Jared and Nick discuss the tragedy in Atlanta and how the leadership of the Republican party won't recognize how dangerous their rhetoric can become. 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 the McCreak Podcast. | |
| I'm Jared Yates Saxton, here with Nick Halseman. | |
| It's the weekend! | |
| We did it, Nick. | |
| We did. | |
| Is it really the weekend? | |
| Again, what is time? | |
| What is time? | |
| I have to say my—and by the way, for those who don't know already, this is our Patreon-only weekender show. | |
| Thank you for your support. | |
| We appreciate it. | |
| For those who are listening to the preview, get on board! | |
| We're having a great time. | |
| Come on over. | |
| I promise it's worth it. | |
| For me, what is time has been weirder because I'm on spring break. | |
| How's that going for you? | |
| It's been wonderful. | |
| I've gotten a ton of work done. | |
| I've gotten a ton of research done. | |
| Do you want to hear an interesting fact that I stumbled upon? | |
| I do. | |
| In the 17th century, a bunch of conspiracy theorists in Maryland gathered together a small army and took over the government. | |
| Huh. | |
| Here. | |
| Yeah. | |
| They marched to the Statehouse. | |
| I know that sounds weird that they would march to the Capitol and then take it over and overturn democratically elected leaders and then ruled Maryland until the Revolution. | |
| Whoa. | |
| Really? | |
| For like a hundred years or whatever? | |
| Yep. | |
| That is incredible. | |
| So there was precedent for what they tried to do on January 6th. | |
| There was a lot of precedent. | |
| And then, by the way, that was their second attempt at a revolution. | |
| The first one got thwarted. | |
| It never works the first time. | |
| We know that. | |
| It never works the first time. | |
| And what I loved about finding out about the first time was it was led by the former governor of Maryland. | |
| He, like the guy who had lost his post, helped try and take over the government. | |
| And then the next one worked. | |
| Wow, the things that you do on a vacation, Jared, are just truly amazing. | |
| Spring break, baby. | |
| Having a great time. | |
| Can't wait to hear what happens on Christmas break. | |
| No kidding. | |
| So we have to switch gears because, of course, we've had a couple of weird, awful things that have taken place over the past couple of days. | |
| For those of you who listen to the show regularly and, again, you're patrons, obviously you do, you know that I live in Georgia. | |
| Georgia has been hit with a terrible tragedy. | |
| A 21-year-old man, not a boy, A man went into multiple spas and murdered multiple people. | |
| An absolute tragedy that involves racism, guns, patriarchal oppression, you name it. | |
| Misogyny, religion, all of it. | |
| And Nick, I don't know if you've been following this thing, but the people in charge of dealing with this called him a kid. | |
| And said, ah, he was fed up and he had a bad day. | |
| It is, um, this country is infuriating sometimes. | |
| It is, it is. | |
| And they had to get rid of that guy, that sheriff, who was originally doing the press today. | |
| Brought somebody else on after that. | |
| Oh wait, he seemed like a stand-up guy. | |
| Did he have something in his past that he had posted on social media that would show otherwise? | |
| Well, if you look today, it wouldn't be there. | |
| Oh! | |
| Oh, okay, so they took down the post where he was talking about the China virus? | |
| Oh yeah. | |
| And faceless-ass conspiracy theories? | |
| Well, it's just that he had bad taste in t-shirts, Jared, basically, is what you're saying. | |
| We should be making fun of this. | |
| I feel terrible, but it's the only way I have to cope with all this because it just happens too often. | |
| But I think the worst part about this, or almost as bad as the actual tragedy, is the way they've handled this, the way they've let this information come out, and who they've had out front of this. | |
| It's absolutely ridiculous. | |
| And I've kind of watched that four or five different times, this little clip of him saying just had a bad day, the sheriff saying it. | |
| And it just – I waffle back and forth between like just a horror and absurdity and disgust and all those things. | |
| And meanwhile – because part of me felt like they're just simply trying to avoid a hate crime part of this. | |
| But I don't think that matters. | |
| He is going to be tried. | |
| You can't go to for prison any longer than a life sentence anyway or whatever. | |
| It doesn't matter. | |
| So I'm not sure it's going to change anything. | |
| This just might be them just sort of shrugging and being like, oh, yeah, he literally they think he had a bad day. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And immediately when I was watching the press conference, I I had one of those moments. | |
| And, you know, you know how it is. | |
| It's like all of a sudden you start realizing that the worst possible outcome Was inevitable. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| And I was watching it and I was like, well, we think this is about sex addiction. | |
| And I was like, there it is. | |
| There it is. | |
| Go on. | |
| Go on. | |
