Nick Hauselman and Jared Yates Sexton check in on the Arizona Presidential Recount where things are going smoothly and there is certainly nothing at all suspicious or alarming happening. That dovetails into a discussion of the remaining threat of antidemocratic activities and our inability to really deal with the horror of the Trump presidency. To access the bonus Weekender episode on Fridays, unlock exclusive content, and support the show, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
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Some creepy old guy telling your children, your little kids, to take medicine whose effects we do not fully understand.
It's totally normal.
Yeah, that happens every day.
Don't ask questions.
Just do it.
I think it's pretty safe to say that bipartisanship of last year has kind of broken down.
Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle just can't resist.
Stretching out the pandemic, using it as a rationale for additional spending far beyond what is best for the country.
Hey everybody!
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
As always, I am Nick Hauselman, joined by Jared Yates Sexton, and it's a lovely beginning to the week, if I don't say so myself.
Jared, are you enjoying your end of the semester You might have heard it on the Weekender edition last week.
I've declared it the Summer of the Muckrake.
Yes.
And I stand by that.
I stand by it.
I have hope for this summer.
I think it's going places.
I have hope.
And, you know, lovely artwork that we were sharing on Twitter, the Summer of the Muckrake.
Some really fantastic and creative ideas.
And if I can scroll quickly enough, I'll tell you who it is.
Because do you remember who did these things?
You saw this on Twitter, right?
All I remember is the Jaws shark.
Arthur.
Arthur Mullen did a terrific.
He did the Jaws.
He did another one that invoked Endless Summer.
The summer of, I don't know if you saw that one.
It was a great endless number.
So it's the summer of muckrake.
I'm in.
And as a result we have to talk about this Arizona election recount that they're trying to do because it's kind of scary what's happening here.
And news broke the other day that they were covering this, the reporters, and one guy kicked out because he tweeted out a photo.
They apparently have was an agreement that they wouldn't share ballots in a picture out on Twitter or whatever or out in the general media and the picture that we see is of a guy named Anthony Kern and in the foreground way out of focus you can't see it's probably a blank ballot is there and they kick him out for violating the supposedly his terms but what really seems to be the issue here is the fact that he was announcing who one of the people that was that was recounting Yes, so let's go ahead.
And this is this guy, Anthony Kern, who was a local Arizona politician.
And I got to tell you, if you dig deeper, Jared, it gets pretty seemly pretty fast.
Yes.
So let's go ahead for and this Arizona thing is important for a few reasons.
I've actually had a lot of people reach out to me and they're like, what do you think is going to happen from the Arizona thing?
And to go ahead and prognosticate, which always gets us in trouble, right?
I don't actually think it's going to overturn the election results.
I mean, over in the QAnon territory, the Mike Lindell territory, you know, the people who are clutching their pillows and, you know, praying, you know, to, I guess some higher being that the election is going to be overturned.
And Trump will be, I don't know, inaugurated in June now.
They keep pushing it back.
It's just continually going back and back.
The Arizona thing, of course, they are somehow or another trying to have a recount in this election because almost immediately in November of 2020, Arizona became a hotspot.
Where all of a sudden they started believing that Dominion was messing around with ballots, that there were ballots being delivered.
That's actually one of the places where the rumors started that there were nuclear marked ballots, right, that the military was setting a sting For Biden and the Democrats and whenever they took over the election, they would obviously be arrested and imprisoned all that good stuff But the whole point is this is a state that in their electoral process much like my state of Georgia They have lost their damn minds Well, let me ask you this.
Oh, can I interrupt for one second?
You know, Trump, of all the people that were really surprised by the results of the election on election night, Arizona was the one that really, really freaked them out, right?
That's the one that triggered all of this stuff.
Might you wonder, Jared, why Arizona, of all places, would have been such a shock to the Trump administration that it didn't go for the Republicans versus other states like Georgia, for instance?
Could you figure out is there a reason why maybe the electorate in Arizona would be much more predicated toward voting for Trump in their minds?
Their brains are being cooked in the hot summer sun.
I mean, yeah, but I would also have to say that it's the the electorate in Arizona is white people.
A lot of white people.
So of course they're going to win that one.
A lot of old white people that must be going to win that.
So this is the heart of this thing.
They can't accept that there is a bit of an awakening I think in Arizona.
We've seen it with some of their elected officials as well who have decided to stand up to Trump to some degree in some milquetoast fashion.
That evidence had been planted from years before so it shouldn't have been a shock to them but I have to imagine it's simply a race thing to them.
They couldn't imagine that the electorate in Arizona would ever vote blue.
Well, there's magical thinking in all of this, and, you know, we've been following this for a while.
It was like when Trump didn't win the popular vote in 2016, and he lost it by 3 million votes, and immediately there were 3 million illegal votes, right?
It's the same thing in Georgia.
It was when he was trying to shake down the government here, and he was like, I need you to find those votes.
Obviously there are that many votes, or, you know, to put me over the top.
Also, the new development in all of this, And not to mention because we have to talk about this this guy and why it's really important that people know about this and it brings a whole new dimension to it.
But we also have to point out that Donald Trump, the former president of the United States of America, the embarrassment himself, who is haunting Mar-a-Lago like a forlorn spirit.
You'll just be there hanging out with your best buddies, not wearing masks, I don't know, singing karaoke.
And the next thing you know, the former president of the United States will shuffle in looking like shit, by the way, like he hasn't slept a night since he was done.
He comes in and he'll grab a mic and he'll just start ranting and raving.
And I know this is a shock to everybody.
Donald Trump has endorsed the Arizona recount, and he thinks it's great.
