*This is the first 15 minutes of our weekly Patreon series The Weekender*
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Jared, suffering the effects of the 2nd vaccine shot, plays his "Flu Game" as he and Nick discuss the right's reaction to the Derrick Chauvin trial as well as Tucker Carlson's full blown White Supremacist chrysalis state, as he leads the entire republican party into a new era.
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I'm Nick Halseman 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 want to go over there and 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 muckrakepodcast.
Hey, everybody.
It is Nick Hauselmann here with Jared Yates Sexton, who is definitely not feeling above the weather at this point, having gotten his second shot.
So I am going to do the opening for our Patreon episode that we do every week.
So welcome.
Thank you for being part of the show, part of this community.
And I don't know, Jared, are you going to be able to be with us today?
You know, I was saying right before we started recording that this is it's very much a Michael Jordan flu game type situation.
I want to be real with people so we can we can level their expectations.
You can confirm I'm literally right now recording this wrapped in a blanket because I have severe chills and like I have felt I felt like straight garbage.
I got my second shot, which I feel so fortunate to have gotten.
I got it yesterday at 9 a.m., and I was feeling, you know, I was feeling a little bit run down.
But then by about 7 o'clock last night, the bottom fell out, Nick.
And I was, and to be frank, the first one did this to me.
I'm really sensitive to medicine.
But last night I was having violent chills and then I had like 101 degree temperature and then immediately sweated it out, you know, like a disgusting person.
And today I'm back to chills while I'm doing this and teaching and I am, uh, I'm a mess.
I'll just say that.
Your ability to smile through the pain of chills has always been impressive to me.
I'm a gamer.
Yeah.
I'm a gamer.
Listen, back in the day, back when I played sports, I would oftentimes, and you're a former coach, you know this, a lot of people, their heart's bigger than their brains.
And that is who I am.
I'm going to play through an injury, even if it's going to make the injury worse.
That is the Midwestern work ethic that I bring to this podcast.
Sure.
Well, and I, you know, I'm kind of, I'm a former player.
That's true.
I think I'm still a coach though.
Once a coach, always a coach.
You're always a coach.
Yeah, I think so.
You're always a doctor, you're always a coach.
I still call my coaches coach.
Yeah, that's one of those wonderful honorifics, for sure.
Well, I think we need to talk a little bit about what happened this past couple days because it won't make you feel any better.
Well, actually it could because obviously the Derek Chauvin trial came to an end, at least round one.
And you know I think for most reasonable people the result was what we expected.
I mean I think that there was always a little bit of a fear that perhaps like on the three counts maybe they'd find one of them not guilty and kind of like wishy-washy their way out of part of this but they got guilty counts on all three and it's just remarkable that the right
Can't come to grips with saying that there was an exceptional amount of evidence that was really well presented professionally by the prosecution and swayed a jury of his peers to vote guilty.
It's kind of amazing how that certainly can't even be the first sentence out of their mouth when they're trying to analyze what happened.
No, the first of all, um, I didn't expect him to be found guilty and, and that, that is one of those things where it's like watching, you know, uh, injustice over and over and over again.
And that actually is like a side effect of like the traumatic part of this society and political culture.
You come to expect it not to work out.
Um, you know, like Charlie Brown with the football.
Um, I was, I was, I was relieved to the point of like getting a little misty eyed because, I mean, this was, If they weren't going to find this guy guilty, there was nobody they could find guilty.
I mean, 360 degrees of eyewitness, you know, record and evidence of this guy murdering another human being.
So I was, um, I think like everybody else, the day that the verdict came in, I was, uh, I felt a weight, like a psychic weight.
You know what I mean?
Just waiting to be disappointed again.
Uh, before we get into the response from the right, I have to, we have to do this reminder, which is, uh, one conviction does not equal justice.
It doesn't equal the end of a situation.
In fact, this is just baseline.
Right, like this is how it should work as opposed to reform and making things better.
Because I'm not a partisan person, I have to go out and say very, very quickly, I think what Nancy Pelosi said was one of the most tone-deaf public statements I've ever heard from somebody thanking George Floyd for his sacrifice, which is straight bullshit and speaks to a lot of problems in our political economy.
But when it comes to the right, they have now gone on the record as saying the only reason why Derek Chauvin was convicted Was because people were afraid of a black mob and violence and that's it and that the country was being held hostage which tells you everything you need to know about their worldview and what they think about the current state of the United States of America.
I mean, it's almost like they're disappointed because they wanted these violent protests.
