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March 23, 2021 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
50:55
BREAKING: Republicans Suddenly Care About Conditions At The Border

In a ridiculously cynical take, the Republicans are trying to hammer the Biden Administration for their treatment of political asylum seekers at the southern border. Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how disingenuous the GOP is on this issue, plus what it means that the US is making an attempt to police bad behavior around the globe via sanctions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey everybody, welcome to the Mutt Creek Podcast.
I'm J.D.
Sexton and I'm here with the workingest of working men, Nick Halseman, who is on vacation.
I'm on vacation.
And still doing the show.
I can't be without you.
You complete me.
This is incredible.
I have to say, it is a testament to your work ethic and your dedication to the Muckraker community.
I salute you, Nick Hausman.
Jared, there's only so many hours in a day to hang out by the pool.
There is.
There most certainly is.
And the good news is that Nick is taking time out of his vacation to talk about enjoyable topics, as always.
We are Muckrakers, after all.
It would Not be okay if we didn't talk about to begin with.
Man, Nick, I don't know how you're feeling about it.
There's so many things to be upset about in this story slash non story slash story.
There's so many different wrinkles in it.
In the past couple days, for people who pay attention to such things, the Republican Party, who, Nick, can you tell me what is the history, the recent history of the Republican Party on immigration on the border?
It's bad.
Very bad.
Well, you know what?
You can argue that from a Republican side, it's very indifferent and just sort of, they don't care.
It doesn't bother them at all what was going on at the border.
I mean, in the sense that what the Trump administration was doing there didn't bother them at all.
Didn't even begin to bother them.
And now that we are a couple of months into the Joe Biden presidency, and after Biden has amassed a couple of legislative wins, Last time I checked, I believe he's still hovering around 60% approval.
It was time to start throwing some shit at the wall.
We talked about this last week.
It was time to start figuring out what was going to stick, what was going to work, what could possibly be a counter narrative to what's been going on.
And lo and behold, Nick, the American media decided that they found a story that they wanted to go with.
Almost as if a manifestation from absolutely nowhere, just vapors coming up and forming into a pseudo-controversy.
We saw this weekend particularly Republican talking points and Republican arguments about a quote-unquote crisis at the border suddenly was on every television show, suddenly being echoed by every mainstream journalist that there possibly was.
And now they have decided that the problem at the border is Joseph Robinette Biden's problem.
It is his crisis.
That's where this thing came from.
Meanwhile, it's an actual issue that people aren't even talking about.
They're dealing with it as a political football.
I am already getting heated up over this thing.
It's amazing.
It's like, just like we talked about the deficit.
When they get out of power and all of a sudden they wake up one day and go, oh my god, have you seen this deficit?
How did this happen?
Have you looked at these numbers?
Can you believe it?
Can you believe that they're having kids in cages down there?
I mean, can you imagine what this... Oh, and by the way, the fact that they're trying to say that Biden created this crisis, which is exactly what we had said about Trump when he was in power,
It's like they must just take notes about how what the legitimate criticisms we have and just say okay great we're gonna use this as soon as we can on the opposite side it's insane it's been 60 days they're actually trying to do things like in good faith they are trying to do things to ameliorate what's going on in the border so that we're not you know by the way you read things like from Mitt Romney to him it sounds like he was okay with being And by the way, we call that the Stephen Miller, is what we call that.
the border because it like somehow thwarted people from coming.
And that is where we need to live.
This is the headspace we need to be in where we have to be an awful country to stop people from wanting to come here.
And that's the solution.
That's insane.
And by the way, we call that the Stephen Miller is what we call that.
And we would be we'd be negligent if we didn't point something out before we go further, which is the United States and their behavior and the way that they have dealt with the border, the southern border, has been abysmal for years.
Listen, just straight up terrible.
There's been so much racism, white supremacy, xenophobia, political gesturing.
This was a problem that has been made a problem, not just during the Trump administration.
We'll get to their part in this in a second.
There is an issue with the fact that America has over and over and over again Interfered in other countries' businesses.
They've interfered in their politics.
They've destabilized governments.
They've interfered with their economics.
That is part of the reason why you have a lot of these refugees.
That needs to be said.
But it also needs to be pointed out.
What you just said about Romney and the Republicans, and particularly with Stephen Miller, They decided that their way of handling the situation wasn't going to be humanitarian in any way, shape, or form.
It was actually going to be a policy of cruelty and terrorism, which was to make the idea of coming across the border so abhorrent and terrifying that it would turn people away.
And by the way, that didn't even work.
That doesn't even work.
Actually, the only reason why people didn't come here more is because America has started to fall apart.
It's not even the place where people want to go in order to make their living, necessarily.
But this idea that somehow or another, this clusterfuck of a situation, Even it started at Biden's desk is just, it's so duplicitous and bad faith and it's such a bullshit endeavor.
And I hate that our media just fell for it hook, line, sinker, but of course they did.
I don't know.
Did you see Mehdi Hassan?
He had a show, he's got a show on Peacock and on MSNBC.
He had Dan Crenshaw come on the show.
And it was fascinating to watch because it all came out across publicly on Twitter where he called out Crenshaw, Crenshaw responded, he goes, "Great, come on the show," which never happens.