He thinks it's the best possible thing that's ever happened.
This has taken the imaginations of the American right.
We were just talking before we started recording that 70% of Republicans now believe that Donald Trump actually won the election of 2020.
We have to go over that mindset and what that means, but this new development in Arizona that you're talking about is, I'll say this about a lot of things, it is Shocking, but not surprising is what I will say.
Yeah.
Well, here's the thing about the recount is that obviously it does nothing to affect the national election.
That's not enough.
Let's just pretend there's two things that can happen.
They'll say this, the vote was right.
And, uh, you know, Biden got his electoral college votes from Arizona and that's fine, but they can also say, well, it was completely wrong.
Trump really won, but it doesn't overturn the election results.
Wait, Nick, are you telling me that nothing that happens in Arizona is going to lead to a giant cage dropping down on Joe Biden and him and all of his Democratic conspirators being lined up and shot on national TV and or shipped away to Gitmo?
Are you trying to tell me that because that just sounds...
Outrageous.
Do you need to sit down?
Because you might want to.
I'm sitting, but I feel like I now need to move down to the floor because conspiracy brain is exhausted.
Yeah, I don't want you to fall off your chair when I tell you that.
Yes, no, this won't really affect the national election.
However, here's the thing.
If they say that it ended up being Trump's victory, that just is a real dangerous situation because that will then justify in all these 70% of Republicans and that'll gain, it'll be 80% of Republicans, 90% of Republicans.
It'll be 98% of Republicans.
Yeah, that will be a floodgate without question to justify why they're wanting to complain about the big lie.
But even if it comes out and they say, oh, you know what, it was actually pretty good.
Like there really weren't that many wrong votes or whatever.
It still checks out for Biden.
I don't think it would change anything anyway.
That's not going to sway any of that 70% right now back to saying it's being, you know, more reasonable and realize, you know what, this was a fair election.
That's the other problem with this.
This isn't like, you know, binary here.
Either it will unleash the floodgates of real turmoil in America, I believe, or it'll just simply be status quo.
We'll be right where we are now, which is terrible as far as democracy goes, right?
In terms of democracy, we're in a terrible situation here because they're able to do this.
And the reason is, is because they agreed to do this being very transparent.
Everyone's going to see.
We're not going to be able to hide all this stuff.
And meanwhile, The transportation of the Dominion voting machines, or whatever machines they were, seemed to be a little bit non-transparent.
But now that they're counting all the ballots, we're looking at who is involved in this thing.
And that's where this man Anthony Kern comes in.
So, would you be interested to hear a little bit about his background, Jared?
Well, I mean, he's being trusted with this recount.
He has served as a politician in the state of Arizona.
He's been trusted by the voters, trusted by the voting authorities.
I have to assume Sterling record.
Oh.
Across the board.
Yeah, when it comes as a surprise to you that he was a cop before becoming a politician?
Upholding the laws of the country.
Absolutely.
I don't see anything not to like here.
Well, are you aware of a thing called the Brady List?
The Brady List was invented or created in the early, mid-2010, 2012, basically to put, it's like a no-fly zone for cops.
It's a no-fly list for cops.
It's because if you do something really egregious, like Anthony Kern did to get himself on the list, then you end up having, you know, you can't be a cop anymore.
But what he ended up doing was not turning over an iPad or a tablet to a superior officer.
And if you look closely at what the Brady List does and the infractions you have to commit to get on that list, the big one is hiding evidence that might get a defendant off of a case.
That doesn't sound like you're backing the blue.
I'll just say that up front.
combine these two ideas.
And it sounds to me as if Anthony Kern was, you know, trying to get this guy, you know, he, he, he found a perp and he wants to put them in, you know, in jail for something.
And they probably had evidence on an iPad or something that would have exonerated him.
And he hit it.
He didn't give it to the, uh, to the, to a superior officer.
So he got in that list, but it gets more interesting.
That doesn't, that doesn't sound like you're backing the blue.
I'll just say that up front, but I'll also add, I really have a hard time understanding why a person who had been disciplined for the mishandling of information in one setting, when the law is on the line, would not be trusted handling when the law is on the line, would not be trusted handling When the law is on the line.
I'm sorry, I'm going a little... I'm getting a little dizzy here with my conspiracy brain.
This is why I thank God that you're here to be able to help me, you know, keep on track and make these points and make these connections because that's why we work so well together.
So, yes, that would be a real big red flag, you think, for handling very sensitive information and making sure that it's counted properly.
Can you imagine, by the way, all sarcasm aside, Can you imagine being in charge of a presidential election recount in a state and, like, not even looking to see if somebody had, like, been disciplined for mishandling information?
Like, not even, like, starting to look at it.
Oh, yeah.
Or looking at it and being like, ah, you have a good time out there.
Yeah.
Going for yourself with those ballots.
I mean, when he gets to the place where they're counting at the State Seminary of Arizona, like, gives him a tour.
You know what it might have been?
He might have just been getting a tour and said, hey, wait, let me cancel ballots.
Would you like me to do that?
And he goes, oh, yeah, sure.
Sit down.
Here's some ballots.
That might have been what happened.
That's how organized this is.
They promised that they were going to go through everyone's social media and scour it to make sure that no one was biased who was involved in recounting these votes.
I do have to say real fast on that subject.
We live in a country where everybody's biased.
I mean, just everybody has an opinion.
And that's a hard thing to even find.
But it's bad enough that this guy had gotten charged in a position of power with doing this, and that didn't disqualify him.
But the good news here is I assume there's no other strike against him.
Oh, oh.
Well, let's keep going, because the story continues.
