The Declaration Of Independence Tried To Warn Us | Chauncey Devega
As the conservative right wingers bristled at NPR's literal quoting of the Declaration of Independence in a twitter thread, co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton & Nick Hauselman examine the document's words as they lay out a stark warning about King George III that could easily be applied to Donald Trump.
Plus, Jared interviews Chauncey Devega, politics writer for Salon, as they discuss the perilous precipice that our democracy balances on.
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Each day we're reminded there's nothing guaranteed about our democracy.
Nothing guaranteed about our way of life.
We have to fight for it.
Defend it.
Earn it.
Folks, it's up to all of us to protect the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The right to equal justice under the law.
The right to vote and have that vote counted.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton, here as always with Nick Halsman.
Here in a little bit, we're going to welcome on Chauncey DeVega of Salon.com and the Chauncey DeVega Show.
But before we begin, it is the nation's birthday.
We are taping this on July 5th, which is the federally recognized Independence Day this year.
Always weird when the 4th falls on a Friday, but we have to talk about how this country started, Nick.
You know, I was making sure as I was at a barbecue yesterday with all these kids in the pool that they were properly indoctrinated into critical race theory.
I made sure I talked to all the parents and they were all nodding their heads seriously.
So yeah, I did my part.
Well, that's what we do, Nick.
We get together.
We make sure that we talk about nothing but critical race theory.
We make sure that all of the children in the surrounding area are properly indoctrinated to hate everything and see society as a zero-sum game.
Oh, I was whispering in the pool while they swam by about like how, what this country really was about.
It, you know, it's important to me.
Can you imagine doing that on the 4th of July?
By the way, just being the guy at like the picnic who's just like, yeah, everybody, this was actually founded on white supremacy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, no, again, that just reminds me of my favorite line in Days and Confused when they're all getting out for summer vacation and the teacher reminds them that when they're celebrating the centennial, it's really just a bunch of old white rich guys who didn't want to pay taxes.
Correct, which is a weird thing to to be in that in that movie.
But yeah, so we're going to talk a little bit today.
Nick brought this to my attention.
And this is one of those things where the the right and the Republican Party is just sort of Cannibalizing itself in this completely contradictory stew.
And in this case, we have the right getting upset, as always, with NPR, which has always been a target of their ire, even though NPR has, in weird moments, sort of laundered the opinions of the right and given them a lot of range on their airwaves.
But in this case, the point of ire was that the NPR was tweeting out the Declaration of Independence.
Yeah, they were.
And what's the problem, Nick?
Because we need to go through what the Declaration of Independence actually is.
But what is the issue at the heart of this outrage over one of the founding documents of the country?
Well, so the way they did it as a thread, it's got to be a 50 tweet thread because you can't obviously fit the whole thing into one.
But when you take some of these sentences individually and maybe you don't notice it's a whole thread and you're a right wing person, You would probably assume that they're criticizing Donald Trump.
And it's amazing because it really is.
Now, they're really criticizing King George, right?
The monarch who was imposing all their draconian measures on the colonies.
But it's stunning, actually, to see how many parallels there really are with King George and how Donald Trump ran his administration.
Yeah, it truly is.
And we thought this would be a good opportunity to dive a little deep into the founding documents, of course, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which are pretty well misunderstood.
And this should come as no surprise to everyone that there's a reason for that.
Our education is more or less been a mythology that has been taught over and over and over again.
The idea of what America is, what it isn't, what it was intended to be.
And that ignorance about those two documents and their relationship with one another has kept us from understanding really who we are and where we've been and where we're going.
And in this case, I don't know about you, but I'm so exhausted by politicians just continually restating the same old pat, stale ideas and using them at all times however they want.
I saw something over the weekend, for instance, of somebody talking about Jefferson and Christianity and how we need to re-embrace Thomas Jefferson's Christianity.
Which, for anyone out there who doesn't know this, Thomas Jefferson went through the Bible with a razor, removing every reference to the supernatural miracles of the Bible, and was one of the biggest proponents of the walling off between church and state.
The ignorance of what this country is and how it was founded is, it's truly profound, honestly.
Well, I gotta tell you, other than the first, like, couple of sentences of the Declaration of Independence, I know of none of this.
This is kind of completely new to me when I read the whole thing.
It's not that long, but there must be something about, you know, the curriculum in, you know, middle schools or whatever, where they simply just stop at, like, you know, the preamble or whatever in the beginning, and that's it.
Because there's a lot the whole list of Grievances against King George are really really important and really kind of should be the safeguards for when we see this happening again Which by the way, which is what the right trigger the right because it sounds like NPR was trolling or criticizing Trump, right?
And that's what they thought it was without knowing that it really is just from the declaration.
So I It's our civics classes or whatever you want to call them now, social studies, it is a complete failure.
And here's the worst part is math is a failure too, right?
Like no one's really performing that well, especially when you compare it to other countries on the globe.
What are we doing?
With our educational system, if you think about it.
Math kind of stinks.
I don't think writing is really good either these days.
Certainly social studies and history are completely lacking.
I guess that's as important as health care.
Well, and it comes after decades worth of attacks on public education.
I mean, one of the reasons why our educational system is in the situation it's in is because desegregation took place in the 1950s.
And the right and the Republican Party very, very quickly wanted to move away from federal overview of the schools and the educational system.
So all of a sudden you started having these private institutions, which, weirdly enough, Nick, tell me if this sounds weird, A lot of them are founded in the South and named after Confederate generals and, you know, have the stars and bars everywhere and they're strictly white, but they're private so they can do that.
So as a result, the right wants to go ahead and starve public education until it can become privatized and outside the purview of the federal government.
And what ends up happening over the course of this time, this war on education, is we start losing sight of what actually founded this country and how things work.
And one of the first things we have to understand is the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are opposing documents.
They are not in the same realm of ideas, and we need to break that down a little bit.
The Declaration of Independence is a document of what we'll call liberalism, right?
And liberalism is this idea that natural hierarchies of power, inherited wealth, inherited power, should be gotten rid of in order to have things like representative government, in order to have property and moneyed classes.
Now, think about it in terms of like a king ruling over England plus America, right?
Well, guess what?
In America, there are a bunch of wealthy people who don't want to be under the purview of the king.
He's all the way over there.
They have a rich tradition here in America.
On top of that, they don't want to pay taxes on their businesses.