And Crenshaw's like, "Great, I will." Now here, we talked about Crenshaw before.
He's dangerous because he has, and he's dangerous in terms of like watch for if he's gonna run for something bigger than just Congress because he has the ability to sound very reasonable and very knowledgeable and very calm and reassuring.
And yet what he ends up saying is completely false and intellectually dishonest.
And Mehdi does this thing where he likes to call people out.
And, you know, his whole take on it was, you know, Crenshaw is making it seem like there's this sudden influx of people at the border.
Whereas Mehdi Hassan said, you know, we've been seeing arrests for illegal crossings for the last nine months straight.
So why are you spreading this lie that like all of a sudden and overnight, you know, and now there are some notions of like there is a there is a bigger influx now.
And they're trying to obviously pin it on the fact that Biden is now trying to welcome everybody in.
When in fact deportations are up in 71 percent of people who are coming across.
They just put out a statement that said, do not come here.
Right.
Which, there's a criticism to be made on the left of that.
They said the statement, do not come here.
Right.
Period.
Well, Dan Crenshaw's response to that was, oh yeah, he was just winking.
And by the way, it's a lot of irony to have Dan Crenshaw trying to explain winking.
Oh, it's crazy.
Crazy.
Listen, I thank him for his service, but he was, you know, trying to do that.
It's like, oh, Biden's just winking.
Yeah, don't, don't come here.
Don't.
Stop.
Don't.
Stop.
Come here.
You know, and that's, it's so dishonest because it actually works.
People who are rational Republicans, if there are any left, there might be a few left who are still like in the party, will watch that and be like, yeah, Crenshaw's right.
He's, you know, many times making up these numbers or they're not right because Crenshaw's like, I don't even know where you're getting those numbers.
And Hassan had to say from the CBP, you know, right from the, you know, the government.
We're having a conversation right now about something that doesn't exist.
is up for criticism here.
At the very least for me, I'm gonna say like, okay, let's give them another like 60 days and let's see if they can kind of move forward a little bit farther than what they've done so far. - Well, and let's just, let's talk about the fact, and this is something that unfortunately we have to talk about all the time.
We're having a conversation right now about something that doesn't exist.
We're having a conversation about a pseudo event, right?
This crisis at the border.
That's not the actual problem.
The actual problem is that we have to talk about how to handle refugees and how to do it in a humane way.
Instead, what we're now talking about, and obviously you're listening to a podcast.
I'm doing air quotes here.
I'm putting it in italics.
The crisis at the border is a pseudo-event, which by the way, like you have Chuck Todd out in front of, and it's just like, how is the Biden administration going to handle this political problem?
It's not a political problem.
It's a human problem.
It is what do you do with humans who are coming for asylum, who are coming as refugees.
That's the actual problem.
We're not talking about that.
We're talking about Chuck Todd, who, if we weren't in a pandemic, would currently be at a Beltway wine party slash cocktail party right now.
When you watch Meet the Press, when you watch Face the Nation, those shows are designed to be a simulation of what it's like to hobnob with these people.
They're not talking about actual legislation.
They're not talking about political solutions.
They're talking about, oh, is this going to be a losing issue or a winning issue?
How is Biden going to navigate it?
And the way that they want it handled, it's a PR solution.
Right?
It's messaging.
How do they take Biden down to the border?
Show him next to something?
You know what I mean?
And like, will he be able to... What is it where you take someone's momentum against them?
It's jujitsu, right?
Is he going to be able to take this problem and turn it into a positive?
We're not talking about the human problem.
We're not talking about how to quote-unquote get kids out of cages.
We're not talking about how to take care of families and how to reunite people who haven't seen each other in, what, two years now?
Something like that?
Like, we are talking about manufactured bullshit, and for the record, this is how Republicans win.
It's always this.
It's always not the thing.
It's the thing adjacent, right?
It's the thing that they get to turn it into and twist it into, as opposed to what the reality is, which is, how do we find a solution for a really terrible situation?
Right.
Well, it's also, another layer of that is, it's the thing that they don't care about.
I don't.
that they're going to duff protests awfully loudly about they don't give a shit about this that's the whole problem I don't give a shit we talked about this for pro-choice or pro-life that's not they don't care about that but and you know you're absolutely right about how what this crisis really is about as a human problem the real answer is and interestingly enough like I'm talking to my 13 year old son who's really into politics he He might have to come on the show at some point.
His solution was, maybe he's heard me say this, but you have to be able to make it so that in the countries they're coming from they don't want to leave their countries so much.
The problem with that is that, okay, you can't just give money to these countries because I think what we found out in the past is that it doesn't go where it's supposed to go.
So it's a conundrum.
But in Well, and we destroyed any system that would allow it to go where it needs to go.
We created satellite countries where we had dictators and warlords in charge of things.
Oh, that's actually a really great point.
And so, right, so our foreign policy has always been, you know, basically just shooting ourselves in the foot.
We're the football player carrying the gun in his waistband at the club, you know, with the sweatpants and it goes off and it shoots us in the foot every time.
So, but that would really be the answer.
Because what are you hearing?
