Hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss OAN's call for a firing squad on the nice people of Arizona who helped run the very legitimate 2020 presidential election. Then Tucker Carlson comes up as he has been revealed as a confidential source for many mainstream media news outlets. That leads to the main event: Pete Dominick joins Jared and Nick to lead a lengthy discourse into the republicans who have rejected trump and where the right went wrong.
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What are the consequences for traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried to steal power by taking away the voices of the American people?
What happened to them?
Well, in the past, America had a very good solution for dealing with such traitors.
Execution.
Here you have the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a congressional hearing leveling a race attack against American citizens.
The guy is supposed to be protecting our country.
That is disgraceful.
It's disqualifying.
It's without precedent.
When was the last time that happened?
And not only is it okay to complain about it, It ought to be mandatory.
We shouldn't have a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who attacks Americans based on their skin color.
It's disgusting.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton, back from vacation, everybody.
Welcome.
It's nice to be back.
I feel rejuvenated.
I feel re-energized.
I'm ready to go.
I'm here, as always, with Nick Halsman.
Nick, I missed your lovely face and your dulcet tones.
Well, thank you so much.
I missed you, although I do say it was a little bit nice to have a break and just sort of have a week to go about, you know, other business for a little while.
Well, the good thing, Nick, is that nothing happened while I was gone and the riot didn't descend further into madness.
But we'll discuss that here in a second.
Good news.
Not only are we back, But today we're going to have the triumphant first overdue appearance of the one and the only P. Dominick of the Stand Up podcast.
I'm really excited about that.
He'll be joining us later.
But we have to start, Nick.
I, you know, I had a vow of silence.
I wasn't going to talk no matter what happened.
I was going to rest.
I was going to look at the ocean.
I was going to read books.
I was going to think about myself and the world.
I'm going to check my notes here.
It looks like the right started calling for executions of traitors while I was gone.
That is that is fact.
But wait, did you do all those things you listed?
Because the tone indicated that perhaps you did not stare at the ocean.
No, I did.
No, I did.
I totally, totally did.
I, I stayed very, very centered and calm, but it's impossible To not hear about the fact, and suddenly people are emailing you and they're like, hey Jared, I know that you've been forecasting this for a while and you've been saying that this was going to happen and now all of a sudden... Pearson Sharp, by the way, was the guy who did it on OAN.
First of all, I've never heard of this dude.
Second of all, that just sounds like a made-up name.
Yeah, actually that's a good call.
That would be my name if I knew it was gonna be like a spy or something.
Yeah.
Sharp.
Pearson Sharp.
That's, that's terrible.
So, uh, our good friend, Pearson Sharp, friend of the, the Bunker Egg Podcast, uh, went on OAN on, uh, the 22nd.
And he got on TV.
Well, I mean, OAN's not really TV.
Is it?
Can we call OAN TV?
It's a stream.
It's a red stream.
That's not good.
I don't know.
It's just this thing.
I have to tell you, by the way, we're going to talk about Trump's first post-presidency rally.
And I watched it on Newsmax because nobody's really interested in carrying his comments.
Have you watched Newsmax before?
Well, you know, I do when I had those three-day purges of right-wing media, but it's been a while, so what am I missing?
It's so piss poor.
It's like while he's talking like down on the Chiron, it's like, Subscribe to Newsmax Magazine and get an emergency radio.
It's so terrible.
So OAN, which we'll call quote-unquote TV, Pearson got on and obviously was talking about widespread problems with voting integrity, radical Democrats who left their fingerprints all over the country providing a trail of evidence that the 2020 election was not only tampered with, it was actually overthrown, He also said, how many people were involved in these efforts to undermine the election?
Hundreds?
Thousands?
Tens of thousands?
How many people does it take to carry out a coup against the presidency?
And then he says, well, in the past, America had a very good solution for dealing with such traitors.
And here's the thing, Nick, you can just leave it there.
You know what I mean?
Like, you can just say that and let it germinate and marinate and not have to say it.
Yeah.
But like you, who has been calling this for a while, they're not interested in wearing the mask anymore, Nick.
They're not interested in hiding anything.
And then he goes on and he says, executions.
It's OAN.
No one's listening to them, right?
They're just trying to get clicks, clickbait, yada yada, right?
That's all that is.
They don't have any influence, do they?
Does anybody else amplify that?
They do.
They have so much influence and this is the way this shit works is it starts out in the extreme right and then all of a sudden you start talking about it on Fox and Friends.
And that's where this thing is going, and now they're talking about actually killing people because that's where this whole thing has been going all along.
So this reminds me of a story, because yeah, I don't want to believe that there's any influence and any normal person would believe and would say, oh yeah, that should be what happens to these people.
But there's somebody who I know well, who is a Trumper, who in the time of the Hillary Clinton email in cut to 2015 or whatever, 2016, when we were saying this is just emails.
So they got deleted off a thing.
He goes, well, there's a name for that.
And we're like, oh, really?
He goes, yeah, hang on for one second.
Hey, Siri, give me the definition of treason.
Oh.
To his phone.
Where is this?
Where was this?
Oh, there's my Siri.
All right, thanks, Siri.
Thanks, Siri.
I appreciate you looking into treason for this.
Yeah, it was it was treasonous.
And so, you know, it's not a big stretch to be like, well, if you believe that Hillary's email stuff is treasonous, which, again, is in the statutes, you know, punishable by firing squad, then it would not be a stretch to assume that if you believe that there is something going on in Arizona with these vet boats, that they should also then it would not be a stretch to assume that if you believe that there That whole audit is going really, really well, isn't it?
But at this point, like you probably know as much as I do, having cut off yourself from all information for a week than anybody else knows.
It's as much as anyone's heard.
They have taken the voting information from Arizona and they have taken it out of state and they have like taken it to like a mountain hideout.
Like, it is just repaired away.
And who knows what they're doing with it?
Like, we've talked about it on the podcast.
They're probably combing it for information on voters.
They're probably combing it for information on how to actually commit voter fraud.
Because that's what the right does, is they are always projecting what they're planning on doing.
They go ahead and they tell you what's going on here.
This thing is not slowing down.
Not an iota, not a shred, not a mile per hour.
This thing is escalating so quickly, Nick.
It is.
It is.
You know what?
It's funny because when you step back enough after a week or two or three, you can see the speed.
I feel like day to day, It kind of is a shrug and you kind of don't want to pay attention to it as much.
But yeah, you can see where we've gone since January 6th is significant, you know.
And where they've all shifted from, you know, this is a terrible day, an attack on our democracy, even Republicans, to, you know, we had a, what were they calling it?
A, oh crap, what do we call people who travel?
A tourist invasion.
It's so absurd, it's almost impossible to remember.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's what that's all of our collective memories.
It's what happens.
They know they wait a few extra days, then people will kind of forget about the seriousness of some of the stuff and they can go back about go back about their business, which is really what we have to stop happening.
Well, and you know, the the thing with January 6, then it goes into all this.
Are you familiar with Ben Garrison's cartoons?
Have you seen this?
Oh man, if you haven't, don't.
Oh, I was about to type it in.
No, don't.
They're so terrible.
But Ben Garrison, I think, is just an absolute terrible cartoonist.
And he's one of those people that likes to imagine, like in his cartoons, it's like pictures of like Donald Trump, like riding a giant eagle and like freeing everybody in the world type stuff.
Ben Garrison, I thought, had one of the more telling cartoons recently, which was his original take on January 6th.
His cartoon was MAGAites.
Storming the Capitol and demanding truth and justice, right?
Like they were totally valid in doing that.