If he wants to get off of this list, you know, I don't think you actually can, in any kind of official way, once you get that black mark on it.
But as a legislator, he decided to create a new law that would get certain people off of this list.
He was elected, Nick.
He went up for office after getting on this list.
And the voters of Arizona were like, you know, he's got a little bit of a checkered past.
Yeah, why not?
Let's go.
Yeah, I like his haircut.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
And so he tries to whip up votes to pass a new law in Arizona that would effectively get him off of this list.
You know, wouldn't you think if you were doing this that you probably, you know, in good faith, Whatever that term means anymore.
You probably have to tell the other legislators that you're trying to get to join you on this bill that like you are on this list, right?
You probably have to tell him at least that it could have been like when you're coughing like I'm on the list to by the way, like you have to like do something to tell him that.
He did not do that.
None of them knew that, and ultimately this law did not get through.
But here's a guy willing to manipulate the system so much to the fact that he will just basically pass a law that only benefits him and obscure that.
Again, more obfuscation here with evidence and with information.
And meanwhile, here he is, you know, trying to be the auditor of a recount of a national presidential election.
The good news about all this is there's no way there's anything else that happened with this guy that would cause us to wonder about his impartiality handling sensitive ballots during a presidential election.
That's the good news here.
It is, right?
Because now I think I'm forgetting a big... What's the next thing I'm forgetting then?
There couldn't be anything else that would be involved with the election whatsoever.
With Anthony Kern?
Yeah, no way.
No, tell me.
What else is there then?
You're the one looking at this guy's drive sheet.
There's no way.
I thought I covered that.
I thought we said he tried to change the law.
Oh my god!
Jared, what is wrong with me?
Okay, let's put the cherry on the top of the soda, shall we?
The great thing here is that it was a bit in the midst of looking at how corrupt this guy is.
Yeah, I forgot the bit.
I can't believe it.
Anyway, this is great compelling live recordings.
Oh, it's wonderful.
No, because it's incredible because you start looking at this thing, and you're like, my God, how is this person trusted with anything?
And it just keeps going and going and going.
And I think you were trying to kick me under the table, and you can't reach from here.
So let's just say that you needed somebody who was a stand-up politician who's really got his scruples, and he's You can trust him.
You can trust law and democracy.
Yes.
And so it's really unfortunate for this man that they caught him – and it's a great picture by the way – in the middle of the insurrection at the Capitol.
Things are going left and right.
It's a sea of people.
Not to use a cliché term.
Wait.
To be frank, it's just going right, not left.
It's all right.
Yeah, it's all right.
And it's all, it's a sea of people just swarming the Capitol.
And then here is this man, Anthony Kern, facing the camera.
He was nice enough to turn around.
Maybe they yelled out his name or something.
He is in the middle of the insurrection at the Capitol.
And this is the man that they're allowing to go through votes and make sure that this are legitimate.
This one, this is, this takes the cake.
This is really impressive stuff.
It's, it's, it's really amazing.
I, I have to tell you, it's, it's just, you know, you, you, you, you sit around with this stuff and like you try and make sense of it in some way and you're like, ah, it couldn't get more absurd.
And then it's a guy who is, like, at the Stop the Steal rally.
I mean, we don't know what he did.
We don't know if he busted into Congress.
We don't know if he, like, intimidated a sitting member of Congress.
But he played a role in trying to overturn the election of the United States of America through force and intimidation.
And now he's in the room!
The call is coming from inside the house, Nick.
And now he's over there handling ballots, dealing with this recount thing.
And you start to realize, and this I think is the large takeaway, not only the fact that this guy is a piece of work, but also the fact that like, They're everywhere, Nick.
They're in so many positions of authority and power.
These people who intentionally tried to overthrow the election of the President of the United States of America and intimidate Congress.
And this guy, this guy is all over the place.
Well, here's why the Internet rules.
It's because in this thread where they're showing this politician, this guy, Anthony, at the outside of the insurrection.
Someone just happened to go through the video footage and they included it in the thread and you see him walking right into the Capitol.
So he was part of the insurrection.
He was part of the group walking in.
He's got his nice suit on and his strange collar or something like he must keep his neck warm.
I don't know.
So he was in there.
And there's no wet washing this part of it either.
This is a serious insurrectionist, you know, because whether or not you want to give someone a pass who was just in the outside and yelling and screaming or whatever versus someone who actually went in and broke a window or two or harassed the police officers.
I think that you can't really draw.
Once they go inside the building, that's it.
You can't.
The line has been drawn.
I, um...
Oh.
Oh my god.
It would be bad enough.
Like, it should disqualify you from engaging in the recount at the election if you were at a rally demanding the overturning of an election.
He criminally trespassed, it sounds like, in Congress.
Cool.
Love it.
Love all of this.
This makes me feel great.
I love every single part of this.
Yeah.
And guess what's going to happen?
I mean, listen, you know, are you going to be surprised when they say, oh my God, we just found like, by the way, it wasn't that close in Arizona.
It's, it's, it's, you remember what the, it was like in the twenties or 30,000 votes, right?
Like it's going to take a monumental, Task to try and somehow flip all those votes and ain't gonna happen.
It wouldn't it would be the most unprecedented, you know flip of votes of all time but Okay, so that's that's the thing though man is it's like if you actually look at the The the riot slash insurrection slash attempted coup of January 6th There were so many Republican lawmakers there
There were so many Republican politicians and powerful people from the party who participated in this thing.
It's not necessarily that Arizona is going to overturn the election.
They're not going to.
By the way, I'm sorry, it's 10,457 votes.