They're coming across multiple countries in the most dangerous, you know, feat of effort to get here because of how bad it is where they are.
It has nothing to do with Biden being the president or Trump being president or anything like that.
It has all to do with how bad it is where they are and how unsafe it is.
They have no other choice but to risk their life and, you know, the odds are they might not even make it anyway.
That's how bad it is.
And what happens if we send them back there?
They get killed.
Right.
Almost immediately we send them back and they get killed.
Yeah.
You have Coburn, the Senator from Texas, actually calling out the Democrats for trying to be humane.
Humane.
He literally said it like, oh these people are being humane!
How can they do this?
This is an affront to everything we stand for.
And that actually might resonate with some people.
That's what's so frightening about this whole thing is that they turned the norms into something where it's like, can we say it's a sporting event now where it has to be a winner and a loser?
I don't even know if that's what it is anymore.
But even a guy like Mitt Romney, who I would have thought would be compassionate about this thing, is trying to string Biden up and take him to task for this stuff.
And it's ridiculous because He's the kind of guy I would have thought would have been a little bit more patient with this thing and let Biden try and help these people out a little bit.
And by the way, Nick, here's the thing, and we were talking about this with the relief bill.
What do you do if you're not the party in power and you want to solve a problem?
You propose a solution.
There's no solution here.
They had control of the country for four years, and the best that they could come up with was pinning up babies and separating families.
That was the best that they had.
Oh, and by the way, while I'm here, let me check my notes.
Forcibly sterilizing people.
That was the best that they had.
Which, last time I checked, is Nazi shit.
You know what I mean?
They don't have a solution.
If you actually care about this, if you actually have an empathic bone in your body, you try and come up with some sort of a solution, and then you get in front of a table and you try and fix this.
They don't care.
They do not care about these people.
They do not care about the quote-unquote crisis at the border because there's no crisis at the border.
And then meanwhile, you have people who go on TV and they talk about this shit with a wink and a nod because they're not talking about the actual problem.
They're talking about the symbol of a problem or the idea of a problem because they think it makes interesting politics.
Most of them, by the way, have been absolutely poisoned by this whole, the liberal media, the liberal media, oh the liberal media, they're against us.
And you know as well as I do, as a former coach, that if you yell enough at a ref, they're going to give you some calls to prove that they're not against you.
Right?
Uh, yeah.
Yeah, that's the prevailing wisdom.
Yeah.
That is the prevailing wisdom!
And it works in the media because the media does not want to be seen as being biased.
And so what do they do?
They're like, you know what?
Biden is in office.
And instead of talking about actual things that, and by the way, they're not going to go near like the Khashoggi problem and Saudi Arabia.
They're not going to talk about that.
They're not going to talk about mass incarceration.
They're not going to talk about that kind of shit.
They have to find something that shows that they are playing it down the middle.
And this thing is so far from playing it down the middle, and so far from a real thing, and so far away from the actual problem, that it's infuriating.
It infuriates me, Nick.
You know, I'll get you to even madder.
Hopefully you're sitting down and maybe have a beer.
You know, Madison Cawthorn, your friend and mine, the young congressman from North Carolina, What a promising young man that guy is.
I mean just you have to be worried about the guys that make up their origin stories like as much as he did.
So he tries to you know exhort the Biden administration for dropping 86 million dollars for hotel rooms for all caps illegal immigrants And yet we have zero dollars going out to our homeless veterans who are at high risk of suicide, unacceptable and American.
Now, meanwhile, what really is in the bill that they're passing is tens of millions of dollars for veterans to be able to help the issue we have, as well as, okay, fine, Listen, they're trying to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.
The Democrats are, as far as what can we do to ameliorate the situation down there.
Well, we can get some hotel rooms very temporarily, get people into shelters so we don't have to keep them in cages.
Like, this is a good thing.
You know what I mean?
I know that there's a lot of other issues we have across our country that also need money and need people to take care of.
I can drive in L.A.
and see tent cities all over the place.
It really is really, really frightening.
Why aren't we spending that money for them?
You know, to get in a hotel room for a few nights.
They're quote-unquote less than human.
That's why.
I mean, it's the same thing here.
It is the dehumanization of humans.
Exactly.
Right.
But it's also playing this political card where he's just going to lie and ignore what they are trying to do.
I mean, listen, this Democratic bill they're passing covers the largest range of help for so many people, more than we've ever seen since the New Deal.
So, to try and criticize that for not helping people and then be completely wrong as a lie is so frustrating because it doesn't matter now once it's said, right?
That's the other thing.
It's out there, it's said, no matter of refuting it.
I mean, Madison Cawthorn himself might even say, hey, my bad, I forgot that that was in there.
He will not.
He will not say that.
He will not say that, right.
And by the way, he didn't vote for it either.
So here's the other thing.
We're all worried about the Congress shifting in the midterms, because that's what always happens every year.
But it's like, if you're not running on this asshole did not vote for a bill that would have directly benefited you, and you know it helped you in the last year and a half while we're running for this position, Well, I mean, it doesn't help that that side of the aisle is not serious.
You know, they don't have an argument.
There's nothing.
Nothing.
At all.
It's one lie and trolling comment after another.
It doesn't help that that side of the aisle is not serious.
