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May 7, 2021 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
13:23
Looking For Bamboo Election Fraud | Weekender Teaser

*This is the first 15 minutes of our weekly Patreon series The Weekender* To access the full episode, additional content, and support the podcast, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast  Jared and Nick discuss the way local Arizona republicans are investigating the ballots from the 2020 presidential election. They then pivot to the republican canceling of Liz Cheney for having the temerity to speak the truth about the January 6th Insurrection. Sprinkled in is a little discussion about a new term Nick invented: Capitalistic Democracy, and how it's the money that governs everything. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey everybody!
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
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.
To the weekender!
To the freaking weekend.
I love it.
Welcome to the Muckrake Weekender Edition.
We hope that your week has been fantastic, filled with joy, hope, redemption.
It is the beginnings of the summer of the muckrake, just so everybody knows.
I am Jared Yates.
I'm here with Nick Halseman.
Nick, before we talk about anything else, we have to start with a follow-up from our show on Tuesday.
In which we were talking about the state of Arizona and the madness of their recount.
Nick, would you like to fill the people in on just a wonderful update to that story?
Sure.
You know, it's technology.
We live in an era of technology, Jared.
So why not use it when you have it, right?
Wait, before you begin, we were joking.
We were joking about how these people were going to be looking for radioactive isotopes, right?
That the Department of Defense or whoever had put in these in order to, like, capture Like crimes.
I don't know what else to call them at this point.
Crimes on behalf of Biden and a couple, I guess.
But tell the people what actually happened.
Well, they're using like UV light or some sort of special light on these ballots.
Now, the same answer to why they might be doing this, and doesn't quite make sense to me anyway, is that they want to make sure these ballots were folded at some point, because that would indicate that they were put into an envelope like they were supposed to.
Okay.
That's almost common sense.
Almost.
You know, you really need a detective, very sensitive detection devices to, you know, see a fold in a piece of paper.
We need fold-sniffing dogs is what we need.
We need dogs that have been raised their entire lives to sniff out very incremental folds in papers.
Yes, yes.
But, you know, that might be just the cover story they're using because in reality what they're trying to discover They want to find microscopic evidence of bamboo.
Bamboo!
Bamboo in the paper.
Because you know, Jared, there's only one place in the entire world where they use bamboo in paper.
And are you aware of where that is?
If I'm not incorrect, what these people believe, and by the way, like when you really examine this claim, It actually only grows more and more insane and more hilarious, but also sad and alarming.
Okay, so their idea, just for everyone to catch up on this, they truly believe that China sent just an absolute shit ton of ballots.
The last time I looked, they believe it's about 40,000 to 50,000 bamboo.
Right.
Because in China, they were like, oh, we need to make these fake ballots.
And someone's like, oh, do you think the bamboo is going to tip these people off?
And they're like, no, don't worry about it.
They're going to route it through Southeast Asia first.
That was the other part of this thing.
We're going to go through Vietnam and Laos before we get it over to America.
So they won't know.
So the great thing about all of this is that not only do they believe that China interfered in the election and supplied all of these fake ballots, which by the way, they're taking their understanding of the global economic consumerist system, which is China sends the goods to us and then we buy them.
They're taking that mythology, which by the way, Completely conflates with their idea of the new world order and the deep state and and which is just an explanation for global capitalism They they really truly believe that like these ballots were like put on a boat You know what?
I mean and and like like floated over to America Why wouldn't, if China was so focused on interfering with the US election of 2020, why wouldn't they just make the ballots here?
Why would they make them out of bamboo in Asia?
It's the dumbest shit I've heard in forever, Nick.
I have no answer to you, aside from the fact that the guy they interviewed to discuss this got so unfairly maligned because he was simply an observer telling us what he was doing, and this freaking reporter cut off the end of the interview where he's like, I don't believe in this, this is definitely crazy stuff, but that's why they have the lights.
You ask me, I am telling you.
And by the way, I can tell that's how he felt.
Real fast, we have to take a second because, and the weekender is where we pull back the curtain a little bit.
We let people know how the sausage is made.
And for those of you who are vegetarian, it's how the stew is made.
Nick has an incredible sense of justice when it comes to internet haranguing.
He does not like it when people are misrepresented.
He doesn't like it when people's quotes are taken out of context.
On top of that, because Nick, of course, he's a major producer with the NBA stuff, right?
Like, he's very well-known and having takes and all that.
When you're slinging ideas on the internet, particularly Twitter, you get maligned all the time, right?
Because you only have so many characters.
Nick wants to defend this guy who has been taken out of context.
It did.
It kind of grinded your gears a little bit, didn't it?
Well, I could tell in the beginning, he's a nice man.
He's just doing the yeoman's work here.
And they freaking edited out the end, you know, the lead.
So, nonetheless... Your sense of justice just went crazy, I can tell.
Yeah, because I'm going to be that guy.
I'm going to be a 65-year-old guy, retired, and observing elections like a good citizen should.
I don't want that to happen to me.
If you think that you're not going to be doing the muckrake in like 2060, 2065, at that point, by the way, it's not even podcasts.
We're going to be like hologrammed into your house.
Yeah.
And it's just going to be me and Nick at our like perspective computers in your house.
Oh, I have to wear pants.