Forgive me, it wasn't that high.
So it's closer, but still a lot.
Real fast we just want to remind everybody that we do have an additional episode every week called The Weekender.
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But, you know, they're not going to overturn the election.
You're right, they can add to the conspiratorial part of it.
This is, this is completely endemic to the entire party deck.
Like it's, it's not just, and we love, we love to get online and talk about it's just stupid people.
And it's just like, you know, the, the QAnon people who believe everything or whatever.
QAnon is the Republican party at this point.
It's all of them.
They are all part of this anti-democratic push.
And, and this, what we're looking at right here, The amazing thing about this is he there's no way he's the only person who did this.
You know what I mean?
Like obviously these other people are engaged in creating the law.
They're engaged.
And by the way, they're engaged in enforcing the law.
There were police there.
There were military people there.
Like this was not January 6, which I don't know about you.
I'm already pissed off about how much people have forgotten this thing.
You know what I mean?
Like it never happened.
It wasn't that big of a deal.
And matter of fact, Tucker Carlson tells us they had every right to be there and do what they did.
Yeah, we had this major coup attempt in this country, and it was it was so many influential, powerful people.
And it is I have to tell you, if you really look at this thing and you really like game it in your head moving forward, now we have a state that's trying to overturn a presidential election.
It's not going to be the last.
You know what I mean?
Like this is, these people, they're in, and they're, they're slumped in it.
We just said 70% of Republicans believe that Joe Biden didn't win the election.
A large majority, large majority.
Those people are going to be involved in the electoral process.
Those people are going to be involved in elections.
They're going to be involved in ballots, ballot recounts, ballot handling.
On top of that, what happens when we can't reconcile these problems?
These people are everywhere.
I agree.
And that is the worry.
I believe you agree with me once.
If this thing does, for some reason, that they find 11,000 ballots to switch, it'll unleash 100% of the Republican Party believing it was a big lie.
Right?
Well, yeah, but they're not going to find 11,000.
I mean, that's a lot of ballots.
It is.
And by the way, we would have to believe that there actually was a systemic effort to steal the election on behalf of Joe Biden.
And I want to be very clear, this guy, this asshole that we're talking about, like, this is the kind of guy who's like sitting there looking for, like, the radiation, you know, stamps, right?
It's like, let me just touch it and let me feel if it feels real.
And they'll go in there.
And this is a larger part of it.
He doesn't need to find 11,000 ballots.
He believes there are 11,000 ballots or that there are 10,000 plus fake ballots.
He doesn't need proof.
He's living in, going back to what we were talking about last week, he is living in his own fantasy.
And in his fantasy, he is a warrior for democracy, even though he breaks the law and is now engaged in these attempts to overthrow an election.
In his fantasy, Nick, he's already cracked the case.
Right.
And this is the danger.
And we talk about this a lot about conflating politics and religion and using religious imagery and vocabulary invites this kind of thinking.
And I would have no doubt if you scroll through this guy's timeline, I'm sure you'll see, you know, references to religion somewhere.
I was just looking and it's all there.
Yeah, exactly.
So, you know, when they, and this is what we see in like, you know, extremist groups across whatever religion we're talking about, when they manipulate the religion to enforce whatever ideology they want to do to create power, this is where we are.
So even back when Reagan started to embrace these things, this was always a straight line on the graph to this moment where you'll be able to then use, because again, most of these politicians, I'm probably fairly certain they don't really believe in the big lie what they do believe in is that the big lie will get them more votes so because of that they are willing to do anything but that's the scary thing is those the more votes they're going to get those are people that actually do believe it
they're conditioned through their religious beliefs and the way they're raised to to when they hear those keywords it stirs them up and they it appeals to them and they're not going to And that's what's so dangerous because once you get that, once they get into that mindset, there's no changing their minds.
Arizona could come out and say, guess what?
We found 10,000 more ballots for Biden.
They could say that and that would be like, more proof, more proof that it was rigged somehow.
Oh, so the deep state was so afraid of what they would find that they were backing in trucks in the middle of the night.
And then you would see blurry camera phone footage of a truck that basically was delivering donuts.
Right.
Yeah.
And you're 100 percent right, by the way, because it's like people like me who grew up with this.
Like we were told that the government was eventually going to betray us or already had.
And they were going to be taken over by a one world government, which eventually became the deep state.
and then the QAnon mythology, all of that shit.
Like, we were all prepared for it, and we've all been awaiting, are you ready for this?
This is important for people to understand.
Quote-unquote, signs and wonders.
And at some point, a lot of things would happen and all of a sudden there'd be tumultuous moments and even possibly miracles.
And you are waiting for all of those things to confirm what you're already believing.
So you're exactly right.
This is a religious mindset.
They are waiting for revealed knowledge versus empirical knowledge.
Which, by the way, I don't know if anybody is keeping track at home, there's a difference between revealed knowledge and empirical knowledge when it comes to elections.
Right.
Which is elections are about empirical proof of what people believe and what they want versus what do you feel.
Well, I'd like to split open one of these people's brains and give you a direct insight line into how their thought process works because David French had shared with us on a tweet a response to one of his articles where the response to trying to dispel the big lie was From obviously someone who's religious says, quote, you are wrong.
Trump did not lose the 2020 election anymore.
Then Jesus lost the battle between good and evil when he died on a Roman cross.
Okay.
You have failed to see the big picture with Trump, just like many have failed to see the big picture with Jesus and God.
You know, which is also this, this reminds me of, um, what's the, um, the Narnia stuff, you know, uh, which is also a parable for Jesus, right?