You know, they don't have an argument.
There's nothing, nothing at all.
It's one lie and trolling comment after another.
And again, this is why it pisses me off because it's like these mainstream, and I keep saying this and I mean this, don't watch this shit.
Do not watch these Chuck Todd punch bowl conversations where it's just bringing people on and letting them spew whatever public relations bullshit they've come up with that morning.
And by the way, for the record, for years it has been talking points that come from the top of the Republican Party and or it used to be the desk of Roger Ailes They used to send out the talking points to everybody for when they went on every show It wasn't just Fox and they go on and they spew the exact same bullshit They're on the same messaging wavelength and they bring them on and then inevitably and you know this as well as I do They will say Chuck Todd will let it happen.
He'll say we'll have to leave it there.
That's what every time we have to leave it there Well, I'm sure we'll be talking about this in the months to come.
Thanks so much And then he'll be like go pack or whatever it is, you know, and it's it's Yeah, but it's also, it's not enough even to hold the media at fault here too, because to open this up a little bit, you had mentioned how often we have, you know, gotten ourselves involved in other countries to the detriment of how those countries are run.
So as a result, when innocent people are fleeing for asylum, we don't want to let them in because they're just streaming in here.
Yet, if we could, you know, fix that.
Well, I mean, there's also what's going on around the world now is that, you know, most countries are not getting the vaccine like we are, right?
And one of the problems is, is we're not letting these countries make the vaccine.
So are we going to be able to, you know, I know America first, they want to make sure everyone gets the vaccine, but are we going to be able to then roll this out?
Now what we're seeing in some reporting, right, is that some other countries are getting involved in here and they're going to be first for all that goodwill for all the third world countries that can't get the vaccine.
That's not good for the old soft power that we're looking to regain now that we've gotten Trump out of the White House.
Yeah, that was all over the Sunday shows this week, right?
No.
Oh, that's right.
They didn't talk about it at all.
They didn't talk about the fact, and by the way, it's not just helping other people.
It's not just making sure that, like, we win some PR battles.
Like, I hate to tell people, if you're not an epidemiologist, if other countries don't take care of the pandemic, they will create new strains.
I'm sorry, but there is an altruistic and a selfish way to look at this, and both of them say you should help these people.
Instead, we went on the side of—surprise, surprise, surprise—corporate profits.
Now, remember when Trump, there was a reporting, you know, in the midst of developing the vaccine, where it sounded like the Trump administration was going to try and figure out how to profit off of this by like, you know, selling the rights to the vaccine.
They were going to figure that out, which is also, yeah, anything short of us delivering, on our dime, these vaccines to every other country in the world is not acceptable at all.
And then, by the way, I do want to make this a point that no one is paying for the vaccine now.
This is amazing.
The idea that the government, and this is Trump as well, push this thing through where the vaccines are getting and no one's paying for it is amazing.
Because this thing would have cost, this vaccine I'm sure would have cost $100 each.
You know what I mean?
Sure.
Whatever they would have charged.
We would have been a lot of money for a lot of people.
If not more.
So, yeah.
So, like, that's a great thing to do.
But, like, the idea now that as we're getting more people vaccinated, we must now begin to look at this.
You know, and it's almost like with the foreign policy, the only thing I want to give Democrats credit for, to some degree, is that it seems like they are sensitive to criticism.
And when they hear it, they actually in earnest or somewhat earnestly try to do something to fix it a little bit, right?
That's what we're seeing at the border.
I think that's what we're going to see with like AstraZeneca.
They're going to start shipping some of those.
Of course, now that we hear that there's some potential issues with that.
Oh sure, you can have that one in other countries.
But it does seem like there is an ear open.
Compared to the Trump administration.
And it does seem like they will inch forward to trying to fix some of these things that the public is upset about.
Yeah, and I hope so.
I was doing an interview earlier today with somebody and I was saying, I've been a critic of some things with Biden.
I have issues with his past, particularly his participation with mass incarceration.
I've thought that he's been really wrong on canceling student debt.
I mean, surprise, surprise.
I think that there has been a lot of opportunities to go much, much bigger with some of the relief.
But I will go ahead and I will say there are things that have been happening and it's important because this is one of the things our show is built on.
We can go ahead and we can hold two different thoughts at once.
We can both praise somebody for doing one thing and also criticize them for doing something else.
Like you do not have to be orthodox.
There's no orthodoxy to be had.
That's when things go bad.
In this case, it does feel like there has been some listening.
There has been some shifting.
There's been some pretty decent things that have happened recently.
You and I were talking about this a little bit before we started recording.
It came out today that the Biden administration, along with a couple of other countries, they apparently took the lead on this, are going to pass sanctions on China for their treatment of the Uyghurs.
Which, by the way, you want to talk about what's happening at the border.
China, that's the nightmare.
Right there.
When you dehumanize an entire group of people, they have not only sterilized, but they have created an entire techno state in order to make a group of people, a vulnerable population, into slave labor.
God knows what we don't know.
You know what I mean?
Like, what's happening that we haven't even discovered or heard about at this point?
That's a step forward.
But I have to tell you, all of that's going to boomerang around back if we're not careful.