And now what's actually happened in the right, and we've been covering this too, unfortunately, is that idea started to shift where they now hold like two or three different ideas at once, right?
Which is important in this entire thing.
The different ideas are, yeah, if we did it, we had every right to do it.
but also we probably didn't do it and it was probably a false flag operation but also maybe the FBI kind of like enticed us to do it which we've talked about on here which is that most of the paramilitary groups that were involved were all working with the FBI in some way shape or form which means that all three of those things are now sort of fostered in the mindset of the right.
His cartoon recently was of the FBI opening up the Capitol like a trap and then luring in the Magites to go in there.
And it is this weird, incoherent mindset that we've spent so much time drowning in for the past year And what is actually happening here is it eventually comes to the point, and the writing's been on the wall.
None of this has been unpredictable.
It was always going to head to the point where it's like, oh, you're going to try and steal an election.
You now either deserve to be executed or we're going to try and steal an election, right?
I mean, it's that dance constantly.
And so when I heard this, and this is another thing, and tell me if you've heard this before, It was shocking, but not surprising.
This thing has been very predictable from the very beginning and watching him come out and say it...
It's not going to be the last that we hear about it.
It's not going to be the last that they say this.
This thing is going to continue.
Well, it's the solidification of this ideology, which, you know, you might have thought when you saw Trump.
Remember when Trump does the interview about man and woman, cat, child, whatever that one where he's, you know, he would he would refuse to acknowledge that maybe the election would be fair until after he was saying, well, we've got to see what happens.
We were saying even back then how dangerous it was because it was the beginning of the melting of the democracy where people would start to believe that.
And now it's solidified like cement, right?
Nothing that happens out of the audit in Arizona or wherever else they're going to go with this thing will change their minds if and when they find no fraud.
When they find no fraud.
That is really where the democracy dies.
That's why it's over.
Probably now we might look back from at this a year from now five years from now 10 years from now and say, you know, June of 2021.
That was when democracy didn't even exist yet at that point anymore.
No one wanted to really listen to that.
I think a lot of the Republicans were just like, oh, that's just Trump being Trump.
And I think they're still like that.
Too bad that his, you know, horrible personality got in the way of all the good things he accomplished, when in fact, what he really did was just accelerate the death of democracy.
I think we were probably on the way there anyway, right?
Yeah, I mean, that goes back to the point, which is he's a symptom, not the disease.
It just so happened.
And you know, that brings in our good friend, Tucker Carlson.
We have known for the longest time that there is a group of grifters in this country who recognize trends, who recognize opportunities, right?
Donald Trump, and my God, Nick, I watched that whole speech the other night, and it was just like, It was so sad.
He came out and he was throwing his hats in the crowd.
Like, that's what this person has been reduced to.
And, like, the fact that he plays any role in the destruction of American society, it infuriates me.
To even think about it, right?
That this charlatan, this absolute fraudish buffoon has played a role in it.
But he recognized an opportunity.
He watched Fox News, he understood it, he spoke it, he lived it, and he got out there and he took advantage of it in the exact same way that now our good friend the fish stick scion, Tucker Carlson, is able to do the same thing.
He recognizes the opportunity within white nationalism and white supremacist paranoia, and he has made himself incredibly wealthy and powerful, while meanwhile sitting around leaking a bunch of information to his fellow reporters that he's probably drinking martinis with in the Beltway.
That's who these people are, and that's how we've gotten to this point.
But Jared, what is America if it's not the land of opportunity?
This is American.
You see an opportunity and you use a little ingenuity and you put on your boots and you take it.
You know, again, this is like It's not really like this, but this kind of half reminds me of.
There are probably people out there, and I think I've talked about this before, who are upset with James T. Kirk for changing the rules of the Kobayashi Maru test to win it, right?
Because what did he do?
He cheated!
But most Americans would be like, oh, that's ingenuity.
He went there and he changed the situation.
There was a no-win thing so he could win.
Well, you know, at some point if you keep drawing that graph farther out to the right, you know, it points to a guy like Trump.
And this is what we said even when we had our guest on before but talking about capitalism.
It's like capitalism ends up turning everything into shit because you have to Take advantage of this stuff, right?
Like, there's almost no choice if you want to be, like, quote-unquote successful.
The problem with a guy like Tucker, though, is that he's already, like, so wealthy.
Like, this isn't anything he had to build an empire out of to, like, you know, have a life and raise a family and have money to buy nice houses.
He already had all that.
You know, that's the thing.
Well, so did Donald Trump!
Donald Trump had giant jets with his name on the side.
He lived in a gold-encrusted apartment.
Well, we know it was gold encrusted, too.
I don't want to talk about that.
But nonetheless, yes.
Yeah.
Nobody had to do any of this.
And that is the problem with both America and hyper capitalism, which is none of this is necessary.
None of it.
Like the people in this country who are particularly like Just putting their boot heels down on the poor and just grinding, right?
The ones who are eroding the government.
The government was originally created to help them.
You know what I mean?
They had a leg up from birth.
All Donald Trump needed to do was take his inheritance and put it in a savings bond.
He'd have more money now than he has, right?
He could have just lived on that and coasted on it, but it's not enough.
It's the same thing with Tucker Carlson.
They are infected with this American disease, which is, I have to get mine.
Oh, you're telling me it's going to destroy the rest of the world?
Well, later, suckers.
Because you have to think about it.
It's like the thing with, you know, global climate change.
These people know it's real.
They're not so stupid that they don't recognize facts.
Donald Trump probably does not recognize facts, right?
I mean, he has gotten to the point where his brain, it's basically like an old 1950s Steamboat Willie cartoon playing on repeat over and over.
I have to tell you, by the way, that rally, watching him stand out there and he is, you know, the old saying where they're like, he's lost a little bit on his fastball.
Yeah.
He's not throwing a fastball anymore.
I mean, that guy, like it took a lot for him to get out there.
And then he was welcoming in the new generation.
And I'm sure you remember this because we roughly grew up in the Saturday morning cartoon era.
You remember those, like, when your beloved cartoon would welcome in the next generation?
Where it was like, Scooby-Doo welcoming in his new little pal Scrappy-Doo!
Yeah, right, right, right.
Oh, you kids like Scrappy-Doo?
Isn't he great?
He's the new Scooby-Doo.
And he was welcoming in Marjorie Taylor Greene, right?
And of course, Michael Lindell wandered in with his pillow and was just welcomed in like crazy.
And one of his aides, who was just absolutely brain dead and running for representative in Ohio or whatever.
And they would stand back and Trump would just smile and they'd be like, we can't wait to elect you again!
And Trump's just sitting there.
He's aged five years in the last five months, and it just continues and continues and continues, and it accelerates, and it's not going anywhere good.
It's not going to stop.
The only thing that we can take solace in is that the the numbers of people who showed up was pretty low.
I had seen a tweet that reported that it was worse than the Tulsa rally he tried to have that got Brad Parscale fired.
Yeah, we're doing a little COVID.
So, you know, that's something that could be.
And by the way, can you imagine doing that and being there?
I remember once working, believe it or not, in California, there was a guy that was running for It wasn't Congress, but he was trying to do a new way of having redistricting because, you know, by the way, at some point in the early 2000s, both sides had a great argument about why these redistricts were drawn so horribly.
So I was working for a guy doing some website stuff where he was trying to, you know, get a thing on the ballot to like change the way we do these districts.
But it was like, There was no energy.
He had no support and he'd go to some of these kind of rallies, whatever.
And like, you know, a few people would show up and it was like, you know, the energy there has got to be so embarrassing.
And so I can only imagine that Trump being out there seeing how it's half full or whatever they are.