| No, it had nothing to do with race, even though the majority of the people killed were Asian women who, by the way, it's amazing that the people who are in charge of enforcing the law in our land, and by the way, this isn't an accident, They're not aware of the politics of misogyny and patriarchal control or fetishization or whatever. | |
| These are people who are supposed to go out and crack some skulls and maintain the status quo. | |
| Meanwhile, we have an absolute crisis in this country. | |
| We know this. | |
| We've been covering it now for a while. | |
| And the crisis is disaffected, angry white men. | |
| And they pick up guns. | |
| They go and they kill people. | |
| They set off bombs. | |
| They march on a Capitol. | |
| They try and disrupt democratic institutions. | |
| You know, they join fascist groups. | |
| They join terrorist groups. | |
| And meanwhile, to watch these people not only put their heads up their asses, Nick, but to figure out Ways to get the heads further. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| Like, it's like, this isn't enough. | |
| We're not doing enough to maintain the white supremacist status quo in this country. | |
| Let's take it a bit further. | |
| Let's figure out new ways to hide white supremacy and white male oppression. | |
| And it's absolutely amazing to watch it happen in real time. | |
| To watch Americans discover new ways. | |
| I mean, like, that's the only thing we produce anymore, which is total denial about what our actual problems are. | |
| Well, I think the denial is rooted also in the notion of how influential leaders are. | |
| I'm going to be an armchair psychologist here for a second, but it feels to me like the disaffected and the people who are ripe to do these horrible things, they're easily suggestible. | |
| Things can just trigger them to do these things. | |
| And the absence of those triggers might not mean that we won't have these massacres and these things. | |
| So that's where you start to realize when the Republicans come out and try and say these things about how it's clearly a mental health issue and not about the guns or whatever. | |
| Or even when they say things like China virus and Kung flu and these horrible things. | |
| These are the suggestible things that will get these people down that path. | |
| And it shouldn't be too hard to ask people to simply, like, observe their language a little bit. | |
| You might be burning inside and being so upset and whatever you want to feel, like the racist feelings you have or whatever you want to feel like they are, but just, you know, don't be that way. | |
| Oh, you mean maybe if you're a basketball announcer who sees, like, some African-American players kneeling during a national anthem and you're just like, yeah, this is a great time to let the N-word fly. | |
| You heard about that? | |
| Oh my god! | |
| Yes, so in case you didn't know, there was a high school girls team playing. | |
| The guy had a hot mic while the national anthem was playing on a local stream. | |
| It wasn't even TV, it was a stream. | |
| And man, this guy from Oklahoma, who was a pastor, was dropping the n-word. | |
| He's not about leaning on the national anthem. | |
| Jared, I'll tell you that. | |
| Well, and he's not racist. | |
| His low blood sugar was taking over. | |
| Oh, I forgot, yes. | |
| And by the way, I'm so glad that you brought that up, by the way, because the other aspect of all this, and what you just said was exactly right. | |
| And we've talked about it on this show many times before. | |
| This is a white male problem. | |
| This is a right-wing problem. | |
| This is a white supremacy problem. | |
| But you know what that Venn diagram that is a circle is? | |
| It's a psychosexual mental health problem. | |
| And all of those things live within it. | |
| Like, from this young man, he comes from a religious background, which, you know, I have to tell you, as somebody who grew up in, like, white identity, right-wing Christianity, they tell you that you have to stay abstinent, that if you feel sexual whatsoever, you're a sinner, you're going to hell, you have to repress all that. | |
| I don't know if you've been reading Freud lately or anybody in the last couple of centuries. | |
| That's impossible. | |
| You cannot repress those feelings as a human being, and they cause problems. | |
| Which is why the Republican Party, and we don't have to go into specifics, we don't have to talk about the instances, they one time after another have come out against the things that they actually are, and the things that they actually believe. | |
| They're so repressed and bound up, and eventually he was like, oh, I couldn't do anything but kill these women. | |
| And matter of fact, I don't know if you saw this, they said that he had plans to go down to Florida and strike out against the porn industry. | |
| Like he was gonna turn this into a multi-state slaughter, all because he couldn't repress and he couldn't control himself. | |
| And he was a young man who, by the way, they feel like if the world isn't serving them, they have to destroy the world. | |
| And and it's just it's a big massive problem and the more that we deny it the worse this thing is gonna get I just can't help but think it's it's just guns Let's that's part of it guns just out of here completely You know the idea that the people are going to think that this is a god-given right and that that's the other thing is the conflation between government and religion | |