So what I find interesting is that a lot of the Republicans are trying to pass laws that will ban protests in their cities, right?
But they also are desperate for these protests to be able to stir everybody up and say, see, look at these savages who are going to be looting the CDS down the street or your target.
Almost like they wanted that and when they didn't get that, it doesn't validate what their beliefs are.
And this gets them – again, when they are confronted with obvious facts that contradict what their ideology is, they don't handle it so well.
No, they don't.
And to give people an idea, like I – What we're talking about here, and we always have to reframe this and put it into the perspective of what's going on.
The current right, and right throughout history, but this particular iteration, they believe that there is a conspiracy to destroy the United States of America.
And that conspiracy is being carried out by outsiders, which put in parentheses Jewish people.
That they are working with internal traitors, or liberals, who are trying to destroy the country.
And by the way, those two groups are trying to manipulate people of color.
Which, by the way, Nick, I thought I would show you this real fast.
I didn't tell you about this.
I wanted to get your reaction in real time.
This was from a conservative cartoon.
Ben Harrison, who is one of the most disgusting cartoonists in the world.
I just want to go ahead and get your quick reaction to this real fast.
Oh, nice!
How great is that?
Isn't that wonderful?
Are those Jewish stars as part of that dome?
Oh, I saw that too, my man.
I saw that too.
It wasn't the feature, but it was in there.
To get everybody up to date on what I just showed Nick, Harrison, and this is obviously what a lot, I mean like whenever they say Soros, they're not talking about George Soros.
That's a stamp.
Yeah, right.
It would be it would be racist if you talked about all Jewish people or prejudiced or anti-semitic if you talked about all Jewish people But to say one that doesn't mean larger conspiracy This is a picture and it was like Maxine Waters directing a mob to destroy an American city based on you know BLM
And over to the side, and this is based off Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome, it's a picture of a very, very large muscular black person with a helmet over their head, you know, because they don't know what they're doing.
They're just the brawn, right?
And then on his back, you have George Soros, a small little Jewish man, pointing at him and telling him what to do.
They really, truly believe that there is a conspiracy to destroy the country.
And they see this as evidence.
They can't see that this man murdered somebody in daylight and they see it and they say, Oh no, this is just another attempt to destroy society.
I mean, it's a truly sick worldview.
Right.
Well, it also, it goes to how they want to, the terms that they want to present their debate, which doesn't have to recognize anything that actually happened on the ground in front of us with the video, right?
They don't, they don't talk about him kneeling for the nine and a half minutes.
They're not really focused on anything that actually happened.
They're simply focused on... And by the way, we need to call out Maxine Waters because she shouldn't be weighing in.
Now, however you want to interpret her quote-unquote incitement to protest or to be vigilant is one thing.
But we can't, we really cannot have, you know, people, members of Congress or the President before the verdict weighing in.
We saw that with Nixon when he got in trouble for doing that with Manson.
Trump did do it with another one, with somebody I'm forgetting.
I remember because we talked about Manson, that whole thing, but then.
So, of course, I didn't bother anybody on Fox News then.
But I do want to admonish, you know, Maxine Waters, who represents, you know, my area of the country, she's got to be more disciplined than that anyway.
But they don't want to acknowledge what really is the facts in front of them.
I'm kind of curious, you know, we've had these monumental decisions that have affected policy throughout the years, like Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade.
And I'm wondering if this kind of decision might be one of those moments where we can point to going forward that was a watershed moment that might change policing.
I mean, listen, they had the chief of police and his co-workers throwing him out of the bus, rightfully so, which is an extremely incredible Moments to see these people who work with them or usually always in the same kind of cop environment They're not going to turn on each other, but they had cops You know the left and right saying how horrible a job he did and how he should be prosecuted.
It was pretty pretty intense well Let's go ahead and put the Derek Chauvin situation into context this was not the first person that he had killed and It was not the first person that he killed under suspicious or problematic auspices.
George Floyd should still be alive.
This thing should have been put it into a long time ago, not to mention that systemic racism and law enforcement should have been brought under control a long time ago.
The problem here, and you're right, this might be a watershed moment where suddenly the tide might turn.
I hope so.
My God, in my most hopeful moments, I would love if this system got itself under control.
But I think it's also important to point out that as we were waiting, there was like, I don't know if you remember this, but it was like, we got the sign that they were going to announce it within like 30 minutes.
They were like, 30 minutes, we're going to have this decision down from the jury.
It ended up expanding out.
I don't know the exact time because I was teaching while it happened.