They shaved the lion's mane and like, but then he comes back stronger or Oil.
strike down Obi-Wan Kenobi and then he's more powerful than ever after that.
This is sort of the same myth that we've seen in literature and in Christianity.
But he continues.
He tells David French, you were like the little brat hearing about a bank robbery and gleefully proclaiming that the robbers got away with their selfish, illegal, and greedy acts.
Stay tuned.
You are about to be surprised as good old-fashioned American justice catches up with the bank robbers.
Oh.
You know, I can't help but point out that this sounds more like a Bonnie and Clyde kind of thing.
We all remember what happened to them, right?
I, well, and that's what they're hoping will happen.
Because the entire fantasy of what they're talking about is not an election being overturned.
It's an election, matter of fact, the election being overturned is not what's important to these people.
It's important that the quote-unquote crime is exposed and the criminals are punished.
They're daydreaming and fantasizing of a military coup.
Let's be real, that's what they're really looking for.
They have lost any and all faith in politics Doing what they want it to do, or doing anything, and they think that the only means of actually making anything work is through violence, intimidation, and oppression.
They believe that they have been persecuted, which means that they, as martyrs, now have the right to engage in legitimate violence.
Right?
That's what they're actually fantasizing about.
But I have to tell you, and I know that there are people who are listening who are like, oh my God, I can't believe they're like going ahead and equating Trump with Christ.
Of course they are.
Of course they are.
And for anybody who's ever played golf, you go out with a bunch of tools in your bag, these people have one tool.
That tool is to go ahead and go ahead and put it all within that religious mythology.
It always has to be perfect people who are being cut down and then retribution for the people who cut them down.
And the conspiracies that they use to take over and hurt legitimate good people.
It's absolute madness that this still works.
Did you just call golf clubs tools?
Sure, absolutely.
Tools of the trade.
Well, you know, interestingly enough, this is also an indictment of the Trump administration as a whole and what they did for those four years because it was bad enough about the tax cuts and the actual policy things they were trying to get through on the wall and the border, but it also goes to the general incompetency of the presidency
and how they were able to hide that behind this myth that he is some sort of Jesus like figure and that's the other thing that's really frustrating is because it then leads to things like what we saw with the vaccine rollout where they obviously had they were so incompetent with this we were so worried about what was going to happen with the when based on what they did with the actual COVID-19 itself that the rollout you know Was not surprising if they had gotten screwed up.
And I think what we're seeing now is that it really did get screwed up quite a bit.
Certainly because of this notion of the way they wanted to let the market forces control everything and let the you know the private companies dole out the vaccines without much oversight.
As a result it didn't go as smoothly as we thought.
Well, and before we talk about this, which I think has been an interesting blip on the radar and has sort of gone and not talked about enough, I want to take everybody back, and I'm so sorry that we're doing this, back to 2020.
I feel like I'm dragging everybody back to the time machine and having to deal with Trump and the response to all that.
There was a period of time Where Trump was starting to do all these press conferences on coronavirus and by the way he was doing it because he wanted the attention which tells everybody you know it wasn't actually about like informing people it was about getting up and you know just showing his ass and he would do these press conferences where he would be flanked by CEOs right because he wanted to seem strong like he was in charge of the team and they would come up to the microphone and they would just praise Trump and lick his boots which was so gross
But it was like, sometimes it would be like, you know, a Walmart CEO and other times it would be like a soft drink CEO or something.
And then occasionally to go ahead and bring this thing full circle, you would have the CEO of a company.
Let me check this.
My pillow?
Yeah.
Mike Lindell, who of course is just one of the most batshit crazy people in the United States of America, who is pushing this conspiracy theory thought constantly, right, and saying that God is not going to allow this crime to go unpunished, he believes in Trump like he does in Messiah, and it is this unquestioning faith.
But to go along with that, All of that mythology that you're talking about, all of that idea that like there's some sort of force and an omnipotent, benevolent, beautiful God who is making things happen and he's not going to let anything go wrong lest it goes punished.
That entire mindset is completely intertwined with American capitalism.
This idea that people who are wealthy and powerful, it doesn't just happen, Nick.
It's not like you're born to like a real estate magnate, like, you know, Fred Christ Trump.
Do you know that, by the way, that Trump's dad's middle name was Christ?
I did not know that.
Fred C. Trump?
Fred Christ Trump.
Interesting things you learn on the McCrae Podcast.
But, you know, obviously he, and if we look at Trump's history, and you know this as well as I do, Trump was given all the money that he needed And if he would have just put that money in a savings account, he would have more money now than he has had as a complete failure of a business owner.
He has driven every business venture he's ever had directly into the ground, and ruined himself multiple times over.
Total failure.
But the American mythology, which is one of the reasons why Trump was able to become President of the United States, and why so much of his bumbling, stupid mistakes, why they were sort of rebranded into something else, Is because the American mythology says that capitalism is backed by the grace of God.
And if you have a ton of money and you have power, it must be God's will because you're doing something right or that you're talented.
There's a meritocracy at work here.
And this gets transferred over to corporations, and this is one of the reasons why people have trusted corporations over the public sector.
One of the reasons why Reagan said, what are the nine worst words, or most frightening words in the English language?
I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
And that the government ruins everything, and you can't trust the government to do anything.
And even people who know that is a lie, like you and myself, it still seeps into our heads sometimes.
Right?
We don't want to trust the government with our money.
We don't want to trust the government with these projects.
And what we saw, not only with Trump bumbling this thing, but also these corporations have screwed it up.
Because America doesn't have a healthcare system worth writing home about, we started trusting this process to CVS, to Walgreens, to Walmart.