They're not getting quote-unquote representation within British structures.
So what do they want?
They want to throw off British rule so that they can be at the top of the chain.
That is the liberalization of this moment.
And of course, Thomas Jefferson writes this thing.
It starts off with all men are created equal.
First of all, that's not an accident.
It is men, but based upon the time they are talking about white wealthy men.
And that is what the document is for.
It's saying that white wealthy men should be able to have their own country and should be able to have the determination of their own liberty.
And by the way, every time you see the liberty back in this time, this is hugely important, especially in the era that we're in now.
Liberty means property.
That's what it means.
It means if you have property, if you own property, if you have money, then you have the freedom to do with your property as you want.
And you have to have the protection of the property, which is why you need a government in the first place.
Oh, okay.
You want to keep going?
Because I mean, I got my eye on some of these, these sentences that we could actually read out loud and talk about.
But, but, you know, so let me just make it clear to my mind when you're, as you're letting us know how this works.
Why do we have this as a, do we consider this like an addendum to the Constitution?
How does this all fit into our history as, you know, as far as Declaration versus Constitution?
So Declaration comes, of course, in 1776.
This is as, and by the way, like, this is a hard thing to do.
I have come to the point where I don't consider it a revolution.
Like, it doesn't hit necessarily the points that we would call off of.
Like, it basically, it's a war for independence, right?
It's basically the money class throwing off the next level of hierarchy.
And that's pretty much it.
So what ends up happening is the Declaration of Independence asserts this new idea.
And, you know, it's based off a lot of British philosophical traditions, right?
This idea of property and these things.
So they throw this off and it creates this revolutionary fervor, right?
We are going to create a new type of government.
We are going to usher in a new age.
Well, that starts it.
Now, in the minds of the white wealthy few, and we're talking about Jefferson, we're talking about George Washington, the wealthiest American, right?
We're talking about those types of people.
When they win their war from independence from Britain, They don't need any more revolution, right?
They don't need to change things anymore.
They need to go ahead and stop things.
So after we go through the Articles of Confederation, years and years later, you then have Madison, who puts together the Constitution as a means of saying, stop.
We don't need to change anything else.
We now have our natural hierarchy.
We have the white, wealthy, landed men at the top.
Everybody else is now going to be under our direction.
We threw off this roof, and now we are at the top.
That's it.
So you actually have two documents that are against one another.
They're sort of inherited, but you have to look at the Declaration of Independence as saying white, wealthy men are at the top of this pyramid.
That's fascinating.
So, I mean, basically the Declaration of Independence is a declaration of war.
Yeah, exactly.
It was more or less, it was this statement, a manifesto, if you will.
There was absolutely no legal strength to it whatsoever.
It was sort of like Luther posting his theses.
Or, if you want to go to the French Revolution, where Thomas Jefferson helped write the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
It was non-binding.
But it created the fervor, right?
It said, here's what we believe in, here's what is going to guide us, and here are the reasons that we're doing it.
And of course, like we were talking about before we began taping this, the original draft of it, even by Thomas Jefferson, who owned hundreds of human beings in his lifetime, even included parts of the Declaration of Independence that seemed like he wanted to get rid of slavery.
Congress is like, get that shit out of there, because That's that's not gonna fly well now, but that wasn't Congress right saying that at that time right it was right This is the Continental Assembly is what it is, and they're like yeah, that's great We got a lot of good.
We got some good parts in here Tom Why don't you take that back won't you workshop it a little bit and?
Ixnay on the slave a because we're gonna have to bring the southern states along on this thing Yeah, right, totally.
So yeah, and it's interesting because we see that now.
We see it's not necessarily a formal written document from like Proud Boys or these other, you know, white supremacy groups, but they are certainly the fervor is there and it's whipped up by the same kind of language that you would see that's and that's probably why where we keep sort of saying we're in we're moving towards some version of a civil war because You know, the manifestos that are coming out of these groups, from their perspective, are probably just another version of a Declaration of Independence.
They absolutely are.
And one of the things that we see throughout this time period is Jefferson's rhetoric is awesome.
I mean, if you really want to go ahead and look at this thing, like Jefferson's writing of the Declaration is such a wonderful venue.
And when we're talking about rhetoric, this is an important thing.
Rhetoric doesn't inherently have meaning.
It has to be imbued with meaning, right?
Like it can elude ideas and thoughts.
The Declaration of Independence has been used by everybody.
Like that inalienable right, all men are created equal.
It's been used by everybody from feminists to misogynists.
You actually go to Vietnam right before the Vietnam War.
You have Ho Chi Minh who uses it and eventually it leads to the American War in Vietnam.
You see white supremacists use it.
You see separatists used it.
By the way, just to go ahead and put a fine point on this, the Confederate States of America use it because they saw themselves as the rightful heirs to that founding, that liberal founding of the United States of America.
Yeah, they're the legitimate version of the United States.
Well, and they had a point.
They had an actual point.
When they were actually seceding, they were like, hey, this country was founded on white supremacy, slaveholding America.
This was the deal we got into in the very, very beginning.
They were wrong.
It's a very complex thing.
Like, they were the actual heirs of the Founding Fathers.
It just so happens that they were all fucking wrong.
Well, and if you're listening to this and you're still confused about what critical race theory is, it's that sentence you just said right there.
Basically, the complicated idea that they weren't necessarily wrong with what they were fighting for in the South.
That truth You know, is the underlying thing about critical race theory, right?
Really, you know, and that, and that, by the way, in some respects, you're almost like defending the South in some weird way, or at least putting in a situation where they, you know, you can see things from both sides.
Well, you start, so again, the contradiction between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is like the inherent contradiction of America.
Like, how do you, how do you release a document that says all men are created equal, and then you have a constitution that upholds slavery?
The problem with America is right from the very beginning of America, and we've talked about this before, all of these guys, these smart, smart dudes, even Alexander Hamilton, and like all of these other founding fathers who thought themselves the smartest people imaginable because they were wealthy white men, right?
They thought they could get around the Civil War by going ahead and making these compromises.
The Civil War was inevitable, right?
It was always going to get to that point.
And the problem is that that contradiction at the heart of the founding of America, it was the wrong decision to make at the time.
The Confederate States of America carried on that tradition, and it was the wrong decision at that time, but when you look at it, it was inevitable.
