*This is the first 15 minutes of our weekly Patreon series The Weekender*
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Jared and Nick have a frank discussion on policing in America in the wake of the Adam Toledo shooting in Chicago. Plus, they dissect what it is the Republicans are embracing considering the usual tropes don't seem to hold as much weight anymore. To wrap up, they discuss what they're watching - with Jared pronouncing the show he's watching now is one of the best things he's ever seen on TV.
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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.
Join the patreon and be part of that community, which has been incredible and amazing 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 weekender edition patreon exclusive I'm Jerry G8 Sexton here with Nick Halseman.
We got a lot of stuff to talk about today.
We got to talk about the Plan that is currently in Congress right now to add seats to the Supreme Court.
We got to talk about the Republican Party.
Surprise, surprise.
Embracing replacement white supremacist theory.
We got to get into all that.
But before we do, we got to talk about, you know, this is obviously a more casual episode that we do.
It's a little bit more unbuttoned, all that stuff.
We have more fun in this episode.
But we have to talk about something that is just broken within the past couple of hours.
We're recording this on Thursday, April 15th, and the video of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old boy in Chicago, being shot by a police officer, has just dropped.
I've watched it.
Nick has watched it in order, you know, to see what this is and stay abreast of this thing.
We need to talk about this and policing and police violence and where this comes from.
But I just want to say, before we move even a step further, Absolutely putrid, disgusting stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I get frustrated because I can already picture the defense.
You know, he could get off because the kid's running and it's in an alley and it's in the middle of the night and it's dark, you know, and I know they can get a free stream of his hands up before they shoot him.
But I think the whole training, you know, we talk about defund the police.
It really should be like we need to change the way police are trained in these situations.
So that this doesn't happen.
You know what I mean?
Because the cop is going to argue that I couldn't tell what his hands were doing.
I was running for blocks.
You know what I mean?
It was all intense.
And all of a sudden he stops and he turns around.
He might be able to argue that.
And that's what's frustrating because he shouldn't be in a situation where we're chasing someone like that and putting themselves into peril.
You know what I'm saying?
I'm not even sure I know what the answer is.
But it's just wrenching because there isn't a clear cut answer.
Yeah, there's a lot going on here.
You know, as we're sitting here, I mean, the Derek Chauvin trial is wrapping up.
I don't know how you feel about it, but I certainly have a great amount of anxiety that, you know, I've seen a lot of, you know, murderer cops go unpunished.
This is a situation, and you know, sure, we can talk about training, but we also need to talk about the fact that The mindset of law enforcement in the United States of America is the problem.
What they are, who they are, and how they approach this thing.
You know, I think a lot and, you know, I go online sometimes because I try as, you know, we talked on Tuesday about the Iraq War, how that occurred, you know, and we talked about it as like chess pieces and how this was used in order to take people's resources.
I try really hard to wrap my head around this and put myself in the position.
So, like, I'll go and watch a video of, like, troops in Iraq and how they operate and, you know, how they move around places and how they deal with their duties, right?
And, you know, troops in Iraq for the longest time were dealing with an insurgency, which meant that you had to assume that everybody in Iraq was ready to kill you.
You had to assume that everybody in Iraq was either your enemy or was against you in some way, shape, or form.
Right?
So you were always ready for them to pull a gun.
You were always ready for them to wire a bomb.
You were always ready for them to be in league with terrorists.
That is very different from what law enforcement should be.
But that is not what this country is.
Our law enforcement treats itself like it is a domestic military force that is, and this is the thin blue line mythology, right?
And for anybody, I mean, I assume everybody knows it, but let's define it.
The thin blue line is the saying that our police forces are a thin blue line between society and chaos and anarchy and violence.
That's bullshit.
That's absolute bullshit.
It assumes that people are awful and corrupted and disgusting and prone to violence.
That right there is a problem.
And the history of law enforcement in both this country and around the world is in the belief that certain people are better than others and that those people need to be corralled and they need to be kept from hurting other people.
And for anybody looking between the lines, that is both an ideology of white supremacy, but also hierarchical Where poor people or, you know, destitute people are terrible and they need to be kept in line or else they'll commit crimes left and right.
It is the ideology and the mindset and the worldview that leads to... Nick, he's 13 years old.
He was 13 years old.
He's a sixth grader, right?
Wait, no.
Yeah, that's right.
It's like a sixth grader or a seventh grader.
Shot him.
Shot him dead in cold blood.
Hands up.
No weapons.
Fuck these people.