And what do we find out today?
The majority of wasted vaccines were wasted by corporations.
That, and by the way, more than a lot of states, the corporations are the ones who wasted these vaccines, and we can make arguments about how it worked, but my understanding from people who went that route is that they were not as pleased with this situation as people who went with the public projects.
And we are entering into a new era where we have to re-conceptualize how we think about private versus public, because we have been more or less brainwashed to believe that private is always better than public.
Right.
Although, you know, by the way, I don't want to make it seem like I'm friends with the corporations and I want, you know, no regulations in free markets.
Old corporate Nick.
That's what we all call you when you're not around.
Old corporate Nick.
Well, let me dispel that one because we know that these corporations will kill people if you don't regulate them tightly.
Happy to.
Happy to.
No problem.
If we don't forget, there was a chemical company that was begging the Trump administration not to deregulate this certain thing that they used, ingredient they used, that was killing people.
They don't want to use it.
They don't want to be able to use it by the law.
And then the other thing about religion and how this intersects is that, you know, we've seen in the past when people have been poisoned by certain corporations for dumping illegal things or whatever, like a lot of times, They're poisoning baby with baby powder.
You know what I mean?
The cigarette thing was just the beginning of this.
How many of them have polluted the environment?
How many of them have intentionally destroyed the environment knowing that it's leading to a climate catastrophe?
They're only interested in the bottom line, that's it.
And you have to be worried, like, you know, the victims would be more willing to, like, pray to God to be healed versus, I don't know, fighting these people and shutting them down with, like, class action lawsuits.
Like, that was another part of the thing that, like, made this thing, you know, work so well for these corporations.
But here's the thing.
Like, if you were looking at it, OK, and you have to take at face value that we don't have this magical system that we're talking about for health care for everybody.
Because we don't have that, if you're looking across the nation and you're trying to roll out a vaccine for every single person in the country, you know, CVS and Walgreens, they're already spread out.
Everybody knows where they are.
They know how to get there.
They're relatively trusted because you can go and get your medications there.
So it was not a bad idea, in my opinion at all, to trust them with distributing the vaccines.
That would have been a really good way to most quickly get them out.
And let me just say this.
I just want to add to that real fast.
Go ahead.
Just real fast as a rejoinder to that, there's a reason why Walgreens, CVS, and Walmart were used in this, and that is because they're everywhere.
Everywhere.
Because they have dominated their markets to the point where you can't drive through a town.
Every town basically looks the same anymore.
It's the same corporations that have completely damned up their markets.
And what do we say about that?
We're like, oh my god, they must be successful.
They must be wonderful.
Well, tell that to somebody who works at Walmart, because I can tell you that they're not treated well.
Right that it is not this perfectly run business and by the way The only reason that they're able to do all this is because they rely on the government for infrastructure support But also to put their people on welfare and put them on things like Obamacare and one of the things that we're seeing here is that You shouldn't have to go to one of these stores.
We should have hospitals.
We should have health centers.
We should have, like, public systems that are there and in place.
I did mine next to a football field.
at my university.
And it was a beautiful thing.
It made me choke up, I have to tell you, to see all the volunteers and all the people coming together and all the public people working together.
But one of the problems is that we have given up so much infrastructure and space to these people.
They should have never been a part of this process to begin with. - All right, I will see that point, but being as it is, in the reality on the ground is this was the best way to quickly get it out.
Now, in this article that was trying to make it a big bombshell notion of how many doses they wasted, I want to tell you, down farther, if you read the whole thing, it does say, overall, waste has been minuscule.
As of March 30th, the U.S.
has delivered about 189 and a half million doses and administered 147.
So, you know, in my mind, like you're going to break some eggs when you're trying to make an omelet, right?
There's going to be waste, especially when you're talking about having to keep these things at very specific temperatures.
We also can factor in the notion that people weren't getting the second dose for a lot of reasons, but some of them were they didn't want the fucking the side effects that they might get.
So they don't want to get the second one.
Now, millions of people did that.
You have to imagine there's, let's say, 10,000, 20,000 of those were part of this, you know, the waste here.
That's a significant percentage.
I do want to share a quote, though, to go along with this conversation.
Yes, let's go back.
From this same article, which is from NBC News, CVS Walgreens have wasted more COVID vaccine doses than most states combined.
First of all, I think that's a hell of a headline, but we'll move on.
CVS and Walgreens didn't have a clue when it came to interacting with nursing homes.
Missed opportunities for vaccination and long-term care invariably results in death.
Of course they don't know what to do with nursing homes.
Why?
Because most nursing homes at this point have been turned into hovels.
Right?
That's not where they're gonna go and pay for things.
Right?
These are things that have been pushed off to the side that aren't part of our giant medical system.
Most of them are for profit.
Right?
And those people aren't going to a CVS or a Walgreens.
They have no idea what they're doing.
So, like, they shouldn't be in charge of this stuff.
Right.
It should have never been a situation like this.
And I will say, real fast, The problem is that we are decades behind other countries.
Yeah.
The problem is that we have roughly 40 years worth of room to make up in all of this.
And that is one of the reasons why we were hit so hard.
Well, the other thing that really drove me nuts when reading this article, and it's buried in there, and you don't necessarily notice it if you don't read it a couple times, is that there's no central reporting of these doses, and so they really don't even have a really accurate handle on exactly where they are, where these doses went out, who got them, and when, and how.
It reminds me exactly of what they did at the border when they were bringing these kids and separating them from their families and then having no paperwork to put them back together.
And that's going to be hundreds of kids who might not ever find their parents again.