Always from that point, and the fact that we never actually dealt with it.
I'm sorry we brought the South back in.
We allowed the South to basically circumvent democracy.
Reconstruction failed.
And I don't know about you, looking around, we still have the same fucking Constitution that got us into the mess in the first place.
So yeah, it's basically looking at America and not thinking that Jesus Christ, like, came down from the heavens and wrote these things.
Which is, honest to God, what a lot of people actually do believe.
They believe they are divine documents as opposed to basically horse bartering.
Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, some sect thinks that he, after the resurrection, came here.
Some, some people do.
Right?
Like that is a legitimate, that's something that people believe.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I, my fogginess, I remember something about reading about that.
So, uh, yeah, yeah.
I mean, and you know, and then we're right back to separation of church and state and all those things, which it becomes, maybe that's the other kind of inevitable, uh, thing is that we just learn less and less about our history and learn less and less about the constitution, about the Declaration of Independence.
And as a result, It all just becomes cloudy and cloudier and more vague, and now nobody knows what it stands for, and people are angry about it, and here we are.
Well, and let's go ahead and let's bring the camera out from the 18th century, right?
This idea of liberalism, and let's go ahead and throw conservatism in there, right?
These are the two poles of modern politics, right?
So we have the Declaration of Independence, which is basically the personification of liberalism, right?
The Constitution is a conservative document, which is all about making sure that you have the highest of the high who are ruling the country, and they're making the right choices, and everybody else needs to shut the hell up and just get in place.
One of the funny things that actually happens, like right from the very, very beginning, and remember, They didn't want parties, right?
They were just like, oh, factions are terrible.
There's immediately parties just immediately, because why?
Why would all wealthy people agree on the right direction of the country?
Right.
So they immediately immediately have a schism.
So you start having the Federalists, who are like George Washington, John Adams.
Well, guess what?
During the French Revolution and all that business, do you think they sided with the French, or do you think they sided with England?
They sided with England.
They were anti-revolutionary.
Then, of course, you have people like Jefferson, who are siding with France.
You already have in the beginning of the country a battle.
Between liberalism and conservatism.
And when you look at that, there's a direct line to where we are now because the Federalists were basically royalists.
They just didn't want a king over top of them.
They replaced it with an executive who knew better than anybody else.
They created a government that would keep people under control and keep power in the right hands.
That's where we are now.
So it's no shocker that the right reads the Declaration of Independence like, fuck you, buddy.
How dare you take a shot at us?
Because they are opposing documents.
Well, I would be remiss if I didn't at least defend the design of, you know, a co-equal branches of government with three of those.
Like, at least on paper, they tried, right?
No, not really.
I mean, they tried to go ahead and limit the influence of regular people in the House of Representatives, and then they went ahead and created the Presidency, the Senate, and the Supreme Court so that the best among them could keep the House of Representatives at bay.
I mean, the creation of the government, and if you actually read the words of Madison and the people at the, he came and called the Constitutional Convention because, I just want to remind everybody, they did not have a mandate to actually write the Constitution.
They were there to edit the Articles of Confederation.
But, you know, if you actually go and look at the words of the people who framed the Constitution, they're like, oh my god, the people are dumbasses.
And, like, if you allow them to control this government, it's done.
And that's actually some of the roots of liberalism.
It's the idea, right, that like, yeah, you can have limited amounts of freedom, individual liberties and all of that, but they do need to be kept in check.
They do not lead to greatness.
They can lead to degeneration.
Yeah.
And listen, if we let like, let's just say the southern states after the Civil War, for instance, if they were able to rally enough like votes, like in theory, somebody could have probably passed a law to like make slavery illegal again.
And then they could have whipped up so many votes in the South.
And like that could have happened.
Right.
Like in theory is a democratic process.
So there's another argument for that where we have that's that's another reason to be careful about letting, you know, enough people vote in.
Did we finally get to that point?
of that too, right?
Well, we'll see it with segregation and like, you know, needing the federal government to force local governments to actually uphold those laws too.
So it's fascinating.
If we ever get this to where we want it to go, where everybody gets to vote, where it's easy.
I mean, listen, did we have that in 2020?
Did we finally get to that point?
I mean, it was pretty close, wouldn't you say?
It's getting there.
I mean, obviously we now have multiple states that are trying to roll back the vote.
I mean, these are symptoms of that federalist mentality, which, again, it goes back to it.
Like, man, I was just doing research last night on the 19th century, and you have, like, the Know-Nothings.
And the Know-Nothings are a nativist, MAGA-like grouping in the 19th century who are against, you know, Irish immigrants, German immigrants.
Oh, the Pope is going to take over America.
The Pope's already taken over America.
They're going to polling places and keeping the quote unquote wrong people from voting.
Right.
These are cycles.
This is what happens.
And what we're seeing now with both MAGA, but also like the Federalist Society and all these people who are like obsessed with conservativism.
They want to roll back that opportunity for universal suffrage.
They want the right people.
I mean, we read that.
It was the National Review.
They said, do we really want more people voting or do we want better people voting?
And there's a very specific better person that they're interested in voting.
Well, you know, it's it's funny that you say it that way, too, because let me just read kind of read one of the articles here in the Declaration of Independence, because it's a list by the end of this of the King George's Does that sound a little familiar?
Doesn't it?
One of them says is he has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
Does that sound a little familiar?
Doesn't it?
Doesn't it sound a little bit like what the right and the Republicans have been doing for redistricting for the last 10 or 12 years anyway?
Oh, I mean, listen, the fingerprints are all over this.
And if you actually look at the things that are happening right now with modern conservatives...
Let's go ahead and go back post-Napoleon, 19th century.
And what you end up having is this, we would call it Metternich, right?
Metternich was this conservative diplomat.
And the whole idea was, oh my god, did you pay attention to what happened in the French Revolution?
You see what happens when the people get their way?
Well now all of a sudden you need to create a system where You start moving things around because you are one of the white and wealthy who is one of the better people.
You start moving people around.
You start doing things like redistricting.
You just start throwing people off voter rolls.
And by the way, if somebody goes ahead and makes the wrong vote, tell me if this sounds familiar.
Just wipe it out!
Just wipe it right out like they didn't have the right to vote in the first place.
They're obviously criminals and obviously the election was stolen.
And so what you end up seeing is the mindset of the conservative in the right is, unless everything goes my way, The election is rigged.