There's not a lot of people there.
It's I would only hope that it hurts, you know, and that it gives somebody some information, which which, by the way, kind of also reminds me of everything's reminding me of everything today.
But, you know, this notion that we have about how these lawyers that Trump had that were trying to help him, you know, overthrow the election were so bad that they ended up being like good.
Right.
They're only good for the country.
Right.
Because they were so inept.
And so it's almost like these rallies might be good because somehow maybe it'll finally, it'll start to peel some more people off and realize how much of a sham this is and how, you know, these are no energy places where a lot of people are going.
You know, I don't know.
I have to tell you though, and this does have something to do with exactly what we're talking about with both Trump and Carlson, but also this Pearson Sharp guy.
So real fast, I just want to put ourselves in the mindset of Pearson Sharp.
I don't know this dude from Adam.
Like, can you imagine going on, I was getting ready to say national TV, but I don't know what OAN would be.
Marginal TV.
Going on marginal TV and calling for the execution of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people.
You know what I mean?
Like, do you think that Pearson Sharp, and we don't know him, do you think this is somebody who is like sitting down for dinner and he's like, yeah, we need to watch these people swing from the gallows, you know?
No, right?
No, he does not believe that.
I don't think so either, but you're also, and again, as a professor of writing and rhetoric, when you put that shit out there, it's real.
You know what I mean?
Even if you're performing for the camera, it's like Trump.
We've talked about it.
Trump didn't plan on building a wall, he didn't plan on draining the swamp, all of that stuff.
He just wanted to get in and become president and hear hail to the chief and steal a bunch of money.
That's what he was interested in.
But the things that he said created a new reality that people are now living in.
And that's Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson is so enmeshed in this new Tucker Carlson character, right?
And that's what it is.
He's been on every network.
He's failed and been fired on every network.
He is now Fox News Tucker Carlson in the age of Trumpism.
That's his character right now.
The other night he got on and called the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, not just a pig, but stoop.
Like, you have to assume he got off the set and he was like, oh, I guess I did that.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Oh, that escalated quickly.
Like, they're playing characters and because of the echo chamber nature of popular culture and mass media, You put that stuff out there, and you affect culture, and then culture comes back and affects you, and it turns into a continual cycle.
Right.
I mean, I think what you're saying is that, look, we know that these guys don't believe what they're saying, but we know that there are people out there sitting in their homes who do believe it.
And those people have AR-15s.
And that's the problem with this fucking country.
Right.
And that's the other point of it, is one of the standard tenets of white supremacy, and I want to be very serious about this for a second, is that white supremacy, because I mean, if you look around the world, like there's been a white supremacist takeover of the world that's lasted for centuries.
It's always been aided by weapons.
Having superior weapon technology.
You don't need a lot of people.
You just need big chambers in your guns.
You just need big magazines in your guns.
And the Republican Party, we keep talking about it, is historically unpopular.
And yes, those crowds are going to dwindle and they're going to continually grow more and more isolated.
And some of them, that's only going to make them more aggressive.
That's only going to make them more dangerous.
And eventually what happens is exactly what you were saying, which is maybe at first you don't believe what you're saying, but if you do it enough, you end up becoming enmeshed in it and you don't know the difference between reality and your false reality, which is Donald Trump has no idea where he's at.
You know what I mean?
Like, he probably does believe that the election was stolen, even though there's no evidence whatsoever that it actually was.
He is living in his own pocket universe, and that's where he exists.
Well, you know, the other thing about Tucker Carlson we learned this week as well was that he tends to be the source of a lot of mainstream media's information on the right wing tidbits and information behind the scenes.
And I kind of want to hear your take on that because it's not exactly clear to me why he would do that, especially when you hear the the sneering and the snide comments about CNN or MSNBC from him and from all of Fox News, why he would slum it with, you know, New York Times and Washington Post with those guys and handing out little information, which I believe is true enough to them because he's some informant for these which I believe is true enough to them because he's some informant
I guess they were able to give him more credence to this like whacked out story he's going to tell about how he got his house got attacked and they were going to, you know, dox his where he lived.
And then he then he turned around and tried and doxed New York Times reporters who had never reported where he lived.
And it's all it's it's it is performative.
Well, I'm curious as to why you think he he does that.
Why is he a guy who's like handing out information to other these other outlets?
So, you know, I don't want to come back for my first episode after my vacation and and blow up too many minds.
So I just want people to sit down.
If you're driving, maybe pull off on the shoulder.
Here's the thing.
When Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Randy Savage were fighting for the WWF Championship at WrestleMania five, when they went backstage, they were friends.
No.
So when they were in the ring, they were stomping their feet and then they were throwing fake punches.
And then they would go out for dinner afterwards.
And the whole point of this is that Tucker Carlson is part of this larger DC community where everybody knows who he is.
He's worked for every major network.
All of these DC types know each other very, very well.
And by the way, this is a little bit of the difference to go ahead and pull the curtain back.
This is a little bit of difference between traditional left-wing and right-wing politics and what Trumpism represents.
So one of the reasons that, and we talked about this back a couple years ago, one of the reasons why Trump continued to get the absolute worst people imaginable for government is because nobody wanted to work with him.
Right.
It was all a bunch of like social climbers.
It was a bunch of people who were like, we're never going to get a chance to work in the White House unless they took this chance.
Right.
Or they sucked and they just had no possibility of actually working in politics.
They were the outcast.
To put it in the, um, what is it?
It's the, the revenge of the nerds type stuff.
Right.
They were, they, they, they, it was slobs versus what, what is that phrase?
It's, um, I don't know.
Snobs versus slobs.
That's what it was.
Right.
So like you have like the traditional D.C. insiders.
And these are the people who like back in the day, you used to hear these tales about Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan would hoist up a drink or do whatever.
It was all a cocktail scene.
It was all a big social status.
And yeah, they would have their fights in Congress about things, and they would have these big passion plays.
But then they would always figure it out because they agreed on economics.
They just didn't agree on who could get married and what a woman should be able to do with her body.
And those things were mostly for the show of the populace.
Tucker Carlson is that creature.
That's where he grew up, and that's one of the reasons why watching him transform into what he's transforming into.
Is really, really frightening because he is a more eloquent, more accepted Donald Trump.
And it just so happens he's not the outsider.
He's not the glitzy, disgusting slob that Donald Trump was.
And he will be welcomed into a lot of these halls of power.
But what's more frightening to you?
Tucker Carlson doing his BS on TV or a guy like Bill Barr coming in and doing the exact same BS in front of fucking Congress?
I know.
I know.
And Bill Barr's one of them too, man.
Bill Barr's one of them too.
And look at how much when Bill Barr was the Attorney General, look how much he actually troubled the impartiality of the DOJ.
Look how he went out and troubled the rule of law.
And he went on Mark Levin's show and said we needed a theocratic government.
And now all of a sudden he's like, can you believe that crazy shit?
I wasn't part of that.
That was nuts.
Look how easy people like that are able to move in and out of this stuff.
And people might have missed, but John Carl of ABC is releasing a book about Bill Barr and the whole thing with that.
And they have him quoted as saying that it was all bullshit.
All this voting fraud stuff is bullshit.
They looked into it and couldn't find any evidence.
And my favorite, though, is when he calls his legal team a clown show.
And he tells Trump to his face, you can't get anybody of importance to represent you because this is not representable.
And you have a clown show and it is completely making everybody look terrible.
This is the problem here.
And then the fact that he'd go and then like kind of get in the coots with Mitch McConnell to like hopefully try and convince Trump to stop.