And it's the same exact thing, and this is why the Trump administration was so evil, was that they never, they so completely outsourced this.
This should have still been coordinated by the federal government.
And so I got my vaccine at a church and it was the same kind of moment where people were, they were so organized and these volunteers, just volunteers and people who had some medical knowledge to give it a shot.
But yes, that is the worst part about this is that They just said, here, we'll just ship it to you.
What's your address?
Without having any sense of a centralized database to know where these went and how many people are getting it so that they can redistribute when they need to, to figure out where the gaps are.
That is the most important part of when they were trying to deal with COVID itself and the reporting and the testing.
And it's also as important now when you're giving out the vaccines.
Now, it seems like they've been putting into place, you know, things that we're going to get this better on track and more organized, the Biden administration.
Again, more of this sort of competent government that we need to see.
And if they can get that on track in the next month or so, then I don't think I'll feel so bad that a lot of these vaccines got wasted in the beginning.
As far as I understand it now, they have a lot.
People aren't coming in.
People aren't getting it anymore.
And the New York Times reported today that it's basically impossible to achieve herd immunity.
They don't think it's going to be possible, just because of the people who don't want to get the vaccine.
What are we doing here, Jared?
Well, I got a few things to say.
First and foremost, Donald Trump should be in jail for crimes against humanity.
Period.
I mean, and this isn't hyperbole, this isn't trying to grandstand.
He carried out crimes against the people with this entire situation.
We know that.
With Kushner, with his entire quote-unquote coordination, how they thought it was a wonderful political tool to let democratic states burn with the coronavirus, and tried to leverage it To make governors praise him on TV to help his re-election strategy.
Like, he carried out acts of genocide.
I'll just be straight up real about that.
The next thing that I'll say is, two of the worst crimes of the Trump administration, one is very obvious, which is incompetence.
It was their inability to understand how government worked, or to coordinate things, or to communicate.
There's a worse one than the incompetence, which is that they didn't fucking care.
They were not interested in using government to help anybody.
The only thing that they were interested in, as president of the United States of America, and I don't think we've even properly wrapped our heads around what happened for four years in this country, which is a person was president who had no interest in being president of the United States.
None.
Absolutely not.
He did it as a scam and a grift and as a way to stroke his own ego.
And then he got in and he had no interest whatsoever in the job or doing it.
And so he just didn't.
Like if you actually sit around and look at what happened during the Trump administration, the majority of it is avoiding doing any actual work or actually passing anything outside of tax cuts for the rich and then selling off the government for spare parts.
Like that's a terrible crime, particularly during a pandemic.
The next thing that I will say, which is what we're watching now is actual confident government.
Like I have problems with the Biden administration.
We don't even need to get into that at this point, but look what they can do.
Look what actually happens when you marshal public energy and support for things.
And doesn't this feel like a breath of fresh air to understand that these things can be done?
We need to use that momentum and go ahead and leap over those 40 years.
Going back to Reagan, we need to be living in 2021 and we are so far behind other countries.
And this shit would not have happened the way that it did if we were advanced to the point where we needed to be years ago.
Sure.
And again, we talked about the notion of needing to punish these people so they can dissuade the next round of politicians who want to get into this, who would be much more disciplined and then by therefore meaning much more evil and much more dangerous.
But the problem is, is that we generally need time away from an administration to kind of look back and really get a handle on what happened in those years.
Also, more information will slowly kind of leak out.
We'll get a handle on it.
But if enough time goes by, Then people kind of don't care anymore and we want to move on and we're not outraged like we should be.
We should be outraged by what happened.
I mean, hell, we should be outraged by what Reagan did and by the time we figured out what happened with the Iran-Contra, it was already too late.
We couldn't do anything when it should have been his Watergate x10.
And it should have tainted all of those people.
It should have tainted the Bush and Barr and all the neocons.
So that's the worry, is that this is going to take too long before we can finally get a handle on exactly what would be actionable offenses that can put these people in jail.
And again, we haven't heard shit from any of these people about indictments or any of these investigations that have been going on for years.
And so it's like, I don't know if I have much faith, even though Merrick Garland is on the case and they've got Rudy Giuliani in their sights.
It still doesn't feel like much is going on as far as Trump goes.
And that's the real key.
If you don't do something to him, then we're going to be right back here.
If it's not in 2024, it's some point after that with somebody who is going to be really nefarious and disciplined and then as a result could change the course of the country.
Human history.
Yeah.
I mean, I want to be Really careful with what I'm about to say because it's, it's true, but I want to communicate it the right way, which is the Trump years were so horrific and so traumatic that I think a lot of people want to pretend like they didn't occur.
You know what I mean?
It's it's a suppression of trauma.
It's like, you know, that was really bad.
And your brain does this thing with trauma sometimes where it's just like, we can't deal with that.
So we're not going to think about that.
And that's and then like years, years later, like you wake up in a cold sweat and you're like, I haven't thought about that in years.
And that's terrible.
The Trump thing was a glimpse.
It's almost like It's almost like Scrooge getting to see the Christmas of the future.
You know what I mean?
And being like, Oh my God, like this is the decline of the American empire.
This is how it all ends.
This is how it crunches.
This is entropy and heat death all together.
Um, people, people can't even bring themselves to say his name anymore.
I don't know if you've seen this, but there's like an entire trend on Twitter where people will not say his name.
They call him the former guy or the last guy.
Um, we, We're missing a really important opportunity to stare this thing in the face and try and steer the ship away from something that's coming.
And everything that we've talked about today, uh, unfortunately isn't getting talked about all that much.
It isn't getting discussed that much.