The election is wrong.
The election has been stolen.
Obviously, I know better why doesn't the rest of the world comport and conform to what I believe and what I think.
Yeah, and by the way, even just the mental capacity of King George as he deteriorated by the end of his life is a very interesting parable to what Donald Trump is.
In fact, watching the madness of King George, I have to watch it again, would probably just feel like I'm watching the Trump administration again in some weird way.
I bet you that's what it's like.
And more and more of these rats are leaking more information about what it was like in those offices during his administration. - Yeah, these dispatches from the final days of the Trump administration, particularly around January 6th, you couldn't find anybody.
Everybody who had thought better had just left it like a rat leaving a ship.
On top of that, you got Trump, you got Giuliani, who's just literally melting at that point, running around showing people YouTube videos.
Like literally showing people YouTube videos with strategies on how to overthrow the government of the United States of America.
I mean, think about, like, back in those days, if YouTube would have been available.
I mean, some of these tyrants, some of these people who are just not well, I mean, that's not a hard comparison to make, really.
Well, how about this?
Does this sound familiar to you?
The next line I'm going to pull out here says, He King George has endeavored to prevent the population of these states for that purpose obstructing the laws of natural for naturalization of foreigners refusing to pass others to encourage their mitigation migrations hither and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.
You know, this is, again, closing borders, refusing immigrants from legally naturalizing here.
I mean, it's crazy.
Well, let's go ahead and take the next jump.
Let's talk about, again, the difference between the Declaration and the Constitution.
The second President of the United States of America.
Number two, not distant, John Adams.
Right?
John Adams, who ends up becoming sort of the poster boy for Federalist thought.
Well, he starts looking around and he's like, I don't know if I'm gonna win this election.
Maybe we need to start throwing people out.
Maybe we need to start looking at immigrants who are coming in because they might be coming from France and they might bring revolution with them.
Right?
Like they might infect the body proper.
The second president of the United fucking States of America goes ahead and takes what we're talking about, brings it into the new order because they are again strict hierarchies.
Ugh.
Well, should I keep going?
I've got a couple more for you.
I love it.
Do it.
Do it.
I love going through this shit.
Like, the Declaration is endlessly fascinating.
Yeah.
And then we'll all go watch, you know, National Treasure.
National Treasure?
Why is that called?
It sounds strange.
Whatever the Nic Cage movie is.
National Treasure?
Turn on your mic.
National Treasure.
Yeah, anyway, so I'll watch after this, but nonetheless, here's the next one.
He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.
This echoes, you know, telling people, citizens to ignore subpoenas.
It echoes Mitch McConnell refusing to have, you know, Hearings for judges from the Supreme Court and let's go ahead and let's go between liberalism and conservatism so Hopefully this works.
This is a very complex thing.
I'm gonna try and boil it down into like a 15-20 second thing within liberalism You take the authority of kings, so like back in the day, right?
The king says something, you're like, well, he's deemed by God, we gotta follow what he says.
Liberalism goes ahead and takes that edict of God, that authority that the king has to make anything happen, and it goes ahead and boils it down to the law.
The law is the secularization of that Sovereignty, right?
So you have to obey the laws.
You have to agree that the laws are there to be obeyed.
And if you start violating them, all of a sudden you're going back to hierarchical sovereignty through God.
God told me I should do this.
I am the right one to do this.
That, by the way, for those keeping track at home, is also fascism.
It's the exact same way that that works.
You start saying the laws are for other people.
The law is my weapon to use against them.
So in this case, what we're actually talking about is the rolling back of liberal democracy in order for thugs, tyrants, and demagogues to start doing what they feel, what they think they should be allowed to do.
Which exactly, there's a long line to draw between those.
Sure.
Now, you know, there's a lot of interesting things about this.
Like, do people, you know, avoid committing crimes because they're just simply afraid of being arrested?
Or do they have some sense of right and wrong?
These are things that also weigh, I'm sure, weighed on them when they were trying to figure out how to design this thing.
By the way, it's also part of the response we've seen from the Trump, you know, Eric Trump, with this new indictment and how they're trying to just sort of Cast it off as like, oh, we had a company car and he had, you know, we, you know, he had an apartment from the company.
That's not, it's not a big deal.
Everybody does that.
You know, that's not subject to like being criminalized.
1.7 million dollars, Nick.
1.7 million dollars.
It doesn't sound, it doesn't sound right.
Sounds like it should be a lot more than that.
You know, especially because you're talking about covering school tuitions, which are $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year easy for multiple kids across multiple years.
You know what I mean?
I feel like there's a lot of, you know, who knows exactly what that's going to be.
I feel like there's probably more.
But it's interesting to see the reaction to it where it's like they – it's such a – they scoff at that as if there's like how dare you bother me with any kind of taxes.
Well, that's walking around money.
Yeah.
That's what that is.
That's not that big of a deal when you're the Trumps.
And that's the whole point is one – we have created in this country an aristocracy.
We have created a group of people who – are not only seen as being above the law, they're above the law.
They don't suffer consequences.
The law is for other people.
And by creating that circumstance, we have created within America our very own royal type class.
They are the ones.
And if you want to go all the way back to something like a Rome, I mean, like that is exactly how Rome was actually like, you know, how it was handled, how it was administered.
There's one group that the law is for, and the other group just takes care of the law and is above it.
And that's what we've created in this country.
Yeah.
Well, there's more here.
Apparently, my memory just remembers a little bit where King George would force, or the British troops were allowed to just take over someone's house and stay there, and they were complaining about that.
But also, They were yelling at King George for protecting these British troops by a mock trial from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states.
Well, you know, you could kind of take that lens and move it into like, you know, police, you know, and these mock trials that we've had for decades and a long, long time of our thing where they were there simply let off.
And it was a ridiculous mock trial.
So, I mean, we haven't gotten very far.
How about this for cutting off our trade with all the other parts of the world?
You know, we saw Trump try and do that and it almost caused a trade war and it's caused higher prices for farmers for nothing, you know, for no reason.
We got no benefit from that.
You know what I mean?
It's like every one of these lines continues to address Trump, which again, which is why the right is freaking out about these things, thinking that they are criticizing him because it sounds just like it.
Well, and this is one of the reasons why we've seen the right and the Republican Party in their complete constellation of stupid-ass pundits Rally around the English, you know, royal family.