Saying that so that they can actually win the Senate races in Georgia just gives another layer of like credence to what Trump was saying and that Bill Barr was clearly just a shill.
Like he was not really the Attorney General.
And by the way, even when you mentioned Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan, that's where Bill Barr started.
You know, we had a fucking Democratic Congress.
I say this too many times, but like we had a control, the Democrats had control of Congress for 50 years and they have Iran-Contra erupts and they don't impeach him.
They don't even, like, do an impeachment inquiry, you know, because Tip O'Neill, the asshole, you know, they were busy having drinks in the cloakroom and, you know, and laughing about all this bullshit like they were doing.
So this is where Barr comes from.
It's not surprising, but Jesus Christ, does he need to be, you know, brought up on charges?
Well, and again, to go ahead and put a finer point on this before we bring in Pete, who I assume has some thoughts about all of it, let's just point out, like, this is about generations.
Bill Barr is part of the generation of the Republican Party that is a couple of steps before where we are right now.
And he was more than willing to come in and do the job.
You know what I mean?
Like, he was more than willing to come in and get done what he wanted to get done.
He swallowed that shit and he was happy to do it, right?
This asshole, this Pearson Sharpe, the people who are around Donald Trump, the people who brought Donald Trump YouTube videos, you know what I mean?
We're talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene quality assholes.
Those people Those are the outsiders who are just starving to come in and get power at any and all cost.
They're not interested in institutions.
They're not interested in those cocktail parties.
They're interested in power, and they're interested in profit.
So think about that, that that is where the right is going.
These are people who have been fed propaganda for years, and they've been fed anti-democratic, fascistic sentiment.
And here's the thing, Nick.
They didn't just like it.
They fucking loved it.
And that's what's happening, is we're watching the evolution of the right, and this was the inevitable evolution of the right.
It's going from Newt Gingrich, who knew what he was saying was bullshit, to people who listened to Newt Gingrich, and they were like, that guy's making a lot of sense.
This is, you know, you can say it's the right.
To me, it's capitalism.
You know, let's get back to that.
This is the result of capitalism.
It is.
No matter what you do, you need to, the bottom line is always more important than anything else.
And this is what they're doing, their own version of it.
And it's permeated into Into politics.
It's when you, you know, you bring in religion into politics as well to govern people.
It's all, it's this, this is the, I guess, oh no, I guess I don't, maybe I don't like the United States anymore.
Maybe they're right.
Maybe I hate the United States because we could see where we are right now and we can see where it's going.
And we've been right this whole time.
And that's the real concern.
So we need, that's, I guess, by the way, that is why you need to study history and know the real facts of what happened I'll just say, Nick, and we haven't really talked about this, but when we started this podcast...
We were called, you know, reactionaries.
Like, we were overreacting.
We've gotten this whole fucking thing right.
And that's the unfortunate thing, is because none of it is hidden.
All you have to do is have a religious faith in quote-unquote normalcy.
Oh, don't worry, America will figure it out.
Don't look at history.
Don't worry about how these things have worked.
And all of a sudden you look up one day and you're like, oh my god, I should have known.
It was all right there.
It was black and white.
It was written on the wall.
Here's my red line.
Here's the line in the sand.
The maddening part of all of this is that none of this was unpredictable.
None of this was.
Here's my red line.
Here's the line in the sand.
Do you think that Seb Gorka has more money in his pocket now than he did before 2015?
Oh, absolutely.
He does.
Well, and that's it.
There you go.
That is that is the that is the indication we needed.
And that's that's where we are.
That's what's frustrating, because, again, there's the guy.
He's the guy who did this all just because, you know, if he was able to profit and benefit from that, from what he did and how he behaved in the White House, then then it's over.
No, I mean, all of them, all of them have more money.
That's the whole point.
They're all so much wealthier at this point.
All right, we've got to bring Pete in to talk about this.
Before we do, just a quick little programming note.
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Hey, everybody, we're back, and this is a really, really long, overdue situation that we've got here.
We're here with the one, the only, the legend, the myth, P Dominic, the host of Stand Up with P Dominic.
I didn't need to mention the name again.
It feels redundant after a while.
It works for me.
Boys, it's great to be here.
Myth is right.
I do have a case of imposter syndrome.
I listen to you guys on Muckrake all the time, usually when I'm in the lawn.
Usually when I'm in the lawn, I listen to the both of you, and I don't think I have anything to offer your show, so maybe we should just wrap this up.
I mean, I'd rather... I enjoy the enthusiasm.
That's good.
I mean, the pessimism, not as great, but the enthusiasm... This is an episode of your podcast I don't have to listen to, because I'm here.
You're on it.
Well, we got an endorsement, Jared.
Maybe he's right.
It's all we need.
I think we're good here.
Wrap it up, boys.
So, Pete, before you came on, we were talking, we were going over, of course, the escalation on the right.
You know, we had, I don't know if you saw this guy, Pearson Sharp.
Which just sounds like a completely made up fucking name, who was on OAN calling for execution of traitors.
We, of course, have Donald Trump out there going after woke generals.
You've been in this for a while.
I don't know if people know your history with it.
You've been covering politics, commenting on it for a good amount of time.
Can you talk about the evolution of what you've seen, not just with the Republican Party, but with the right wing?
Can you talk about the different iterations that you've seen and where we're at right now?
Oh my gosh, yeah.
I have watched it for probably 15 years really closely, a lot of different perspectives, but certainly from kind of a corporate media buy-in standpoint, and what I mean by that is like working at CNN, Comedy Central, and SiriusXM, having credentials to be at the conventions and the debates and the
I went to, I actually do, I can't speak this a bit with my perspective, not necessarily as an expert, but certainly my perspective, but I would go, I think three years I went to CPAC and attended and, you know, I was a pretty well-known progressive commentator, so people saw me coming, but that was a really very interesting thing to witness because there was a lot of young Republicans there, like college-age students, and I would try to spend time around them and And at the Gaylord Hotel, which is always so rich.
It was just so rich.
The word Gaylord is just like one of my favorite all-time words.
And if you have any discomfort with your sexuality and then you go into a hotel called Gaylord or deal with that name, then you can almost watch them being uncomfortable that they're there.
But anyway, I just have seen it move into this kind of white cult, really.
It was less overt, and now I've just seen it progressively move to be so much more overt, which I did not actually ever think I would see.
But I was warning for a long time, as were you guys recognizing, that they were now a conspiracy theorist, dominant, not fringe.
I feel like what I saw before a lot of mainstream commentators and observers was it was clearly the conspiracy theorists that were taking over.
And more importantly, to speak of who's behind them, the commentators, like the mainstream corporate right-wing commentators.
I think the Beltway media and politicians and even grassroots political organizations did just didn't listen to AM talk radio.
I did!
And I worked with those guys at Sirius, like the conservative commentators at Sirius.
I worked with them, so I really got to know them and what they were doing.
And if you listen to Mark Levin and Sean Hannity, And the guys at Sirius are really extreme.
Andrew Wilcott was one guy.
Another guy, you know, did a bit once when I first started, when I was listening.
He said, I want to call her from every state in the country to endorse the idea that women shouldn't be able to vote.
And wow, but this new kind of, you know, he was clear that it was a radio bit, but like this conservative, you know, constitutional conversation or convention, and this time women can't vote.
And it was like, that's the difference between progressive and conservative humor.
There too, and that was just tame, because at least that was a bit, but I heard these guys on the radio three hours a day, and if you just listened to them you knew where they were going.
It was just kind of amazing to see John Boehner and even Paul Ryan be surprised.
That they couldn't control the commentators whose shows they'd been on and who weren't extreme enough for.