That's what I have to say about it.
Well, and let me just put another piece of the puzzle to that is, you know, if the cops were these, you know, the silent majority, whoever's out there who wants to assume that these people are just awful crime, you know, crime laden, you know, just I have to do this.
The majority of people that commit crimes are doing that because their situation is so bad and so dire.
Why?
Well, because the economy leaves people like that completely behind.
So we could draw all sorts of parallels to when you watch these, you know, tax cuts that they do for these wealthy corporations, they're supposed to trickle down, that will never get anywhere near the lower class and people who really would need it and help, that this is what you get out of that.
Certainly a great portion of crime is built out of that scenario that we have completely gridlocked our country.
Now, we haven't mentioned the fact that there was another person just murdered in Minnesota as well because the cop erroneously pulled her.
Well, now we have to decide whether or not she did it on purpose or not, or as an accident.
She pulled her, instead of the taser, she pulled a gun and just killed the person two feet away from her.
These are the things we talk about when we're talking about needing to reform the police.
So I feel like, A, it has to start with what you mentioned perfectly at the top, which is this is not what they're for.
No.
Just the whole notion of what police stand for, but also just how they're supposed to deal with all these things.
And if you have military members who join the police forces, which is very common.
And by the way, you give up military hardware.
Yeah.
Then you have to deprogram them before you can let them back on the streets, and I don't think that's happening either.
So it's a clusterfuck, and it's hard to picture how you're supposed to make this right quickly.
This would take decades in my mind, I think, the way it's set up now to kind of get reform in and have it actually be meaningful.
But we have to do something because it might take a while and if you don't start now we're going to have these these kind of trials and these kind of awful situations forever.
They're never going to stop.
Yeah, so we're recording this, and again, just within the past hour or so, you know, this has dropped and gotten out there.
You know, and for days, by the way, and this is one of the more repulsive things about all of it, for days the media has talked about this as basically telling us that you're going to see a weapon in his hands, you know, basically to try and make that happen.
Lori Lightfoot, who is the mayor of Chicago, who ran on this idea of reforming Chicago, she has been out in front of this and, you know, said some of the things that are important.
She said, you know, this is a systemic failure, that we failed him, but also said, quote-unquote, this remains a complicated and nuanced story, and we all must proceed with deep empathy and calm, and importantly, peace.
Man, I have to tell you, and I don't know how you feel about it, and I don't know how our listeners feel about it, it's really hard to remain peaceful.
You know what I mean?
Like, it really truly is.
And there comes a certain point where you start to realize that law enforcement, who, again, see themselves as holier than thou, who see themselves as the last line of defense against the unwashed masses, right, who are going to just destroy everything.
At some point, like you said, you have to start wondering about the policies, about power, about money, about resources, and you start to realize that the state has a monopoly on violence because it's supposed to be the thing that we're all trying to live within and it keeps us from being barbaric and awful and you start to realize that the state has a monopoly on violence because it's supposed to be the thing that we're At some point, you got to look at this thing and you have to say –
You know, I understand better angels of our nature and all that.
I don't know how you watch that video and you don't feel a little bit radicalized.
I don't!
I really don't know how you do it and I don't know how you continue going down this line because you're exactly right.
Every time that we start talking about reform, and by the way we talked about defunding, and by defunding we mean taking resources from the police who should not be called on most of these calls.
It should be social workers.
It should be people who are dealing with mental health and dealing with crisis and poverty.
Tons of things that need to be done.
Maybe taking some of their budgets and changing it to people who could handle, you know, situations without guns.
What'd they do when we talked about that?
They won't do anything about it.
No, no, they lost their minds.
What do you mean?
We're the thin blue line.
You could never take money away from us.
Oh, my God.
Right.
Then all of a sudden it's like, oh, well, we would like somebody to be prosecuted.
And the police unions are like, well, that won't happen.
We're the thin blue line, right?
Like, we can't do that.
And it just keeps going and going and going and going.
And it reaches the point where it's like, you won't even allow us modest reform.
You won't even allow us to start having a conversation about how to change this paradigm.
And then you get out in front and you say, this is a nuanced situation.
Well, motherfucker, I watched a 13-year-old kid get gunned down in cold blood.
That's not a nuanced situation.
You know what I mean?
And there are some times where telling people to remain calm is gaslighting people.
It's telling people, hey, trust us, things will get better.
And I'll tell you what, we know in this country, this country isn't very great about things just moderately getting better.
It's a frustrating, it's a frustrating, pissed off type situation.