This is what they want.
This is who they are.
When we read these, like, I mean, my God, it was a couple of years ago when Trump was coming into fruition.
You start reading all these things like the National Review and even Ross did that in New York Times.
They're like, oh, I miss the wasps.
You know, the people like your George W. Bushes.
They had created their own group of ruling class people who they believed were.
And this again, it's it's hereditary.
They believe it goes through bloodlines.
They believe it's shown through profit and wealth.
And as a result, this is why we have reached this point where the right is embracing things like monarchism.
I mean, they really, like, did you see this?
There was a shirt that was seen at the last Trump rally, and it was like the Trump dynasty.
And it had Trump's years in office.
Then it had Don Jr., Ivanka, Eric, and then Barron.
And like it was just this big long list.
They had the years down and everything.
That's what a lot of people actually want.
Like they actually want to go ahead and assert a complete rewinding of all of the liberal democracy and create a dynasty of their own accord and their own profit.
Well, between the Bushes and the Clintons, it kind of felt like that way anyway in some weird twisted ways.
So it's astounding to me that, you know, why do you hate our country, Jared?
But here's the thing.
It's really a matter of what we want.
Do you really want democracy?
Do we really want what was outlined in this document and in the Constitution?
Because it just doesn't sound like they do.
It sounds like they want what you just described.
And they're okay with that.
And we're the ones who are, you know, these ridiculous liberal people who want to destroy the country for it.
But that is really the question.
Whether you believe what was outlined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is how we should run the country.
Well, I'll say this.
I think they'd be fine with the original Constitution.
I mean, there's a reason why, you know, Scalia and all these Federalist people are all about it.
They would be totally fine in getting back to 1789 and ruling the country through a ruling class of white, wealthy men at the expense of everybody else.
I think they'd be totally fine.
Well, let me ask you this.
If you were to talk to even, you know, a person on the right, you would probably be able to get them to admit or to acknowledge that from 1789 till whatever, 100 years, there was a very strict class system in our country where there was not a lot of mobility or whatever you're born to is where you're going to be stuck, right?
Like they would probably be able to agree with that, right?
It depends on who you're talking to, because there's a very, very huge divide between people who understand this, right?
Like the people who are actually studied in this, and again, this goes back to education, this goes back to mythologies, and other people who literally, Nick, they look at American history and they're like, it's been Candyland this entire time.
It's just been Popsicles and Liberty everywhere.
And the difference between those two groups, I mean, the latter is what Trump sold them.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, America was great from its very, very beginning, and then it fell apart at some unnamed time, which, I don't know, probably is desegregation, more or less.
And that latter group literally doesn't understand any of this, doesn't know any of this.
It's actually been kept from them behind a waving banner veneer.
Okay, because I'm thinking like even the pop culture things that we've seen of movies or books of like from those that era, you know, from 1800 to 1900 robber barons and this is notion like, you know, there was disease and you know, there wasn't a lot of technology going on yet until the railroads all these different things.
I don't know.
It seems like it'd be reasonable for someone to be like, well, yeah, of course, we, you know, wasn't we had, you know, a very, you know, there wasn't a lot of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and becoming successful like that.
And I mean, and I bring it up in that sense, because if you could get that far with them and they can acknowledge that, then it feels like they're saying, OK, then why are you arguing to bring it back to the Constitution and what that represents?
Even if you're talking about a guy like Alito.
Like, why would that be the civilization that you want us to go back to when clearly it wasn't equal for everybody and there wasn't opportunities for everybody?
Because one of the things that you just said betrays the entire purpose of the conversation that you are just proposing.
By talking about the fact that people were living in squalor versus the fact that accumulation of capital and wealth was at an all-time high.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, so one of the things that some, you know, some of these scholars would hear, and we're talking about people who know American history at this point, right?
They would say, why would you want to get in front of your Vanderbilts?
Why would you want to get in front of your Morgans?
Why would you, I mean, they, they built the railroads.
They created modern industry.
They put together, you know, the, the telegram and telegraph and all of that, like, Look at the incredible things they were able to do.
They raised up America from a regional power into a world superpower.
And they did that because of laissez-faire, hands-off, government doesn't get involved in any of this shit.
Well, you started the conversation from the fact that no people were subjugated and suffering.
They would start the conversation from no titans of industry.
Look what they did when the government got away from them.
And so you're actually living in two different realities at that point.
Just read Rudyard Kipling's stories about the slaughterhouses in Chicago and you know that wasn't just a little one-year snippet of a day in the life of somebody in Chicago.
Yeah, Kipling was all about that shit yeah but I mean it's you know right now it's funny we're having this conversation I'm researching social Darwinism right now which is this idea that like you know survival of the fittest And I just read a book, it was called, What Do the Social Classes Owe Each Other?
And basically the thesis is, they owe nothing to each other.
If you are a failure, then you are a parasite.
And that can get hidden behind flowery, star-spangled language, but that's what people mean when they say liberty.
You and I, when we're talking about liberty, we're thinking about the ability to say what we want, go where we want, hang out with the people we want, have opinions.
That's not what people believe.
They believe liberty is about you're able to do with your property and your wealth what you want.
And that's a very essential American idea.
It's that sort of a twisted, bastardized version of what it is.
Sure.
Well, as long as you're rich enough to not have lead in your paint on the walls or in your drinking water, which causes all sorts of behavioral issues too.
I just saw something recently where they were able to track when the unsafe levels of lead could somehow then lead to crime.
You know, in kids who are exposed to that much lead.
It's fascinating to me in the sense of like the social economic implications of that, of just like, you know, by virtue of like where, who you're born to, it still seems to dictate what your end of your life is going to be like.
And I really would like to think that the ideals of the country, you know, especially when you hear it from these, you know, These, you know, patriots would not indicate that.
Would everyone have an equal chance to be successful on their own merits?
So this is this is the giant question that we face right now.
This is why we're at a crossroads.
We have to admit that the founding fathers were wrong in a lot of things.
That just because they were white and wealthy and powerful at the time doesn't mean that they were perfect or that they understood the future.
Or, I mean, again, the main problem is they thought that white, wealthy men were the best arbiters of the future.
But this is something we're going to be talking about a lot, because I think this is the, again, I think it's the definition of the crisis of the time.
And so on that note, we're going to bring on Chauncey DeVega of Salon.com and the Chauncey DeVega Show, and we're going to have a conversation, and then we'll be right back.