And I guess the final point was like the culminating moment for me was hearing Senator Ron Johnson, who no one is more of a like a conspiratorial senator.
And, you know, I think openly work with Russia with their intelligence.
This guy is as far out as they can go.
And Mark Levin was screaming at him for not getting their conservative agenda done.
And Ron Johnson like I can't.
We don't have the votes, Mark.
And the point, guys, is what they do on the radio is they demand things that can't happen.
They have no concern of governing, only of entertaining and firing people up.
They're not serious.
And that radicalized people.
That's it.
Talk radio radicalized people.
Now, to a further extent, I think YouTube and podcasts.
But everybody focuses on Fox News?
Nah, it was really predominantly Rush, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, the guys at Sirius.
They're all doing the same goddamn bit as a comedian.
It's so hack.
They're all listening to each other, stealing from each other, and so I watched them.
And if you watch them, you didn't have to be especially smart or even observant to know what was happening.
Well, it's ironic because we were talking about this exact subject before we got on with you, and we were sort of pontificating that most of these people on the TV don't believe what they are saying.
Um, but I'm kind of curious what you think about that.
Cause we were recognizing that it's a bit and they're doing things to stir up the populace, but they're also, they could believe it.
Uh, and then, you know, tie in guys like Stuart Stevens and Steve Schmidt and like these guys who are now all of a sudden, like coming out of the fever dream, like what are we supposed to make of that?
And whether or not they, they believe what they're saying.
I believe them.
I believe them.
I believe Stuart and all the Lincoln Project creeps.
I could trash every one of them all day, but I do believe them.
I believe Joe Walsh.
I believe—I just had him on the show—from Wisconsin.
Sykes.
Charlie?
Charlie Sykes.
I believe all them because they've all lost tons of money, tons of gigs, and frankly, a lot of friends.
The first guy that I know that kind of, you know, moved away from the conservative movement and denounced everything he'd been involved with was a guy named Bruce Bartlett.
And Bruce is a really good friend of mine, and I know him very well, and I know for sure he lost most of his friends.
Like, these quote, principled conservatives that saw Trump for what he was, that turned away from him, they lost their friends.
Like, legitimately lost them.
Lost a lot of money, I'm sure almost all of them, and so I do believe them.
As far as The guys that are still selling it?
I think some of them believe some of it, but I worked with Steve Bannon.
Shared a studio with him at SiriusXM.
Find him to be the sharpest, most intelligent of any of these guys, or three of them combined.
Bannon is definitely original.
He's the most dangerous conservative, in my opinion, of all.
I mean, compare him to anybody you want, from Roger Stone to Sean Hannity to Rush.
This guy is absolutely brilliant, the way that he has handled himself.
I mean, I just can't even... So, he has basically said, in different ways at different times, that Donald Trump, he's just a blunt instrument.
He's just helping us get our shit done.
Our white supremacist domination, dark web takeover, you know.
He's just helping us build the Death Star.
He's Darth Vader, we're the Emperor, or I'm the Emperor, whatever.
So, I think that you can kind of take them on a somewhat case-by-case basis, but I did try to differentiate there to some extent.
The guys who have turned their back on that, and who I do believe have a certain amount of integrity, of character at least, they still support a lot of shitty policies that have failed forever, but they're not necessarily awful people in terms of the way, you know, it's like how could anybody like Donald Trump, he's such a mean son of a bitch.
Well, If you're mean too, then you get it.
I just don't think these guys are as horribly cruel as some of the others that don't care about others and only care about the agenda and making a lot of money.
Like Ben Shapiro.
He's a horrible person and he's making a fortune.
I just want to throw out really quickly the Bruce Bartlett connection, because that's notable, because he was one of the chief architects of trickle-down economics, comes out and says it's all bullshit.
And I don't think I've seen harder, harsher reactions to anything from the right outside of what he had said, because they so believe in trickle-down that it's telling them that their entire, you know, life work is... Have you guys ever interviewed?
Oh, just, just cancel me right now and get him on.
He's amazing on the air.
He just whines and complains and has zero fucks.
Like, we can say certain people have zero fucks.
This dude has literally an egg where fucks go.
He is so brutally honest and so cruel and dismissive of these people.
And it's just wonderful and beautiful to hear and to watch.
So yeah, I can't say enough good things about him.
Well, I'm really glad that you talked about the sort of strata of these people, because I think you're exactly right about Steve Bannon.
Steve Bannon is learned.
And it's dark arts, is what it is.
I mean, it's neo-fascism.
Let's be clear though, like I shared a studio, like I shared space with him.
I saw the way he touched and treated women, which was inappropriate.
And I've, I don't think I've ever told anybody this on the record, but I feel like people now will believe it.
One time I walk in the studio and he's leaving and I'm not, he turned into a bat and flew away.
Did you smell sulfur?
Yeah, well that was a given and I felt like people knew that.
Yes, we would hang garlic in the studio, didn't buy- nothing.
All of the vampire things that we were- none of those work.
They don't work.
We tried all of them.
I stabbed- Popular culture.
With a wooden stake through the heart.
He just kept walking, he's like, good to see you Pete.
Popular culture, it just lies to you about these supernatural creatures.
Yeah, Bannon is just an incredible sort of manipulator.
And I mean, he's one of those amazing people that can tell you, I am a manipulator and this is what I'm doing and this is how we're doing it.
I think part of me not being renewed at Sirius was that, well part of my career progression has always been that I'm good at navigating an institution.
You put me, I worked at Disney World when I was 18 and I was hired at fast food but by the time the summer was over I was working on production companies.
You know, when I got hired at Sirius as a comedian just doing a comedy show I worked my way up to a three-hour public interest show and part of that was making Creating great relationships with the executives, and I did nothing but build those relationships for 10 years until they crumbled when I stood up against them rehiring Steve Bannon.
And I don't mind, you know, this is probably one of the more interesting things that's ever happened to my career, and I think it's hopefully illuminating for your audience.
I stood up to some executives there.
It was, you know, a disagreement, but basically I said, listen, you can't have this guy be here.
He's an anti-Semite.
And they said, no, he's not.
He supports Israel.
And I explained to them how it works, how this stuff works.
And they didn't hear it, but it was, I would see his callers, guys.
I would look on the screen and I would see the callers.
And it was like six calls of just like crazy people.
So you'd see him put one on the air.
And the guy would say something, you know, similar to Jews run the media, Jewish people, whatever he would say, something really outrageous.
If it were C-SPAN, even on C-SPAN they'd be like, thank you sir, and they'd hang up on him.
Like, Steve Bannon would take those calls and say, great points, glad you're listening, thanks for the call.
And that, what I would tell the executives, that's anti-Semitic.
It's not overt, it's the idea of, he's messaging, yeah, I hear you, and I agree with you.
And that was all day, all the time.
And that stuff is not overt for a lot of people to pick up on.
They don't hear it, they don't see it.
I did, I saw all the time, boys.
And I have to say that it's what we were talking about before we brought you on is how, you know, you'll take somebody like a Tucker Carlson who there's a lot of ideology there, but there's also a lot of grifter acting.
He understands where the current is right now, right?
He can go on.
It's almost like Stephen Colbert with the Colbert Report, right?
Where I worked on staff for six years.
Exactly.
So, like, there's an understanding of the mimicry.
There's an understanding of being able to do that.
There's other people who believe in it.
Then there's other people who are obviously profiting off of it, such as, like, a serious that says, yeah, maybe this is disturbing, but there's money in this.
And they all sort of interact with each other.
I was wondering if you could talk about the sort of unrealness of the show business aspect of this.