Because one of the things that we've seen, And this is incredibly disturbing, and we have to talk about this, which is the technology that China has been creating in order to keep an eye on Uyghurs, to oppress them, to destroy their cultures, and some of the products they've made them create in slave labor, they're finding their way into the West.
And if we don't go big in terms of stopping the fascist threat, if we don't actually take care of these problems, we can see the roadmap of where we're going.
You know what I mean?
If we don't actually take care of this thing at the border, if we don't actually take care of the human crisis with it, and our philosophical crisis with it, we can already see that this is going down a really bad path.
Well, you know, again, another example of obviously what was going on in China for the last, you know, against the Uyghurs this whole time, you know, Trump completely ignored it in an effort to get a deal with China on trade, right?
So he didn't want to upset anybody over there.
So again, we see the Biden administration heard about this, recognizes it, and they were very smart.
They did it multilaterally.
So it wasn't just us, you know, trying to, you know, impose sanctions on them, which is great.
I'm not going to feel really great about any of this until they start doing something about Saudi Arabia.
Sure.
the Khashoggi thing.
Sure.
Because that, like, okay, if we start to see some sanctions there, then I'll really feel like, okay, they're really trying to do something here to improve our standing.
By the way, even if it's just that, even if it's just like a selfish thing to like sort of make us look better, quote unquote, I'm almost okay with that because the sanctions do make a point and they do hurt those governments and perhaps would change, you know, their behavior.
But the fact that they haven't done anything about that and they've been very silent is also concerning.
Well, and I want to go ahead and put this on there because we do like to go a little bit deeper and we don't like to leave it at like this, you know, tertiary level.
The thing that the sanctions being passed against China, we need to make this very clear, that is happening in part because it's politically okay to be opposed to China right now.
Obviously.
I mean, we have We have the beginnings of a stirring of a new Cold War.
I mean, the right wants it so bad.
I mean, they would be perfectly fine to go ahead and launch a preemptive strike against the People's Republic of China.
I mean, they would be great with that right now, and they're going to keep pushing that for a while.
To go back to the problems that we have created and that we are currently looking at, The Saudi Arabia thing is part of it as well.
It's the quote-unquote price of doing business.
We have partnered with Saudi Arabia not just for oil, but in order to try and keep the Middle East in check.
Because American hegemony relies and has relied, and this is one of the biggest problems that we're still dealing with today, has relied with us trying to keep the entire world in check.
And in order to do with that, we've got to partner with some really shady characters.
And by the way, I would be remiss if I didn't point out, the start of the Iraq War was 18 years ago.
And Saddam Hussein, we helped that dude out a lot.
He was, he was our guy in the Middle East for a very, very long time.
And eventually we had to deal with that problem.
And we have to deal with terrorism that we helped partly inspire and create.
This whole thing that we're dealing with now, it's part of our ongoing project of hegemony.
And we have to start looking at those things and understanding where we've gone wrong and where we can possibly do better.
And just throwing up our hands being like, where'd this come from?
Doesn't help anybody.
Right.
I mean, historically, Jimmy Carter was a guy who really understood that we're going to have to deal with certain people we might not like in order to keep stability in the Middle East.
That's actually sort of the grown-up way to look at this, I suppose.
We can go back as far as Kennedy to sort of understand whether or not we're supposed to be the cops for democracy across the world, because that is fraught with all sorts of other foreign policy blunders that we've had ever since then.
You know, it's a real challenge because if you wanted to say, you know what, we're not going to interfere and it's not our dominion, the risk you run is that you'll end up having states that will be terrorist states that can fund attacks back onto America, right?
That's the fear that the right would say.
If you were to sit here right now and you were to chart out the major military conflicts of recent American history, It is a who's who of backfires to things that we have done.
And countries we tried to control, countries that we tried to manipulate, countries that we use strongmen in, right?
I mean, like when you actually look at it, it's like Noriega.
Noriega was on the CIA payroll!
And eventually we had to go down there and get his ass.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's small and large.
It's all of these different conflicts from trying to control the world.
It's like the old children's slime.
When you put it in your hand and you try and squeeze it, it comes out.
and there's all like there are always consequences to trying to control the world because you can't do it you just cannot do it and when you keep trying it has unintended consequences that are oftentimes worse than even the things you were trying to contain in the first place i'm not sure i took you for an isolationist jared i i you know what i am i I am outside of all those spectrums.
I don't even know if you could put me on a map with a pushpin.
I'll be honest with you.
Okay, because I get it.
Like, you know, I used to even argue, like, who's to say that democracy is the best way to run a government or run a country, right?
Like, and meanwhile, here we are, like, fighting and killing people over that, too.
As long as there's a basic notion of human rights, then I guess we can kind of deal with those things.
But, you know, trade wars.
That's fine.
That's the way to go.
You just do sanctions.
Rather than get into bloody conflicts, sanctions are certainly the first thing you should turn to anyway.
And I think those work.
Well, I guess the question is, do they work?
Because you look at a place like Iran, and people in Iran have just been suffering for decades and decades under sanctions, and that regime isn't going to change, necessarily.
Well, and by the way, and I think that's really, really important, because I don't think I don't think Chinese people are necessarily going to suffer from these sanctions.