Hey everybody, a special treat today.
Audience fan favorite, the phenomenon, Chauncey DeVega is on the Muckraker Podcast, back by popular demand.
How are you doing, buddy?
The phenomenon.
I sound like a professional wrestler.
AJ Styles is going to sue me.
Something along those lines.
How are you?
You know, I reached out to do this because I was like, you know what?
It's a very special July 4th.
So I said, who would I like to spend this wonderful July 4th with?
Or at least have folks have something to listen to this conversation.
So of course I emailed you and you are so very busy styling and profiling.
And now here we are.
You know, Chauncey, I don't know how your July 4th was last year, but I still shake my head thinking about Donald J. Trump standing at Mount Rushmore.
And at that point, every flag and every gesture, all of the pomp and circumstance and all of that just absolute BS American exceptionalism.
It was like watching something out of a David Lynch film for me.
And I'm glad I'm not going to have to look at that.
But I have to tell you, that was That was like looking back in the rearview mirror of America and just seeing, you know, it's like you just drove through an eight-car pileup and everything was just on fire and smoldering.
That's what this feels like to me.
Well, I use two metaphors.
One is we're in the center of a hurricane, The eye wall is approaching us to continue the devastation.
But in terms of movies, you know, the story isn't over.
And that's what's so frustrating to me.
You and I have been trying to tell folk, this is so far from over, you have no idea the hell that is coming at you.
But what do they do?
They laugh at Donald Trump's pants.
These hope peddlers and others, I just wrote something about this.
What do they do?
You got the public up here actually believing some of them.
I feel almost bad for these folks.
That Trump's going to jail?
There's one person on the internet, Twitter, who I will not call out.
This person is on there 10 times a day, Trump going to jail.
I don't know what alternate universe these people live in, but the American people, and so many of the quote-unquote professional smart people, are in such a state of denial about how horrible this is.
And when certain things happen imminently, they're, again, 2nd January 6th, they're gonna be sitting there shocked and surprised, all these revelations.
No.
It's not a crisis of imagination.
You're in denial.
It's total denial.
And you know what it reminds me of?
You know, when I was doing the research for American Rule.
You know, I was coming across this conservative movement in Hollywood, and I'm talking about back in the days where, you know, Ronald Reagan was not just turning in his friends and ratting on them as an FBI informant, but back in the days where, you know, they were pushing these codes.
And these codes told people how they were to make movies and TV shows.
And basically, popular culture was to show America as a place of fairness, as exceptional, obviously.
And one of the things that had to happen within these shows is the bad guy or the crook or the criminal always had to get caught and face their comeuppance.
There had to be a belief in the omnipresence of American justice.
And, you know, over the last few years, we've been involved in like, you know, watching prestige TV or watching, you know, these postmodern movies in which morality is, you know, more colors of gray.
But I really think that people are reverting back to that fantasy, Chauncey.
I think they truly want to believe that the worst is behind us.
And so as a result, the bad guy has to get caught in the end and has to, you know, face the consequences of what they've done.
But we have history.
We know that white, wealthy, powerful men in this country very, very, very rarely face the consequences of their actions.
You know, to look at what's happening with Trump, people are believing, to a large degree, in fairy tales that have absolutely no relationship with reality whatsoever.
And then, you know, that fantasy life is a way of them, as you said, to have the fantasy to resolve cognitive dissonance.
Yep.
Because you think about all the things that they've learned.
I just talked to Dr. Justin Frank about this the other day.
So you're a naive, white American.
Could black and brown folk know better?
We know about fascism.
Jewish brothers and sisters.
Roma.
First Nations.
Some white brothers and sisters, too, who know the history and whose people have experienced it.
We saw this coming, right?
So, capital W, capital A, white America, right?
What did they learn?
They learned that their president doesn't care if they live or die.
He commits democide.
Your president is a crook.
Your democracy is a sham.
Literally, for a lot of these folks to have a president who didn't care if they lived or died, actually was trying to kill them.
If you look at what Trump was doing with black and brown communities, blue states of this country, blue areas, major cities, these quote-unquote revelations, he didn't give a damn, he just cared about getting re-elected.
And if he could kill, literally, directly or indirectly from this pandemic, black and brown folk and others who quote-unquote are not real Americans who don't vote for him, All the better.
So you make a list.
You saw a coup, something that you never thought you'd see in this country.
You certainly got to talk about that, because that was a coordinated attempt.
Yep.
Trump repeatedly tried to have a military coup in this country.
I wrote about it, a few others.
It is woefully underreported because it's too damn scary.
So you look at autumn fictions being shattered?
A lot of folks, they ain't made for that.
So what do you do?
Retreat to the lie.
Retreat to the fantasy.
You grab your blankie and you snuggle up.
And you lie to yourself that everything's gonna be okay, but it's not gonna be okay.
It's gonna get far worse.
Yeah, and to be honest, the only way to prevent it from getting worse is to look it in the face and understand not just what's happening, but what is possible.
And the delusion and the denial, there's so many different There are a lot of people who they still live in this mythological America, again, where the good went out.
There is a working meritocracy.
Democracy is, you know, this amazing, beautiful thing that we've always had.
Uh, and, and, you know, our history is about winning our independence.
And then, yeah, there was a problem with racism, but we licked it in the civil war.
And of course, we're jumping over a lot of really important things.
I mean, there's a reason why they're attacking history.
There's a reason why they're trying to get rid of the information that explains how this oppression has worked and how this systematic, uh, exploitation has occurred.
I think that there are people who willingly live in that fantasy.
There are other people who don't even understand it's a fantasy.
And my God, Chauncey, there are some people who are making a lot of money off of this entire situation.
They're lying to the people.
They're telling them that everything is totally, totally fine.
And again, like you said, it's too horrific to really look at in the face for everybody.
You know, here we are.
We're recording this in July.
We're just a few months removed from an attempted coup.
And you know, this is one of those things where, let's go ahead and get into it.
People want to make it a joke.
They're like, oh, is it just a bunch of bullshit queuing on people and a bunch of MAGA people who are probably tailgating in the parking lot?
Well, that's not.
correct whatsoever.