I mean, we've talked when the light wasn't on before about people who see opportunities and they take it.
And they perform for a while, but eventually the performance becomes ingrained, right?
Eventually your Tucker Carlson, who is a character, becomes Tucker Carlson on Fox News, the white nationalist, right?
Like, eventually it sort of goes in these cycles.
I think that you can point to so many people in entertainment and it's very hard, and I almost have a certain, I do have a sympathy for this, to become so powerful.
And then in any way, let go of that and dispense of that and give that away.
And I've seen a lot of my friends, you know, turn into people that I don't even recognize because they became famous.
I would name the names off the air to you guys, but not on the air because it's just like they're not evil.
They just became different with all the power and how it changes them.
Well, there's an unhealthiness to it sometimes.
The whole idea is fucking preposterous that anybody would have this much influence.
Even like I feel like you are a guy who has to be careful yourself because there's a certain like following that you now have.
Like I believe that people have so much respect for you that if you said something that just as a test was was not something you believed, I think people wouldn't question you because they they really trust you.
Like, I think you realize that, but I mean, you're getting to that point now where you have this following and you have so much credibility that if you went out and said something nuts that you didn't believe, people would be like, must be true, Jerry ate sex.
But I will say, while we're on the subject, there is a financial incentive to go out and say something fucking nuts.
Like, I think about this all the time, like sitting here looking at my phone.
Like, I can go on my Twitter account right now, and I actually have every financial incentive to go on and say something radical, inflammatory, controversial, go out and start feuds, go out and be awful.
Like, that is part of the problem, is this entire system is wired to preference that.
Yes, but it's not a liberal or conservative, it's more of a psychological, it's more of a conscience thing.
It's at a certain point, people cross a threshold, it's just simply called selling out, where I can make a lot of money doing all of these things.
The question, everybody gets to a point, I've been at this point a lot of times and I'm super proud of the integrity with which I've led my career, where I said I'm not gonna, I'm actually not gonna do that.
I'm not gonna go in that direction even though I know I could and it's kind of funny because I'll just throw my wife under the bus like she would have never minded if I did and said things I didn't believe because She's always worried about money, and she really always has been.
We always have been, and financial security sure would be nice, and I could do – I could make a lot more if I did certain things differently.
But you can't – I can't look at my kids, look in the mirror.
Like, I wouldn't feel comfortable that the money doesn't... I've never been motivated by money.
Other people are, and I almost don't judge it.
I'm just not.
I'm motivated by, if anything, actual human approval.
Like, when actual people tell me the work I'm doing matters, that motivates me.
That's it.
Like, I could be, by the way, having a shitty day, and then I get one email from someone telling me how much, how important the podcast is, you know, through the pandemic and staying connected, and they learned so much.
Done.
Like, for the next couple days, like, I'm filled up.
Like, for me, that kind of thing matters a lot more, and so I can't sell something.
I just, I can't, I can't sell something I don't believe.
I can't do it.
So even if I wanted to, I can't.
I suck at it.
I wanted to run for Congress when I left Sirius, and the three people who knew me best, that I trust the most, said I couldn't.
And everybody else said, do it.
And I said, you know why they said I couldn't?
They said, they're like, you can't lie.
Can't lie.
And to a certain extent, you have to lie to get things done.
You actually do in politics, to a certain extent.
And I just, I would never have been able to do that, I think.
And I don't know if that makes me a better or worse, and it makes me certainly sound like, you know, some noble, but I frankly can't do it.
I can't.
I'm too worried about what people think of me.
Well, you just said something that made my ears prick up, which was you could make a lot more money if you did certain things differently.
And I'm kind of curious if you want to give us an example of something.
I mean, is it like more titillating or are we just talking about what you say?
Well, there's a lot of different answers.
I hosted a show at CNN for eight weeks.
And at the end of the eight weeks, they said, we want to continue with this show, but we don't have a budget for it.
And I was like, what does that mean?
And like, well, you know, what that means in corporate media speak is there's no money for you or the six people that were slaving away, you know, doing extra work.
And I was like, well, then I can't do it.
There are many people that work for free on television and radio, and I have had a lot of serious arguments with those people.
I've called them out, always privately, and said, you're ruining it for all of us because you're just going out and doing everything for free.
So, like, working for free is a thing a lot of people do that I wouldn't do.
And at the same time, doing a certain type of gig and interviewing.
When I was at SiriusXM, I did have a lot of, I will say, they gave me a lot of bandwidth and control.
And I said no to Harvey Weinstein.
I said no to several other guests that they wanted me to have on.
And they would have been great for me, but I wouldn't do it.
And that was the case with a lot of different guests.
And then just the idea of working nonstop everywhere you can.
Who is it like we make fun of the most?
I guess he's not in politics, but James Corden.
He's doing all the gigs.
He's got all the gigs, like let somebody else have a gig.
To me, being with my family and having the balance was more important.
So some people don't even see their kids.
They just do.
Sean Hannity does three hours of radio every day and an hour of TV.
That guy probably, you know, he works Crazy amount of hours.
So there's a lot of different ways to describe it, but I just didn't want to be this guy who was always out there needing to be heard and on every platform and trying to dominate and looking, you know.
I don't know if that answers Nick your question perfectly, but there's just many different ways to sell out and exploit yourself and do things and sell things.
So many of these guys sell shit that You know, nobody needs it.
They don't even like the stuff.
You don't need to enhance your manhood anymore, Pete?
I mean, I say that, but you say manhood, and I literally, literally, the last email I sent was to an ad firm saying I will in fact advertise once a month for meat in a box on my podcast.
Awesome.
Meat in a box, boys.
Hey, well, listen, I cannot criticize anybody for doing that on my basketball side.
I'm just, I'm a shill for anything.
In fact, Adam and Eve is coming up.
I have to decide if I want to do an ad for them.
But what we're talking about here... Yeah, I did turn down, like I turned down Christian Mingle ads.
I'm serious.
I said, I won't go on, and I turned down oil ads.
Like I said, I won't go on the air with my name on that.
And if I won't, I'll quit before I sell a Christian, you know, an anti-gay.
That was specifically a dating site that, you know, was only for Christian people and was very anti-gay.
So, like, there are certain things that I think... But what we're talking about here, I think, not just in terms of advertisements, but also in terms of politics, what we're actually talking about is trying to live in a society that is sort of buttressed By a system of economics that is completely predicated on taking advantage of the worst instincts of a human.
I mean, like, I'm doing this project right now with the new book and I'm studying all of the original sort of engineers of capitalism and they're like, oh, human beings are terrible.
They're just the most selfish, god-awful creatures you could ever imagine.
We have to create a system that takes advantage of that.
And that is not conducive to healthy behavior, but it's also not conducive to society at large.
It's not conducive to politics.
It's not conducive to making the world a livable, sustainable place, right, Pete?
Yeah, I mean, before anybody knew what capitalism or what money was, we lived as tribes.
And yeah, I guess we fought the other tribe, but it was over, you know, A buffalo or, you know, I mean, like we we could have evolved from that tribal living into something that was far more equitable.
And, you know, let's be honest, certain countries and societies have done that, certainly more than than America.
But I mean, that idea of that's very American.
You know, it's just very, very American.
And we learned that, I think, through the pandemic of You know, I learned it, frankly, about this country through the three years I covered the health care fight.
I covered that extensively with health care experts all the time.
And, you know, I also heard from callers all the time.
And so I learned then That Americans don't really care about each other, unless they know each other personally, but we definitely don't care about strangers.
And we learned it even more specifically and acutely with the pandemic.
