despotic takeover by socialist overlords. | |
| On the way to completely destroying the fabric of the United States as we know it, yes. | |
| That's what I thought happened. | |
| But this is exponentially larger. | |
| And I couldn't – it's so funny because the railing against it is, well, nothing is really dealing with COVID here. | |
| But it's all COVID. | |
| It's all the economy. | |
| All these things are intertwined so irrevocably primarily because Trump, all he had to do in the very beginning was sort of lock down everything for two straight months, pay everybody not to get out. | |
| And we probably would have had this thing under control then. | |
| And then the economy would have been functioning properly then. | |
| And guess what? | |
| Trump probably would have won the election. | |
| The bottom line here is that these are all connected. | |
| It's all vital. | |
| Okay, is there going to be some waste? | |
| Is there going to be some states that are not going to apply this the right way? | |
| Sure. | |
| But it's like, since when has, you know, the United States functioned perfectly, which is sort of the criticism we always hear from the Republicans anyway, when it doesn't go absolutely perfectly right, then it's got to be just destroyed and we got to take it down. | |
| And that's the frustrating part. | |
| It's not an intellectually honest conversation that they're having. | |
| Well, I mean, you know, it's really hard to argue with Republicans considering when Trump had a recovery bill, all of those funds were just ethically applied across the board and there was no waste and or handouts to his corporate buddies or buddies at his golf courses or people within the administration. | |
| I mean, it's not like they threw millions around left and right to just, you know, whatever rich palm was waiting to pick them up. | |
| I find the whole thing so disingenuous to the point where I can't even, I honestly can't interact with the Republican ideology anymore without first telling myself in a famous movie quote, forget about it Jared, it's Chinatown. | |
| You know, like it's just, that's what it is and that's who they are. | |
| And this whole thing, I mean, Ben Shapiro, by the way, He should just come out and say, Welfare Queen. | |
| I mean, that's what he's saying, right? | |
| It's the old Reagan adage of if there is a bill out there to help people, obviously black people who don't deserve it and will abuse it and possibly will use it to buy Cadillacs, Nick, that all those people, and by the way, if we would not... And gold teeth, sorry. | |
| Right, and we would not Be honest if we didn't point out that that was something that happened on both sides of the aisle for a while. | |
| This claim of welfare queens and Cadillac welfare and all that bullshit. | |
| But that's what Shapiro was doing here. | |
| Shapiro was saying, obviously, you're going to have a bunch of people who are going to have kids because that gets them more money. | |
| By the way, I don't know if you've noticed, Nick, but the birth rates in America have plummeted because no one can afford a child anymore. | |
| The idea that people are just going to be having kid after kid after kid in order to gain a welfare system. | |
| It's such bad faith bullshit. | |
| But I also want to go ahead and spotlight something. | |
| These articles, and this is the weather vane of political media at this point, the era of big government is not back. | |
| Big government has always been here. | |
| What wasn't there was this ability to actually help people or to actually have social safety net programs. | |
| Big government was spying on us. | |
| Big government had their hands in literally everything at every step along the way. | |
| It just so happened that they weren't doing anything to actually help people. | |
| I have to tell you, I don't have a lot of faith that this bill signals a new era I mean, people are comparing it to FDR. | |
| And what it is, is it's a reactive bill that was necessary to keep the country from teetering into a chasm. | |
| This isn't some sort of new era that we actually need. | |
| We need more investment in people and infrastructure and human projects. | |
| That's what we need. | |
| But going ahead and acting like this is somehow or another a return to the New Deal is just, it's disingenuous madness. | |
| Well, okay, I can go with that. | |
| But this is also part one, and everyone knows that the infrastructure bill they're going to do through reconciliation is probably going to be bigger than this. | |
| So it's like, this is going to be a massive infusion of all sorts of government resources. | |
| And this is sort of the difference here. | |
| Do you believe that the government's job is to help people? | |
| Or do you believe that people need to just lace up their bootstraps and pull themselves up on their own, and everyone's on an equal footing the minute they're born? | |
| You know, that's the big issue here. | |
| I mean, aside from the fact that whether or not you believe we are living in a democracy where the majority of people should rule the country and what they feel like should happen, which is again why I like the notion of this being a bipartisan bill, because it's so fucking popular across every political spectrum. | |
| Now, let me just correct the record here because people are yelling at us, I'm sure, listening to it. | |
| Senator Roger Wicker was the guy who was touting that the restaurant operators will have $28.6 billion worth of targeted relief and how excited he is about that. | |
| And so they asked him, so why did you vote against it if that's what you're so excited about? | |
| He goes, well, can I do my Mississippi accident? | |
| One good provision in a 1.9 trillion dollar bill doesn't mean I have to vote for the whole thing. | |
| It goes without saying. | |
| I issued a statement, but I think it's a stupid question. | |
| So I don't know, maybe I'll just... Would you say he was for the bill before he was against it? | |
| Yeah, I think in his heart he believed it was true until he realized it was not true. | |
| Yes, I don't know what his deal is. | |