It ended up stretching closer to an hour, a little bit over an hour, if I'm not incorrect.
And what you start to notice, and this is one of the reasons why social media actually is an important thing, because all of a sudden people in the major metropolises around the country, and even some of the smaller ones, the secondary and mid-sized cities, everyone started comparing notes and pointing out That police were being mobilized, National Guard was being mobilized, military was being mobilized, you started having surveillance helicopters, you started having riot control units, SWAT units started coming out.
And what ended up happening was they weren't even prepared to have a conversation or allow people to protest what would have been a straight injustice.
Because they recognized that this was a flashpoint, right?
They recognized that this decision was going to be an important decision.
And instead of seeing it as a moment of nuance, they saw it as potential violence.
They saw it as a potential for insurrection, which means, as always, law enforcement sees itself as an army against the people.
As long as we have that sort of a philosophy, they're going to keep killing people.
And not only are they going to keep killing people, they're going to kill people and then rally around it behind this thin blue line mythology bullshit, and it's just going to keep perpetuating itself.
Before we recorded I saw across the wires a screenshot of what Fox News Chiron was saying and it said Left celebrates Chauvin trial as proof riots work.
So they kind of have it both ways in some weird way.
They wanted the riots desperately to be able to cover it because obviously that's money for them.
It also reinforces these stereotypes and these ideas they have about the other.
But if they don't get that, well then they have this whole other, you know, grievance that, well, it's only because they voted guilty only because they were so afraid to have another BLM, you know, set of marches that we had from last summer.
Now remember, a lot of those were peaceful.
A lot, many of them were.
You know, the looting and rioting that happens tends to be an unfortunate offshoot of, you know, when you want to have people trying to, you know, exercise their right to protest.
And so they, you know, I don't know.
So the point being that, like, for that, that is what they're trying to push now is that all of a sudden, you know, look at these riots.
And it's kind of that sweet siren song of that's going to be intoxicating for all of their viewers.
Is that this thing is like yeah look at that and again it distracts from the reality which they do not want to understand or handle which is we saw this police officer kill some murder somebody in front of us and it was not what he was trained to do and he should not have done and we have to fix this we have to retrain all the police and they can't handle that that can't happen it cannot happen because it means that black people will have rights Yeah, and let's parse this out because this is why we do this podcast.
You know, we could get up and do like a five minute cable news segment and trade headlines and not really get into the meat of it.
This is why we do this.
So let's do it.
First things first, protest absolutely work and mass mobilized protest work.
We would not have had this trial if it wasn't for the Black Lives Matter movement and the protest of last summer.
Period.
That's why this happened.
One hundred percent.
The second part of it is this idea of riots.
And we covered this exclusively, too, while nobody else wanted to talk about it.
How many of the riots that they featured on Fox News in a perpetual cycle did we find out were started by right-wing extremists and provocateurs who were trying to start a new civil war?
And by the way, that's how the fog of war works, right?
It's things get weird and things happen.
You can't even necessarily tell where things occur.
The third thing, and since we're having a detailed, nuanced discussion, and we're talking theoretically, Nick, I will go ahead and say There is an argument to be made that riots aren't necessarily that bad of a thing because it interrupts the monopoly of violence that the state has.
And if the state is going to kill you, and continually kill you, and never be held responsible, then throwing a trash can through Chase Bank isn't the worst thing that can happen.
I'm pretty sure Chase Bank can handle themselves.
And, you know, we can have talks about this, but it is necessary to point out We cannot be docile because it's not like they change.
They keep telling us, oh, you know, what was it Tucker was saying the other day?
We were talking and he's like, change can be slow.
Well, it's like, yeah, motherfucker.
Like that's what you say.
And then nothing happens.
And while we're on the subject of Tucker, because, you know, he is, he's at the center of all of this.
He is gaining power and strength and influence like nobody's business and we got other stuff to talk to or talk about with him Did you hear the quote where he was like this the the the decision was an attack on civilization?
Yeah, well he threw that in there that kind of the end of a sentence right sort of He did yeah, and and you know what everybody in Twitter like dunked on him like oh He's trying to be a scaremonger or a fear monger.
He's not wrong It is an attack on civilization.
White supremacist state violence.
Law enforcement as an oppressing army civilization.
It is.
That actually is.
Because all these parts are working together.
And as long as we pretend that there isn't some sort of a systemic oppression, we're not going to get any further.
So he was right.
He actually was right.
He just didn't add on that it was a white supremacist law enforcement as an oppressive army to it.
But he was right.
It is an attack on civilization, for sure.
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