You know, it's like just the mask thing and the vaccine thing.
It's like, and just the idea of, you know, following the rules.
People close to me didn't want to follow the rules and didn't.
And it was, it was morally offensive, but that's like a lot of other societies and cultures do it better.
And so I do think, I'm not going to say it's uniquely American, and there's some truth to what those, you know, capitalists said, but only because they fed us the meat that it took, like only because they create the hunger games.
Of course, we're going to act like animals because you're holding on to all of the resources and we want to survive.
So, I mean, you can lead human beings that way, but you can lead them in so many other different directions that I think have worked out really very well.
You know, I think that economics is a really fascinating conversation to have, but it's always got to be had with, I think people have to start with their economics argument with, wait, what do you morally believe about, like, resources?
Like, how much do you think people should have?
Like, do you believe in that?
Now my threshold, boys, is do you believe that one person should have a billion dollars?
You do?
Well, then we probably can't have any kind of meeting of the minds.
I have a question because I have a sort of quaint notion that the what you're describing as far as Americans not really caring about each other.
If there's a genesis of it in the modern era to me it was when W runs for president and says the surplus money that we have which could go to some of the most amazing programs and help people.
It's your money.
You should have it back.
I'm going to pay you for your vote, basically, is what he said.
And I kind of feel like that became ground zero because it drags us through the debate about health care.
And it kind of takes us through the housing crisis as well in a way that I like to have an antiquated notion that perhaps before that we maybe did care a little bit about each other.
But I could be a whole No, it's a good point to make and I would also say about a third of Americans really don't care about, you know, it's like 70 million or so or something like that or certain cultures or, you know, it's often these people who, you know, pretend to be the most moral religious people, they might care about the people that go to their church, they probably do, even if they're different races and ethnicities because they know each other.
I don't know, Pete.
I've been in some churches where that's not the case.
It's the larger performance of it, I think.
The moral test to me often is, how do you feel about people over there that you'll never meet?
You know, the Peter Singer, effective altruism kind of ideology.
And Nick, I think that you're right.
I think that when government, I think that the New Deal changed a lot of attitudes.
And I think that for a long period of time, You know, this is I'm stepping outside my lane when talking to you guys here, but you know, up till the late 70s and you know, Goldwater and then obviously Reagan perfecting it all and saying government's the problem.
The government is an organizing, you know, we can we can all criticize government and, you know, a budget is a moral document in terms of how we spend money.
However, we were better.
I think you're right.
I think we were better when we had unifying ideas, conflicts that kind of sometimes even cross, well, definitely crossed class, but Once we began to demonize government and say government's the problem, then that kind of Bush idea really is effective.
This is not my money.
This is not our money.
It's not the government's money.
It's your money.
And that goes back to the problem with, you know, obviously with billionaires and philanthropy.
Billionaires decide where to give their money.
They shouldn't have that much money to decide where to give it.
Oh, they gave it to pediatric cancer.
Great.
But pediatric cancer actually isn't killing that many kids.
There's so many other ways to spend that money, and that should be decided not by your panel, but by the people and through taxes.
And that's messy and that's complicated, but it's also democracy.
So I think you're right to say, you know, we were better, but we've, I think, trended progressively worse with individualism in a way.
I think a big part of it, though, is the message that has been force-fed to us now for generations, which is, if you care about other people and you trust other people, you're a fucking sucker.
And all you're doing is you're basically opening yourself up to be screwed over, whether or not it's through welfare queens, or whether it's through, you know, Democrats who are telling you one thing, they're talking about being empathetic, but they're actually trying to take over power.
It's been turned into like a game theory type thing, which I actually think that Donald Trump personified more than anybody else, which he basically came out and said, this entire thing is a game.
If you are worried about other people, you're a sucker, you're a loser.
And I think trying to walk back from that edge, there's a part of me that hopes that the pandemic started to crystallize that.
But also, Pete, I don't know about you, but I look at America and I'm like, our memory is so short and so simplified in terms of politics and experience.
I still have hope, but it is a really terrifying thing to stare off over the other side of that ledge.
Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with you.
And I think this whole conversation actually could be, you know, we're talking about how to gain and lose power and followers and money.
And I think that it's so easy To make money, win elections, get followers by owning other people.
And so if we leave out the religious right, fascists, the Trumpers, if we just talk about progressives, what I see happening Within progressive, the progressive movement is a similar type of tribalism, a similar type of purity, a similar type like I'm really fascinated to watch the smartest black folks I know argue with each other about messaging about policy and me sitting back going,
I think this black person is right and this black person is more wrong, but then also trying to say, you guys are also burning each other down, and let me leave it out of race and just talk about then white guys, you know, like the dirty progressive left, and like just saying like I could I just had a long argument with a good friend on the record for my podcast, Paul Rykoff, who's, you know, former executive director of the premier veterans organization of his generation.
We disagree on a lot, and we had a long disagreement.
And I can't wait to disagree with him again.
And it didn't end ugly.
I wasn't trying to own him.
I definitely trying to win that argument.
I worry that there's not enough of that anymore.
And it's because of how I don't want to say algorithms, but because of how your podcast, your YouTube show, your cable news show gains followers and then how elections are won through dividing people like, you know, they don't.
I just talked to Ian Haney Lopez.
Have you guys ever talked to him?
Just this idea of For years and years, generations, just the wealthy destroying all of us.
Like he says, basically, they're not racist.
They care less.
They just use racism to destroy, you know, to drive a wedge between everybody and to get lower taxes and to get the kind of policies that they want.
They use it expertly.
Well, I think it's the natural offshoot and evolution of austerity.
You get to the point where there's not enough money and enough resources.
Well, there is enough money and there are enough resources, but it's been so damned up and bottled up that you end up getting to the point where you're like, we only have a limited number of resources.
How do we distribute them?
And then the next thing that you have is puritanical Warfare and it ends up becoming who do we trust who deserves it and you end up having a loss of empathy I had a question last night on Bourbon talk and somebody asked me do I think that every Trump supporter in the country is lost and I know that they're not because I have to tell you prior to 2003 in the lead-up to the Iraq war I was on a trajectory to become Eventually a trumper.
You know what?
I mean if 20 years would have passed and I wouldn't have had The people in my life and read the books and done the research, I very well could have been at one of those rallies not investigating it, but...
Being a part of it.
So no, I don't think people are lost, but I think there's like an empathy left there, and it's about a lot of division of resources.
I would disagree with the small gradation, meaning I would say I think a lot of them are lost, and it's a cult.
I agree with that.
I agree with that.
I think some of them, you know, we could get back.
Some of them we could get back, but I think a lot of them are lost.
And never to come back, like that's what happens with cults.
Like, they just, you never get them back.
I mean, ask a family member of anybody's, and that's what, you know, the Trump-ism is a cult.
And I don't know what you guys, I mean, let me ask you guys, what do you think of talking to Trump supporters anywhere and trying to, you know, not win an argument, just ask them questions.
I mean, I just saw this, I think he does great work, the Irish reporter at CNN that goes to all these Trump rallies, or even Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show.
You obviously went to a lot of those, Jared.
Do you think... I played a montage of the Q&A by the CNN reporter at the Trump rally on Saturday night on my podcast because I think it's important to hear them and I think it's important to hear them to the point of what you're saying is that a lot of them are cult.
They're just cults.
There's no amount of any kind of reason or argument or morality that you could appeal to.
They have... they're in this...
I think there's two ways to answer that.
One, I think that it's important to listen to them to understand the incoherence, right?
To see where the inconsistencies are and to understand like where this mindset is all jumbled up and where it's cult-like.