Oh, well, never mind.
OK.
Yeah.
Pull the cord.
Eject.
Yes.
So here we are.
By the way, they're going to return this election now.
I really do feel like... not the election, capital E. I think that they're going to somehow muddle it up so much that Arizona is going to be some big question mark.
I really feel like they're going to be able to do that.
Wait, you think Arizona at this point is going to, like, pull away their electoral count?
I feel like they're going to come up with something... Obviously, remember, everyone's already... There's a predilection to believing that there's already a problem, right?
70% of the Republicans anyway are in on it.
I believe that they are going to have some sort of muddled result that is just going to increase that 70%.
I really do.
It's not going to... They're not going to make a clear cut that it was a... Either way, it's going to be muddled.
See, I find the whole Arizona recount, like, I'm laughing about it because it's horrific.
Like, it really truly is horrific.
And by the way, like, I want to, this is a mea culpa.
I have to admit this for a second.
The Arizona recount had not been totally on my radar because it was so absurd.
And after you brought up this guy, this insurrectionist slash, you know, state representative or whatever he was or is, I was like, oh, this doesn't seem great.
The more I read about the Arizona recount and the more I look into it, this is a really disturbing story.
Like it really, truly is that Arizona is just full bore in on this thing.
And I have to tell you that the Republicans smell blood with it.
And I really believe that they they're going full bore on Arizona.
And I think you're right.
They're going to try and leverage it into some sort of a, oh, you don't believe.
That the election was stolen?
What about Arizona?
What about what they found in Arizona?
I kind of feel like that writing is a little bit on the wall at this point.
Well, there's a couple things here.
The Department of Justice is being ignored by the Arizona state Republicans.
They're demanding answers about how they're doing this recount, and they will not answer them.
So that's one thing.
This all has context.
This is not just a bunch of people who just showed up one day in Arizona and said, you know what, we should recount this.
No.
This is the Brooks Brothers riot again.
This is exactly what this is.
That's a wonderful thing to fill people in on.
Will you tell people about the Brooks Brothers riot?
Sure.
In 2000 when we had this big recount in Florida, a bunch of Republicans wearing Brooks Brothers shirts who supposedly were the people Who was one of the planners?
into where they were doing the hanging Chad counts.
And they were banging on the windows and they were completely harassing.
And it became like they frightened everybody to the point where they kind of shut down the count based on what the uprising of the quote-unquote people were.
But it really was just a bunch of Republican operatives.
I believe Brett Kavanaugh was part of this mob, among others.
And so they were able to...
Who was one of the planners?
Who was one of the planners of that?
Is there anybody that we know?
Yeah, well isn't it Brett Kavanaugh?
Wasn't one of the planners?
Bill Barr?
One Roger Stone.
Roger Stone?
Oh yes, Roger Stone, forgive me.
One Roger Stone.
Perhaps THE Roger Stone.
Maybe THE Roger Stone.
Yes.
And so, you know, this is sort of what they're doing and there's already precedent.
They got their way then.
You know, there's no reason to think they wouldn't get their way now.
And, you know, here's what's frustrating because doesn't it feel like if there were any kind of normal Republicans, right, the kind of, I don't know what that is anymore, but there were the reasonable ones, doesn't it kind of feel like they're just sort of sitting this one out?
Right?
They're kind of sitting this one out.
They're going to hope that, you know, Trump just kind of goes away, you know, as people do, you know, and then they can get back to normal.
Isn't that sort of what it feels like we're missing here?
Well, so this is something we have to talk about.
We have to talk about Liz Cheney.
And we have to talk about what's going on within the Republican Party right now.
And it's ugly.
It's really, really ugly, and before we say anything, we really pride ourselves on context and historical explanations.
Things are not simple.
Things are not black and white.
So before we begin, what you're talking about, the quote-unquote normal Republican, is technically Liz Cheney, right?
Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, these are what you would call normal Republicans.
These are not They're not okay, right?
Like, it's not like one day the Republican Party rolled out of bed and they were like, we're really into fascism.
Like, like, destroying democratic institutions kind of seems to be my jam.
You know, it's like, as I get closer to 40, like, my, my, my, my, my taste palate changes.
You know what I mean?
Like, I'll wake up one day and I'm like, I never thought I'd be this guy.
I prefer vanilla over chocolate now.
You know, like, like, that's not what happened with the Republican Party.
They didn't wake up one day and they were like, oh, suddenly, you know, Disenfranchising people is sort of our jam and, you know, hidden white supremacy is how we like to do things.
Like, this has been a gradual movement.
So like, if there was a slide in which we were examining the Republican Party, the normal Republicans, a Liz Cheney, are still incredibly problematic.
Right?
But Liz Cheney is basically, her and Mitt Romney are the last people standing at this point.
Who are even saying, you know what, the Republican Party is full of shit and dangerous and we shouldn't be doing this stuff.
And they're being destroyed.
And you've been listening to a free preview of our Patreon exclusive weekender show.
If you want to get in on all the fun and get that bonus episode every week, not to mention exclusive content, live hangouts, question and answer sessions.
We're even going to do some of these live so you can come and watch how the sausage is made.
All you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
On top of that, you get to hang out with the Muckrake community, which are a really good group of people.
So you should do that.
That is patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
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