This is very much more of like a party level thing.
But you're exactly right about Iran, Iraq.
Those sanctions, they took food off people's tables.
Right.
Right?
They actually did.
And by the way, it's important, and I don't think that people always get this.
I just want to take like a quick moment out of history.
Like something like Vietnam, right?
We had to go into Vietnam because it was quote-unquote a domino in the Cold War.
Look what happened with that.
It's not like Asia fell afterwards, right?
That whole thing was bullshit.
But let's talk very, very quickly about one of the reasons why the Vietnam War ever happened in the first place.
Ho Chi Minh tried to appeal to America twice Twice he came to American presidents in order to be like, I love America.
I want to work with America.
I want American independence in Vietnam.
And both times you're like, hey, get out of here.
Don't, don't, just leave us alone.
And what did he do?
He went to the other side and he's just like, you hear what I have to say?
And they listened to him.
And we have to understand that, like, American mistakes compound each other because we don't face them, we don't deal with them, we don't think about them, and the next thing we know we have a quote-unquote crisis at the border and we're not even talking about the actual problem.
Again, we're talking about a political football.
We're talking about a symbol of a real problem.
Right.
You know, it's gotten so bad now that this past week, the other rallying cry we were seeing from some of these Republicans was cheering on Putin against Biden in some sort of weird debate that they're, like, inventing in their heads.
Like, where have we ever seen debates between two heads of state?
Like, I don't even know what this is.
Some sort of Super Bowl in their mind.
But, by the way, it's clear Fox News and Gaetz and all these other assholes, they literally would be cheering for Putin, and these are the same people That when they go and see people who are kneeling during the National Anthem would be screaming and spewing hatred about how it's an affront to the flag, it's an affront to our troops, but it's the same people who then say, come on Putin, we know you can beat the midget in Biden.
This is not okay.
We've seen those t-shirts during the campaign, I'd rather be Russian than a Democrat.
I don't even know what to make of that, besides the fact that it's the sportification of this to the detriment of actually the human element that you've been talking about.
I'm so glad you brought this up because I've been, because you're on vacation now.
I was on spring break last week when this thing happened.
It feels like that happened like months ago, but I'm so glad you brought that up because what's actually happening with that, and we have to address it.
Whenever Russia was interfering in not just 2016, by the way, they interfered in 2020.
That report just came out that they continued their interference.
It wasn't just about Trump, and it wasn't just about Trump working with Russian operatives.
The Republican Party and the Republican base at this point, the reason why they're trending towards Vladimir Putin, and it's been happening for a while, like if you look at these polls, like I think it was back in 2015, 2016, they were saying they preferred Putin over Obama.
The whole point is that Russia is what the Republicans want.
They want a strong man in charge, They want a sham, bullshit democracy that doesn't exist.
They hold, quote unquote, elections, but no one really votes in them, or the results are cooked because they can't actually win an election anymore.
They want weaponized nostalgia.
I mean, Putin, in one of the most, like, Crazy, just absolutely crazy off-the-wall things has merged the nostalgia for communism with a nostalgia for the Church of Russia, which is just crazy because those things don't mix, man.
That's...
In Nick's world, that's like chocolate and peanut butter coming together.
And that's a hot take for the patrons right there.
But he's merged these things.
And on top of that, it's white identity culture.
It is a culture that is completely controlled by white people and everybody else is oppressed.
That's what they want.
They really, truly want that.
They don't want the quote-unquote American system of government.
They want Putinism.
They want illiberal democracy, and that's where they're pushing us.
Believe me, they are going in that direction, and that's where they want to end up.
You know, in the Winds of Change documentary that you recommended to me, and as I was listening to it, there's a great scene at the end of this thing where the Communist Party, the government has fallen, the walls come down, And there, I think it's in like East Germany, there's a consular or something, I think this is the story, where they're going to storm the gates and they're really upset about the whole thing.
They want to just, you know, take over.
And a Russian or a Soviet, you know, soldier comes out to try and talk to them and say, listen, you come in here, we're going to shoot you, knowing that he didn't have, you know, they had five bullets and 5,000 people are going to storm a thing.
And they tell you at the end that that guy who came out, who was bluffing, who was lying about that, it was Putin!
It was a young, you know, KGB officer who came out there.
And that motivated him from the beginning, from there, to try and restore what they had.
Now, to translate that, you know, it's the progressives, the left, the Democrats, those are the people at the gate who are storming in trying to take control, you know, because they outnumber the, you know, the old guard.
And that's what these Republicans are trying to defend, and they'll lie and they'll cheat and they'll obfuscate as much as they can to create this veneer of power that they have in order to maintain it.
And by the way, we have to point out, Putin doesn't have an actual ideology.
Going back to how we keep talking about the Republican Party doesn't really mean any of this shit, Putin doesn't have any principles.
What he does is he just kind of like figures out ways to profit off of other people's fears and cultural issues.
And he'll come out, and by the way, he's completely funded by, you know, oligarchs and all of these people who, they're making incredible amounts of money because they're just taking everything.
He'll come out and he'll be like, oh, it's not my fault, it's the oligarchs' fault.
And the people are like, let's get the oligarchs!