I think the problem is that for years now, they've been using these people as entertainment.
It's like a day at the zoo, go and look at what the animals are doing.
Right?
Like, listen to the insane bullshit that they're saying and laugh at it.
Call them stupid.
And then, by the way, get back on social media and say, I hope they all die of COVID.
Right?
Like, there's that lack of humanity.
I think we can listen to them and still do both those things.
So go ahead.
Yeah.
I, but no, I, and that's the thing is I think social media prioritizes that.
I think it basically says.
I got rightly criticized for retweeting, you know, comedians sometimes say things that are offensive, but that are worded really, really funny.
And Twitter is not stand up.
And so I think, but I retweeted my friend JL Covan, who's a great, the best impersonator in the country, I think, but he's also very funny.
He tweeted this weekend, he goes, There's a Trump rally in Ohio on Saturday night.
I hope the keynote speaker is the Delta variant.
And I don't actually wish death on people, but I thought it was a funny worded joke.
Like the Delta variant can't be a keynote speaker.
So I didn't really, you know, like it's just a funny wording, but I, I've gotten, I've had a lot of moments and gotten to a lot of points where I'm just like, these people, I do dehumanize them to a certain point in my mind, if I'm being honest.
And so, you know, I think, I think I have work to do because my truth is I want to be compassionate to the people I despise, am afraid of, and hate the most.
I want to find compassion and the truth is I have struggled to find it throughout the last, you know, few years.
Well, you know, I look at it like what you kind of Jared said, like you go to a museum and you want to you're going to observe or like watching a nature show and it's like we're observing Trump is erectus in the wild and what they would see what they say.
It's like, you know, that's the morbid curiosity for me, which then leads me to question to have a question for you, Pete, which would, which is, how do you think that stand up has changed in the midst of all of this in the last like five or six years even?
I think that the assholes are getting their due.
Like, most stand-up comedians are awful people.
I'm on the record saying that.
You know, shouldn't generalize about people in any job, but stand-up, it kind of lends itself to it.
And I've seen over my career, and this hasn't helped me either, a lot of men treat women horribly.
And I've been in the middle of some of those, you know, trying to do the right thing.
And that's pervasive.
It's like people sometimes give certain respect and ideas of nobility to certain jobs for the wrong reasons.
And stand-up comedy would be one, and the military would be another.
Like, we sit here and talk about the military.
Like, they're so great.
And I'm always happy to have a nuanced conversation, but there's an epidemic of sexual assault in the military.
It is horrific.
And so I'm not going to fall for a few good men.
Like, there's a ton of rape.
It's like really horrible.
Horrible.
And trying to get any kind of recourse or justice is a nightmare.
And so back to stand up, Nick.
A lot of guys are shitty and they can't understand why.
They're getting their comeuppance.
Some of the things that they're still saying aren't flying anymore because women and minorities have taken a power.
You know, I think one of the most powerful phrases in the new women's movement is times up.
Like if someone says times up to you.
I mean that's a rough thing like you're done and you could say that to like you could almost like a comedian doing some really shitty joke that's old and not funny you know a woman could stand up like time's up stop and so I think that we have to evolve and we can still be funny I do think a racist and sexist joke If it's worded really funny, I still laugh because I look at the comedy of it.
And I know a lot of women and minorities that do as well.
So before I do, it's like this idea of the structure of the joke and separate it maybe from the person doing it and so on.
What are the intentions there?
But I think mostly the answer to your question is there are consequences now more than there were before about what you say.
I don't think we should hold those consequences against comedians who said things a while ago.
I think that times change and we shouldn't be held to things that we said because we all said things on a mic that we wouldn't say today.
I certainly did.
And so I think it's evolved.
I think it's getting better.
I think it's certain things are rightful criticisms of the kind of, I wouldn't, I don't use the word cancel culture, but sometimes it's like a little too sensitive maybe.
We don't have to worry about your feelings all the time, but generally punching up is a good idea.
If you're a white, straight guy, you can't go wrong with that.
And that's not hard to do.
It's just so easy to do.
And so I think we're going through some growing pains that are really great.
And I think that the market will continue to decide whether or not Louis C.K. sells tickets or Andrew Schultz or Joe Rogan.
These guys are a lot more controversial, and they will.
There will be an audience for them.
And guess what, boys?
Comedy club owners, overwhelmingly shitty people.
Overwhelming to the point where it's not helpful.
Most comics are progressive politically.
It's easy to make fun of your Trumps, your Bushes.
And it's a little harder to get booked by those guys because they're so seriously trumped up.
And it's all about being a business owner and not wanting to pay taxes.
Um, so it's a it's a kind of an interesting time where a lot of the gatekeepers are a little more conservative than the comedians and that that kind of seems to matter.
But I'm happy with what where comedy is at and I am never ever worried, put it this way, about performing anywhere and being canceled.
You heard Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld.
You can't do colleges anymore?
Bullshit.
Yes you can.
You know why they can't do colleges anymore guys?
Because same reason I don't really don't.
Because their shit's not College funny.
It's not.
They're talking about being married and kids and you know, that's not funny.
You have to go and you don't want to do that material.
You don't want to talk about all the things that they're interested in because you're not 20.
So that's why they're not doing colleges.
Not because they're too politically correct.
Colleges have always been politically correct in a way that's good.
We spent way too long not having you on this podcast.
Can we get you on sooner than later?
I'm booked.
Pete, can you tell the good people where to find you?
I love to talk to you guys.
I love listening to this podcast.
It's one that I rarely miss an episode of, and I'm psyched you guys are out there doing this together, and that it's expanding and growing, and I love promoting each other.
So yeah, folks want to listen, stand up to Pete Dominick.
It's daily.
I do what I think is a really robust, comprehensive news thing that takes me like hours every night putting together.
Sound and a few little jokes.
And then I usually interview two guests who are generally speaking like expert folks, you know, on the show.
And that's it.
And that's their daily for you in the morning.
And I hope that people that listen to your show listen to mine.
And I'm sure that people that listen to mine listen to yours.
Thanks so much for coming on, Pete.
Thank you for having me.
You guys, you looked great.
I just also want to say that you both looked really great on the... This was a beautiful panel, I got to say.
This was a very attractive panel.
Let's make sure if folks don't watch it, they should at least see a screenshot.
Thanks so much, Pete.
Thanks, guys.
All right, everybody.
That was the muckrake podcast premiere of Pete Dominick of Stand Up With Pete Dominick.
Still really hard to say the name twice in a row.
It was really good having him on.
Good people.
Absolutely.
Great conversation.
Great show.
It's something everyone should be listening to.
Yeah, it is.
It's one of those have to listen podcasts.
He does it every day, Nick.
I know.
It's really amazing.
Anybody who does anything like that every day is impressive to me.
I wouldn't mind doing it under the right circumstances.
I think we could do it.
Let's do it then.
Don't you put that on me.
How much Diet Coke can I get my hands on?
Just a reminder to everybody, we're gonna come back with the taping for our Weekender Edition.
We will be, and that's for patrons only, if you want to get in on that, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
We'll be going live this Thursday, July 1st at 7 p.m.
Eastern.
And again, that's patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
If you want to watch that and get access to the weekly, I just dropped my glasses.
I'm all discombobulated, Nick.
Did they break?
No, I think they're fine.
I think they're all right.
I think everything's good.
I think everything's copacetic.
You know what?
It's probably like a good metaphor for where we're at.
I agree.
All right, everybody.
So hopefully we'll see you Thursday night at 7 p.m.
Eastern, July 1st.
And again, that's patreon.com slash mcgreggpodcast.
If you need us until then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