For sure.
This is a week filled with all sorts of things that all connect in a weird way.
You know, you'll talk to these cops, you know, who are, you know, who've been in the force for 25 years, and they're jaded, and they've been in, you know, they've seen shit that's been, they'll curl your toes, right?
They know what it's like, and when they hear, and they'll tell you, you know, how dare you say, to defund us or whatever, we know how to take care of this stuff.
And we've been doing it long enough.
But the bottom line is taking care of the stuff is what we keep seeing every week, every day across the country.
So it's hard because that argument is, well, shit, he's got a lot of experience.
He knows how bad people can be.
But those aren't the people that probably should be really doing the policy because they are jaded.
It's been so long in the soup.
Now, we've had Christian Clark, who is now being from the Senate to run the civil rights Be the civil rights lawyer for the administration.
And it was like I was listening to Fox.
I happened to stumble upon Fox News on my radio while they were talking about this.
And like out of this, this, you know, and they're trying to, you know, tar and feather her as some radical who hates Jews and who hates white people and all these different things.
And then out of nowhere, though, this connects, they start talking about the 1619 Project.
I'm not even sure how that even came about in the midst of this discussion.
Oh, I know how.
I can tell you.
Well, you connect that because what they say is, if you teach a 1619 Project, you are going to teach kids to hate their country and hate the cops.
Now, what we're watching, that video we just saw, would teach me to hate the cops.
I'm sure it would teach a lot of people to hate the cops, like you're talking about.
Here they are saying, well, if we teach actual real history of the United States, that's going to teach you to hate the cops too.
Well, to me, okay, great.
Let's reform this.
If we both are on the same page here, then let's do something about it.
Well, OK, so I'm going to take a wild right turn and I promise I'll bring it back.
Just stay with me for a second.
OK.
So, you know, we spend some time on this show talking about popular culture and movies and stuff and how it's in conversation with culture and politics and it reflects it and goes back and forth.
I think all of us are very familiar from the 1980s, even late 1970s, 1980s, early 1990s, we're very familiar with the gritty cop movies where the cops go outside the lines, you know what I mean?
But they need to, right?
They need to go outside the lines.
They need to rough people up.
They need to not respect people's rights.
They need to plant evidence.
They need to break in and then, you know, come up with the reasons why they did it.
I feel lucky today.
Are you feeling lucky, punk?
And all of that stuff, by the way, that's not just movies and popular culture.
That is an ideology in America, which is they need to do that stuff.
And it's a bunch of pussy liberals who want you to follow the rules, right?
And by the way, that's the whole thing that they're doing, is it's the idea it's an emasculated culture, right?
That somehow or another cares about criminals' rights more than they care about the rights of the people.
It's all bullshit.
That idea is what those people want, which is fascism.
They just don't want our cameras around.
You know what I mean?
It's like Rodney King was like a sea change moment because it was like, hey, every now and then if you're going to crack some dude's skull, you're going to get caught on camera doing it.
They want it to continue to happen.
They just want us to shut up about it and let them get to the dirty work of abusing people and violating their rights.
That's number one.
Number two, the 1691 project is reframing America through the lens of slavery and white supremacy.
Guess what?
The original police squads in this country were about reining in dangerous slaves.
And I'm talking about fugitive slaves who ran away.
I'm talking about slave uprisings.
That's how you get the police.
That's how you get the Second Amendment.
All of that stuff comes from the fact that there were more of them than there were of the slave masters and slave owners.
They needed a force with overwhelming force.
That's not untrue.
That's 100% our history.
They don't want to talk about that.
They don't want that in the discourse.
What they have, and by the way, I've spent a lot of time on the book lately researching what we would call cultural Marxism.
Okay?
And we've heard that, right?
They'll say it every now and then on Fox News when they're not like minding their P's and Q's.
And it sounds like it's just, you know, Marxist philosophy or whatever.
That's not what it is.
It's a conspiracy theory, and this actually expounds on something we've talked about a lot and what they try and do.
Cultural Marxism says that movies, TV shows, books, art, culture, music, that makes you feel bad about being an American, that criticizes the American experience.
By the way, we would be grouped in on that, right?
We would be considered a culturally Marxist podcast because we criticize America, right?
that it's a conspiracy and it's being done by surprise surprise Jewish people and communists in order to make people feel bad about America so they can destroy America and it goes back to everything we keep talking about which is it's a giant fucking conspiracy and don't you dare criticize them or you're attacking America which is why the police need to be a standing army
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