And he's like, Yeah, they have a wheel and they spin it and everyone comes up the top.
He's the one that they arrest and they just throw him in the jail.
Right, and most of the time it's some traitor.
Does that sound familiar?
It's the threat of gay people, obviously, right?
And any sort of, oh, globalism.
And it's not even the globalism we talk about.
It's obviously like, you know, elders of the protocols of Zion or protocols of the elders of Zion.
He doesn't really have an ideology.
He doesn't really believe anything.
He doesn't have a political view.
Matter of fact, if you look at Russia, it's not like Russia is, like, improving.
It's not like Russia is going anywhere.
It's just...
It's in neutral, and they're just taking their money.
It's just a scam.
And that is exactly what they're looking for.
He is the perfect avatar for what the Republican Party actually wants to become.
The irony here, though, is that what drove the economy, you know, through the 70s and 80s and the 90s, was having the Soviet Union as a foe.
Where we had to spend all this defense money to match what they were doing, which turned out they couldn't even keep up anyway, and that was all a sham.
So it's interesting that we're now decades out of the Cold War and what the ramifications are here.
The Republicans are still clamoring for that atmosphere of fear, where they can then drive up spending in the military.
And all their friends and cronies can then continue to redistribute that wealth.
That's what's interesting about this whole thing.
I would have thought decades later, we would have evolved into a different level of foreign policy.
But instead, it's like the same tropes over and over again.
And it works.
And for some reason, the people that follow them, because again, if no one believed in what they were saying on the right, then they would have to change their tune.
But obviously, it works enough where they can continue to poll okay.
Nick, I'm currently working on the new book and I am at the founding of America and I have to tell you bad news.
It's the same thing over and over and over again.
It's the same Damn conspiracy theory fear-mongering over and over and over again.
It works because people think it's brand new and that it's currently happening.
On our Patreon last week, you really resonated with me what you were saying about how we have so many of the right who are defending the monarchy against the, what's her fame, Meghan Markle, whether she was saying that whole thing.
And it was so outrageous to hear them defend it in the sense that our whole country supposedly was founded against that.
Right?
They said God saved the Queen!
Yeah!
You know, it's crazy.
It really is crazy.
Because what are they always trumpeting?
They're always trying to say, like, this is the founding of the father.
This is what the originalist meant in the Federalist Papers.
And it's like, here they are.
We're now falling back.
We want to be friends with the Soviet Union and follow their lead.
We want to defend the monarchy, of all things.
You know.
By the way, you know what's next, then?
Is slavery.
Like, I almost feel like they're going to want to have slavery.
Or some version of slavery, we'd call it.
Whatever they call it now.
Which maybe you'd argue is what happens in China.
and what happens in a lot of other countries for these slave working, it's crazy. - No, it's just a complete recycling of everything.
And, and actually, by the way, um, on the, on the, um, on the topic of rejecting monarchy, interesting thing.
Tell me if this sounds familiar, Nick.
Um, when one of the, one of the animating stories of the American revolution is that we had to revolt from England because England was going to incite the slaves and the natives.
And if we didn't fight them, like, they were going to come for our children.
And here's the thing.
Tell me if this sounds familiar.
The natives were going to drink children's blood.
Yeah, not that that's, you know, a familiar story or a course that we've now gotten used to.
It is the same thing over and over, and you're exactly right.
The story works, and they're going to keep pushing and pushing it.
We've gotten to the point where, I'm sorry, but our corporations have figured out ways to get around minimum wage.
They've figured out a way to give people benefits.
They figured out a way to get around all sort of regulation.
It's just going to keep rolling back and back and back, and eventually we're going to get to the point where, again, you have someone like a Putin who has no ideology, no idea of something going forward, and they're just going to give people that weaponized nostalgia, the conspiracy theories, and the veneer of a country that is actually just a matter of laundering money.
And that's it.
I think I told you there's a great documentary from years ago about these pranksters.
And their organization sounded a lot like the WTO.
So people, they'd get invitations to speak at these things, thinking it's WTO.
And they accepted one.
And they basically did in a very economic jargon, you know, presentation, they described slavery, where you import natives and you bring them in and you force them to work and you wouldn't pay them but you give them and people are sitting there studying and they're writing down all these notes and it's amazing and they and they get applause this whole thing they go back and do another one and they're like you know what we realize that it's a lot cheaper to leave them where they are and not import them over here and they're basically describing it in the chinese structure and vietnam where they were able to use
you know a lot of slave labor there and then import the products and these people were being it was a joke it was a joke and yet everybody in the in the audience was like taking this as gospel and they were ready to now launch their new business model that way free trade and globalism was a structure that was built upon the idea of oh we have to pay american workers minimum wage
what if we could have the factories where there wasn't a minimum wage and we could just come back and then all of us were just like oh that sounds great and then meanwhile somehow or another we end up on phones or something that that uyghurs were made in slave labor.
Right.
That's how it goes.
That's what it is.
I will say this, you know, some of the countries, the cost of living is lower.
So they don't need $50 an hour necessarily to be the equivalent.
But it's really the conditions, I think, is really what rattles me more, is that it's the slave-like conditions that they have to work under versus the actual specific monetary benefits they get, which is, you know, that can be debated for a while as far as how it translates to what we pay.