And the reason why it's not is because to really deal with Donald Trump, to really deal with the things that brought him into power are horrific.
Like, it's the actual essence of horror.
So, here's the thing, you know, I'm a pretty big mental health advocate, and I think we're both familiar with what happens when you don't properly deal with trauma.
And it could be personal trauma, what happens in your life, it could be, you know, even just dealing with those four years.
And it's very, very damaging, and it could come up years from now, or it could come up in your daily life right now.
That is what's frustrating because if you want to picture the typical person who would never want to deal with their feelings or deal with self-reflection, you know, I hate to like be too generalized or whatever, but like, you know, you can attend to think of a Trump voter.
And what I find... No, it's a mental health problem.
It's totally a mental health problem.
And they didn't want to deal with their own shit.
And they were told by people that they didn't need to put up with their own shit.
And that, oh, the problem's not you.
Like, no matter what people tell you, the problem isn't you, it's them, and be angry about it.
Like, absolutely.
That was the essence of the entire movement, and still is.
Now, what makes me worried here is, because we talked about how, like, the percentage of Republicans, I think it's a big lie, and, you know, the Republicans had gotten together.
See, here's what's scary.
They have these retreats, Jared, where all these lawmakers get together, like, it sounds like it's in the woods, and, you know, the smell of sulfur in the air, I don't know.
They're burning statues to Moloch.
Yeah, you know, in the middle of the night.
It's got to be what's happening there.
And so, you know, when they did this in February, they were also met at Cheney, I think it was February, with Liz Cheney about, you know, saying the truth, which was that Trump was a terrible thing and he's a stain on our democracy.
And, you know, they voted to get her out.
And do you remember what the results of that vote were in February?
Well, I'm just going to tell you.
It was a landslide in her favor.
Like, you know, when it's a secret vote and they don't actually say it out loud, everyone's like, yeah, she's right.
Trump's an asshole.
Well, guess what?
They got back together again recently because for some reason they felt like they didn't have enough burning in the woods at night.
And they're trying to do it again.
And they're trying to get Liz Cheney out again and manufacture this outrage.
And here's what comes out of this, because Jim Banks, this Republican from Indiana, was starting to say, you know, Trump taught us something.
He taught us that we need to appeal to non-college educated voters.
So as we wrap this up, I know we're getting along the tooth in this podcast, but I wanted to know, like, do you ever spend any time on a college campus, Jared?
You know, just my entire adult life and also My college years.
So the majority of everything.
OK, good.
So what about college?
And I'm thinking of, you know, wearing the sweatshirt that says college on it, I guess.
What about college would then, having gone through that ordeal, I suppose we'll call it, would then lead someone to not want to support Trump?
What happens there?
Explain this to me.
Well, so there's a lot of things happening with that question.
One thing I would say is that Trump does have College-educated supporters.
Because one thing that Donald Trump was good for was business.
If you were wealthy, if you had influence, Donald Trump was really important to you.
I mean, like, I'm sorry, but January 6th was not just a bunch of, like, yokels.
My people.
Like, there were people who flew private planes to Washington, D.C., who own their own businesses.
So, there are college-educated people who support Donald Trump.
But I will tell you, That the message that Donald Trump was selling, which was just a bastardized mythology of America that he didn't even understand.
I mean, you know what I mean?
Like he had no clue what he was talking about at any given moment.
But the Republican right wing mythology of America is a simplified mythology and narrative of America, which goes back to the mental health thing that you're talking about that says, There's nothing wrong with white people.
There's nothing wrong with being wealthy.
Oh, you want to talk about Native Americans and you want to sit here with your political correctness.
It is an argument over what we talked about last week, which is uninterrupted fantasy.
Don't tell me that I'm supposed to feel bad.
Don't tell me that I have privilege.
How dare you?
I will beat the shit out of you if you don't stop telling me that.
So it's all about interrupting that fantasy, absolutely.
So you think that college interrupts that fantasy just by the nature of learning and being smarter than you were when you started?
It does but I do want to, and this is something that we're going to talk about soon, this is something that I'm gestating, I'm thinking about, I want to talk about, which is I think a lot of people think that by going to college and they think that college is a liberal institution of indoctrination they sort of still think about the 1960s and 1970s and if you go through college you come out and you're like a left-leaning you know challenger to capitalism when in fact it's
It's very much a place where you go to learn to be a manager of capitalism.
So we'll talk about that sometime soon.
But yes, that is true.
That's where that narrative and mythology start to break down.
Okay, fair enough.
Because I also feel like when you're talking in code about these voters that they're trying to attract, when you start saying, you know, so let's put the college-educated people aside.
The people that they're targeting, the non-college-educated people, we're basically saying white people.
who are white people, even though there's plenty of other people of other colors who don't go to college either.
But that's not who they're talking about.
No, because they're not voting for Trump.
And that's the scary thing is, you know, because it's a zero sum game, this is not about helping constituents or making the making the country better or having progress.
This is simply about winning.
And that's finding every available, you know, way of, First of all, method, which is what they're doing in Arizona, and any method to convince, you know, every individual head that they can to vote for them.
These margins are too major thin, and that's why there's enough encouragement for them.
In a normal world, based on the fact that they lost by how many millions of votes?
10 million votes?
Millions.
They should just be like, they should just give up.
Or change strategy.
That's what we were talking about the other day.
At this point, when you lose like that, when you eat shit for this many elections in a row, you should change what you're doing.
Open up your umbrella, change into something different.
Except that you are historically unpopular.
Historically unpopular, but instead you want to send assholes like this dude into Arizona to try and fix an election.
So, all right, well we're going to keep an eye on this.
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