| We probably should have been much more worried about this in the 80s when it kind of began but the separation of church and state used to be this mantra that we used to really cling to It's completely been obliterated, and certainly Trump has done everything he can to blur that, without even being religious at all, having any clue of what this means, except for the fact that maybe he'll get a few more votes out of it. | |
| That is really a concerning thing to me, because everything the Democrats do is fire a brimstone that's going to destroy the earth. | |
| In a biblical plague. | |
| And that is a real powerful swan song, swan song, siren song, to people who have already been raised like the way you describe how you were raised. | |
| And it's manipulative and it can't be, you can't convince me it's that much different than what like, you know, radical fundamentalists, Islamic fundamentalists do. | |
| No, it's the other side of the coin. | |
| And you know, in the research I'm doing for my current project, what I keep finding is it's not about religion. | |
| Religion is a story that we tell ourselves to try and explain why we do the things that we do and why the world works the way that it does. | |
| You can, religion can lead to charity. | |
| It can lead to, you know, community. | |
| It can lead to healing. | |
| It can do all of those things. | |
| But I'll tell you, it's really, really useful for power. | |
| It's great for power, because if you need to do something, if you need to do something that is destructive or hurtful, say, I don't know, carry a weapon into a spa and murder people there, you do as well as I do. | |
| There are people in the country right now who are like, he did God's work. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| Like, he was obviously doing the right thing. | |
| And not even to mention the conspiracy theory shit that boils up around that. | |
| I assume some people in the QAnon world are like, oh, he was obviously striking out against human trafficking. | |
| These were sex workers. | |
| They had it coming, or something like that. | |
| Like, who knows? | |
| And then, that is the exact same thing that happens with, like, Kyle Ritterhaus. | |
| It's like, he had to do it. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| He had to take a gun out and he had to kill people. | |
| Meanwhile, we were talking about this before we started, some asshole Carried an AR-15, which by the way, isn't it weird that the AR-15 just keeps showing up in all of this? | |
| It's almost like it's a military-grade weapon that makes it possible for disturbed, power-seeking individuals to go out and hurt other people. | |
| He shows up outside Kamala Harris's residency with an AR-15, and God knows how much ammunition. | |
| I'm sure he was just sightseeing, you know? | |
| It wasn't like there was something in his mind that said, I have to do this, or they'll take over the government, or they'll hurt people, or they'll destroy the Christian religion, or whatever was on Fox News that night. | |
| All of these things work in concert. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And we keep hearing You know McCarthy was out there getting all angry at CNN about the line of questioning when you know even in the sense of like the because this is all related to contesting the results of the election right like he's not trying to kill Kamala Harris if he believes that the election was fairly won. | |
| I would I would kind of hope that that would be the case. | |
| But the point being that, he's like, well I only voted against two states, you know, from ratifying their election. | |
| And that wouldn't have given him 270, so I'm free, I'm absolved of everything. | |
| And it's like, every little choice they make, they don't have any, you know, and I believe him. | |
| I don't think that he's manipulating this or trying to lie about this. | |
| I kind of feel like McCarthy believes that he was just doing his little part by, you know, disputing two states. | |
| And then he can kind of wash his hands of it, but no. | |
| That speaks volumes and ripples across the entire, you know, Republican, white supremacist, you know, people who are going to attack the Capitol. | |
| That's what they don't understand. | |
| These things ripple all the way across and reverberate in these people's ears. | |
| And that's the only, so I guess the question is, the only thing that keeps us from these things happening in the past was the fact that these leaders had some sense not to say it. | |
| Like, they were ready. | |
| They're waiting for the cue. | |
| They don't get it so it doesn't happen. | |
| Maybe that's what we've been like this whole time. | |
| And that's how dangerous we are in this world. | |
| And you've 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. | |
| All you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. | |
| On top of that, you get to hang out with the Muckrake community, which are Really good group of people. | |
| So you should do that. | |
| That is patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. |