But clearly there's an issue there and there's no oversight there.
We can't control what China does with their factories, right?
I mean, I guess the way we can control it is by simply stopping buying their stuff.
Well, and I don't know how many people have heard about this or how many people have come across it, but if you want to think about your own consumer choices and the role that America plays in all of this, particularly in global free trade societies, look up suicide nets.
Look up suicide nets on factories because there was a while there where components for like Apple products were being made in factories and the conditions were so terrible that the workers were hurling themselves off of the factory in order to end their miserable lives.
And they started constructing nets.
To catch them.
To catch them.
And by the way, they didn't think about making their conditions better.
They didn't think about paying them, reducing their hours.
That mindset, and by the way, it's the people in the room that you're talking about who are scribbling furiously, right?
It's like, oh yeah, obviously, put up nets.
That's what you do.
Instead of making their lives better.
The problem here, and this goes back to everything we've been talking about, and somehow or another we did it, we made this a cohesive episode touching on a bunch of shit.
What we need to look at is how we interact with the world and how we interact with other people.
It's not a crisis at the border.
We have people at the border who are refugees, who need to get away from something.
They need something better.
It's not a political issue.
It's not something to debate about and win elections over.
It's something that is a human problem that we need to deal with.
And we need to look in the mirror.
We need to think about what matters to us.
We need to humanize the dehumanized and actually fix things somehow or another.
Well, just to put a button on that, you know, the act of deciding to seek asylum in America is as dangerous and as difficult as jumping, you know, you're basically jumping off of a ledge.
And that net that needs to be built is what we need to do to figure out how to, you know, A, Keep them from being harmed farther if they get to the border, but then B, figure out how to get them off of the damn roof to begin with, right?
That's, that is the whole thing.
And I've always talked about this.
It's like the Israeli-Palestinian issue as well, where, you know, it's almost like you just kind of have to continue to show good faith, you know, intentions to help people and be humanitarian.
And over enough time, it's going to take a while.
It's going to be bloody.
It's going to be brutal.
That's the only solution I can come up with.
Otherwise, we're going to be stuck in the same cycle we are, both in the Middle East there, or in the same cycle we are at the border, where nothing ever changes.
And we're going to consistently just have this stream of people coming.
And we have to constantly be figuring it out because I don't know what there is a great deal.
By the way, I get the argument for people that waited in line properly and did all of that and why they're so upset that other people can just stream in, you know, undocumented and then somehow get amnesty that way.
I get that argument, but it doesn't make it any better.
It doesn't make it any more humanitarian to fix how we fix it eventually.
And you know what else doesn't make it any better?
Every two years, THERE'S A CARAVAN COMING!
THERE'S A CARAVAN COMING!
EVERYBODY, THERE'S A CARAVAN COMING!
Put your kids up!
And there's gotta be ter- Well, now they got coronavirus, which I thought was a hoax, but you know how it is.
But it doesn't help.
We're at loggerheads.
We are at a moment of societal and political gridlock.
And the only way to win these games is to not play them.
If we continue to play them, it's just going to get worse.
And I've said this before, and I want to go on the record again.
If you think the quote-unquote crisis at the border is bad right now, Wait until climate change.
Wait until you have millions of climate refugees and more and more scarce resources.
Because if we don't nip this thing in the bud, if we don't make it better, if we don't figure it out, if we don't stop this playing around, we are going to have a bad situation on our hands.
And it's already really bad.
Yeah, or it becomes 12 Monkeys because this, you know, if it's not this virus, it's the next one.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, no.
By the way, that's almost a certainty because of climate change and also our continued, like, deforestation and moving around the world.
I mean, it's an inevitability every time now.
And even the anti-vaccination movement could continue to grow out of this or not.
I don't know.
I would like to think that going forward, let's say the next person, if it's Biden in the White House, we have a new thing and he encourages everybody.
Again, the way it's been polarized, I don't know if the right and the people against Biden are going to ever accept that, OK, vaccines would be good.
We need to do this for the good of the world.
You know, it might be it.
We've already passed that moment.
I want to end this, and you know, one of the things that I hear a lot, so we're bringing up big things.
I mean, we're talking about some of the worst nots in our political discourse and world, even.
I know I can hear a lot of people, it's like, well, what do I do about it?
Because sometimes it's so much worse when it feels like there's so many things that make so much more weight.
I will say this, it goes back to what we were talking about.
In this situation, you have to reject the spectralization of it.
Reject this story, non-story, controversy, headline on Sunday morning shows.
Start thinking about your place in society.
Start thinking about how you feel about it, how you view it.
And when you start doing that, and when you reject this tabloidization of it, we can start to actually deal with problems.
We can understand what they are, and we can start actually taking them on and actually solving them.
And that's more important than ever, I think.
All right, everyone.
That's going to bring an end to today's show.
We're going to let Nick go back and enjoy his vacation.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for partying, Nick.
I enjoyed it.
There's a lot of pool time I've got to catch up on now.
You gotta get back to the pool.
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Don't be on Twitter!
Go enjoy the pool!
And you can find me, J.Y.
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