The president of the United States of America organized this thing, directed it, and on the ground mixed in with those people were some really dangerous operators, people who train as paramilitary groups, people who have as part of their espoused world philosophy, either people who have as part of their espoused world philosophy, either the crumbling of American democracy or a violent coup who have been looking for They want to create a theocratic white ethnostate.
They want to recognize fascism as a world order.
And then meanwhile, let's go ahead and pull back the curtain.
This is, and you know it as well as I do, nobody wants to talk about this because it's horrific.
Most of those groups have been working hand-in-hand with federal enforcement groups such as the FBI and the informants.
I mean, you had the leader of the Proud Boys picked off the street the day of.
You have a bunch of people who have been arrested from the attempted coup who go in and they're like, I don't know what to tell you, I'm an FBI informant.
They had intelligence operators there.
We had members of the military, members of the Republican Party's ruling class.
This thing was a massive, massive operation that people want to pretend like it didn't happen.
They want to pretend like it was laughable.
And even the people who were horrified on January 6th are now like, oh, you know, maybe I was scared at the time, but I was wrong.
It wasn't that big of a deal.
Let's move on.
Everything's fine.
That delusion is what is going to ensure that things get worse, and as long as we live in that denial, there's no doubt about it that this thing's gonna get worse.
I mean, and on that point, because you study these folks, these white supremacists, the neo-Nazis, the far-right, and I don't even use that language, far-right, anymore because they are the Republican Party.
The Republican Party is a right-wing extremist organization, a lot of research on par with what you see in Hungary at this point, or Poland, right?
So even our language has to adjust, and the centrists love to do that.
Oh, you know, bipartisanship, reasonable disagreement.
No, we're post-normal politics.
What does bipartisanship get you?
Compromising with a right-wing, fascist organization.
Well, then you're just as dirty as they are if you compromise with them.
But you see, that's too much realpolitik.
That's why you don't see me on the TV that much.
I get myself in trouble telling too much truth.
But you think about what happened that day, and I think you and I alluded to this last time, which I did, and so many folk in the mainstream corporate news media, either because they don't have the vocabulary, the imagination, or they're just terrified to say it, They saw an idea.
If you're a fascist, right?
Member of the global right?
Hell, even if you were a white supremacist trading newsletters back in the 70s, you saw something on January 6th you had dreamed of.
You saw your forces overrun the Capitol.
And that is a very, very powerful idea.
Now they know what's possible.
They almost succeeded in their coup.
So now you got the power of an idea, and as part of that idea, and this gets to Trump, this gets to their new, um, because they're always making heroes, right?
They're making martyrs.
They love to do this.
You've seen the woman who was at the Capitol coup attack.
She's killed.
They're trying to say she's innocent.
Right?
They're doing all this fundraising for her.
You got Kyle Rittenhouse.
You can go down the list.
Trump is making himself into a martyr.
And I don't know what the Democrats, progressives, or the left, if they don't understand the imaginary they're up against, Yeah, and what you're talking about is the actual reality of the situation.
They simply don't understand storytelling and symbols and ideas.
These folks won that day.
I don't care if a thousand of them go to prison.
They won the power of that idea.
They know what's possible. - Yeah, and what you're talking about is the actual reality of the situation.
I mean, people, this is one of those things with Donald Trump.
Like, of course, everybody, you know, on like a social media, they want to spend a lot of time making fun of the way that he looks, the way that he talks, his ridiculous nature, and they want to treat him like he is a clown.
But it's not about Donald Trump.
It's about the fact that Donald Trump and those around him and what he represents, those people have now introduced to the political reality of America possibilities.
And in the past, you know, the Republican Party used to flirt with these people.
I mean, Newt Gingrich and, you know, you even have Wayne LaPierre with the NRA.
For years, they flirted with what at that time you would have called the far right.
Right.
Right.
These were people that they, you know, used to be dog whistles, EU.
Used to be talking about the New World Order every now and then and talking about, you know, Democratic liberals who are working against America.
And meanwhile, people like Timothy McVeigh, their ears pricked up and they knew exactly what was being said to them and what was being fed to them.
That wall is gone.
It is one base at this point.
It is one anti-democratic fascistic movement at this point.
And Every time these things are introduced, you're exactly right.
Because all of a sudden, it used to be, here's a very narrow type of political reality that you can live within.
And, you know, I was thinking a lot because Donald Rumsfeld, the war criminal, died the other day.
I was thinking a lot about George W. Bush.
And George W. Bush was absolutely a disgusting human being.
But there was even a moment with George W. Bush where post 9-11 he was like, oh, I need to go out and say that Muslims as a whole are not our enemy.
You know, he might have believed it, he might have believed that he was involved in a holy war and a crusade, but he was like, I have to walk back this idea.
I have to put it under, you know, lock and key.
That's gone.
None of that, like, even those people who were more than willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people, they aren't even, like, they would look at this, I mean, you even see how Bush is trying to be rehabilitated.
But the idea is really powerful.
And once it becomes clear, and you and I know this, and I think a lot of the listeners right now know this as well, All of this is a fabrication.
All of it is a social construct.
A constitution, a country, human rights, the bounds of good taste and dignity, democracy.
These are things we agree upon and they exist because we agree upon them and we play within their imaginary boundaries.
But the moment that you start to realize you don't have to play within those boundaries and You can profit and gain power by not playing within those bounds, which is what has happened not just in the Republican Party but within corporate America and in the capitalist society we live in.
It becomes very clear very quickly that if you're not destroying democracy, you're losing.
And so we now have a point where you're exactly right.
January 6th cannot be the end of something.
We have not treated it as the end of something.
We've treated it as just another rest stop on the way towards a longer destination that we're going to inevitably reach until we start realizing that that destination is possible.
Now here's one, you know, pulling, you know, breaking the fourth wall, you know, our own internal lives and how we think about this because I very often I think, you know, And it's not a judgment.
I just think it's a fact.
A lot of folks, you know, they read your work, they listen to a podcast, they may hear you on the radio.
They're like, okay, these people have the answers, you know?
What do they say we should do?
How are they making sense of it?
You know?
So I so appreciate those emails.
And I tell folk back, I'm like, I'm just as confused some days as you are.
But I think we got to be transparent about, you know, the world moving under our feet, our feet rather, and all this confusion.
And I think we get power from that, right?
But here's what I'm just working with an idea, right?
That also leaves you very vulnerable because a lot of the quote-unquote professional smart people, as wrong as they are, they operate with absolute certainty.