| And by the way, I can understand that too. | |
| I can understand that there might be parts that he liked and parts he didn't, so he said no to the whole damn thing. | |
| But then I just wouldn't be out there like trying to almost take credit for it without voting for it. | |
| Of course he is! | |
| Of course he is! | |
| That's who they are! | |
| God, that's so gross. | |
| That's so gross. | |
| Is it as gross as trying to take credit for the vaccine rollout? | |
| For a vaccine? | |
| That Mr. Trump just blasted out there? | |
| It's really sad that he obviously has nobody working for him because he wrote this... Trump writes this missive that's like so poorly written as it is and it's embarrassing. | |
| Nobody who has any intelligence would ever have written that on their own. | |
| Somebody, I wish I remembered who, but somebody out there took this, and for those of you who haven't seen it, because hopefully you have a healthier distance from The In-N-Out's politics than some of us, I salute you. | |
| Um, Trump released a statement and it was like, just want to remind everybody you wouldn't have a vaccine if it wasn't for me. | |
| And by the way, made sure to go ahead and use like a xenophobic anti-Chinese name for the flu. | |
| And you know, and, and somebody took it. | |
| I, again, I wish I remembered who. | |
| They took it and they, they pasted it into Twitter and they figured out that he had written it as a tweet. | |
| Like it was it was it was almost exactly 280 characters. | |
| Oh, wow. | |
| Yeah, he he's sitting at home just just really banging him out, which I think is wonderful. | |
| I would love an expose and I don't like thinking about Trump and I don't like Trump coming up in public conversations. | |
| But I need a massive deep dive feature article that takes two hours to read about what Trump is using instead of Twitter, like where he's counting his numbers out. | |
| It's so pathetic. | |
| And we need to remember this. | |
| And I know that a lot of people and I actually posted this message because I wanted to talk about how pathetic Trump was. | |
| And immediately everyone's like, don't repost what Trump says. | |
| I was like, okay that makes sense But we do need to remember first and foremost because he's like a Rosetta Stone of the Republican Party You know what? | |
| I mean like yeah He is the Republican Party stripped of any veneer of logic or professionalism or humanity. | |
| And he is what they are. | |
| And we're going to talk Chauncey DeVega here in a minute, and I'm sure Chauncey will have some stuff to say about that. | |
| I think it's important to remember how disgusting and pathetic this guy is, and how disgusting and pathetic the entire movement on the right is. | |
| I'm sorry, you vote against this and somehow or another you're taking credit for the money that's going to go to restaurants and tourist businesses? | |
| How disgusting can you be, really? | |
| Yeah, I mean, but to him, I'm sure it's just politics, right? | |
| This is what politics is. | |
| You take credit for as much as you can, and you get out of, you know, the blame of anything else that you might have done that's attributed to you. | |
| That is what the Republican Party is, and it doesn't seem to matter anymore. | |
| I mean, I think that's also one of the bigger issues. | |
| At some point in the history of our country, you couldn't really get away with doing that without getting hurt at the polls, at the very least. | |
| And that was something that kept you perhaps behaving. | |
| I mean, listen, I don't want to give a sunny version of what politics has been like even 50, 60 years ago. | |
| It was awful. | |
| But at some point, and then this is the norms that were destroyed that Donald Trump did, this is the kind of behavior that's now tolerated and expected, encouraged. | |
| Dude. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Tucker Carlson, last night, came out talking shit about women in the military. | |
| Like, in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of an economic crisis. | |
| I mean, listen, Tucker has millions of people who watch him every night. | |
| He can talk about anything in the world that he wants to talk about. | |
| And what he decided to do was go after the quote-unquote feminization of the military. | |
| Like, that's so pathetic and disgusting. | |
| And the fact that that can happen and that man is able to show his face in public the next day... | |
| It's an indictment of how this whole thing has gone downhill. | |
| I know, but we can't skip over this weird obsession with Taylor Renz he has, who's a tech writer for the New York Times, and here's what it sounds like. | |
| They wanted to do an article about him living in Maine in the summers, and he felt so slighted by that and so abused. | |
| That he's like, oh, here's my chance to like get back at somebody. | |
| So I don't think he understands. | |
| And it's another thing. | |
| This is the right wing media, which then, you know, ejaculates over to the that's not the right word to the right wing politicians. | |
| But the idea that like, not the right word. | |
| No, it's it's it oozes out over on top, whatever the word, you know, it gets assimilated. | |
| Is that, you know, Taylor Lorenz had said a tweet saying National Women's Day, International Women's Day, like, let's not forget that women get, you know, attacked on this website all the time. | |
| It's horrible. | |
| It ruins my life. | |
| And they keep trying to now say that, you know, anybody who disagrees with her, that that's what ruined her life as if it was a disagreement. | |
| She's a tech writer. | |
| She's not writing these think pieces about the Republican platform and how horrible it is. | |
| But people will say the most horrible, heinous things to her. | |
| And we see this with women across the board on the internet. | |
| And these assholes on Fox News, or certainly Tucker, is trying to minimize this to make it simply seem like nobody can be criticized. | |
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| So you should do that. | |
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