Absolutely.
And that's why they have no credibility, because they're wrong so often.
They never say they're wrong.
They never apologize.
They never explain why they thought this and what they misunderstood.
But have you figured that out for yourself?
Because I try to be transparent and be like, you know, I think I even wrote something about it a few weeks ago.
I was like, you gotta be honest about your disorientation.
This is a disorienting moment and that's how fascism wins.
You're imposing fake certainty on something you really don't understand.
I think that's very irresponsible.
I do too.
And you know, this is something, I came to this realization during the pandemic.
You know, I've been working on this book, you know, that basically is getting us to this fascistic crisis.
I started back in Rome, and I just did this reconsideration of Western civilization, or so-called Western civilization, because I wanted to understand how we had reached this point, because I don't think you can come up with a solution before you understand the actual problem.
I mean, I think that's one of the issues here.
And if you actually look at this, and you're being honest with yourself, and you look at it, you take it in, you analyze it, and you let it sit in your heart, what you realize very quickly Is that we're at the end of something.
And, you know, to go ahead and just bring it up into higher terms, we're at the end of the liberal democratic experiment.
We're at the end of an epoch.
We're at the end of this particular type of capitalistic exploitation.
Neoliberalism has shown itself to be a dead system that doesn't even win the things that it claims to win.
If we're going to get out of this, and let me tell you something, because you and I, we do not enjoy blowing smoke up people's asses.
There's a very thin window.
It's almost like that Star Wars point where Skywalker needs to shoot the missile inside of that duct, but it's a much smaller duct, right?
Whatever the answer is, it's going to have to be a massive, massive revolutionary type answer that I don't even know that if we have the political imagination to have it because quite frankly we've been fed all the wrong facts.
We've lived in a very convenient delusion and daydream for so long But it would have to be something that has not revealed itself, because what happens with fascism is it says, oh, we're at the end of a line.
Here is an alternative.
And fascism provides itself as an alternative as older systems start to self-destruct.
So if we are going to find a way out of this, you're exactly right.
You have to first admit that you don't have all the answers, because to have the answers would mean that fascism wouldn't take place in the first place.
You have to find something new.
You have to find a new direction that is better and realer and more human.
But that is, again, that's a very, very thin window, I think.
Now here's a brass tacks, on the ground, fundamental question I've been struggling with.
So you, you're the wise man, you teach me.
When someone threatens to kill you, Shouldn't you believe him?
My father fought in World War II and he always said, people threaten to kill you, take them at their word.
And I also say that as someone who was almost killed in a robbery.
Had a gun in my face.
People put guns in your face, they're gonna kill you.
So you've got this whole right-wing movement literally telling everyone else they are going to kill you.
They say it on OAN.
Last week, Tucker Carlson is basically saying it.
They've gone from stochastic terrorism to outright threats, public threats.
But it seems like no one is acting like this is real deal.
They're always making excuses.
This isn't hyperbole or a joke.
This is a fascist movement that kills people and has killed people and wants to kill many, many, many more people.
How do we explain this to people?
Help me understand the levels of denial here, or what the hell's going on.
Do you want to get in the weeds for a minute?
Where do you want to go?
Are you driving a car?
Are we driving it together?
Let's have a weird conversation that would probably be more at home around 3 a.m.
in the midst of a road trip.
You know, I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think a large part of American society and culture can be explained through the cult of the individual, particularly because we're talking about America.
Let's talk about white, cis, patriarchal America.
Um, we have basically been conditioned to believe that we are the protagonist.
And by we, I mean the individual.
That we are the protagonist of history.
That we have been chosen for some amazing task.
Well, in that story, how did things not work out?
You know, like it's like people, you know, when they're in the midst of a disaster or their lives are falling apart, you'll hear them say, this isn't what I thought life would be like.
This isn't how things should happen.
This isn't the life that I imagined for myself.
And so there's like a reality bending arc around people.
I know I would say Americans are at the forefront of this.
Where I think they look at it and they're like, there's no way there can be a fascist takeover in my life.
Obviously this is going to fix itself out.
I'm not going to be one of the people who dies getting struck by lightning.
I'm not going to get cancer.
I'm not going to have these things occur to me.
It's not how I imagine my reality.
And so I think a lot of people kind of look at this and we've been conditioned as Americans to live in luxury and enjoy the finer things and to treat ourselves.
And I think at a certain point, people look at this and they're like, yeah, this just isn't the story that I imagined for myself.
And so as a result, it is, I think, a personal denial that that and by the way, climate change is like that, too.
Like we look at all of the data that's right there and people are like, yeah, I don't see myself living through a climate apocalypse.
I don't know.
Does that does that sit with you?
Yeah, I mean, you have death anxieties, you have denial, you have, I would add, collective narcissism.
Yep.
Culturally.
I mean, narcissism right now is a public health emergency.
I completely agree.
And you add that all together, and for certain Americans, the ability to bend reality, and this is not my observation, other folks far smarter than me have said this, Whiteness is a social construct and a force, and the ultimate white privilege, on the individual and collective level, is the ability to prevent or deny yourself discomfort.
To choose the terms of your reality.
So you have a whole culture, right, oriented around that, especially for white folk, where literally they can convince themselves of things that aren't true, and because they're the dominant group, they can bend reality around them.
That type of white narcissism, whiteness and narcissism, a lot has been written about it.
And then you just up that a scale, you know, to the whole culture, Our history, our traditions, the lies we tell ourselves?
Maybe it is that simple.
And I think that's why a lot of conservatives and others get so angry when you call out the truth about this country's history.
It's narcissistic injury.
Their identities are tied to the lies, so when you expose the lie, you're hurting them.
I think that's exactly right.
And when you when you start looking at this, and you know, I'm hesitant to say this, but because of the way the right captures linguistic conversation in this country, I have to because they're that talented at it.
This whole critical race theory conversation.
And I want to go ahead and point out, it's not about critical race theory.
Critical race theory is its own thing.
What they have done is they have taken a really well-constructed boogeyman that now encompasses, like you said, everything that makes white Americans feel uncomfortable, which is investigating systems of power, oppression, and actual history.
And so here we are at this point in America where our economy has fallen apart, Uh, the idea of a meritocracy has been completely refuted as, as the fraud that it is.
And so you have a lot of white people who maybe they're not even economically advantaged, but to sit there, they, they have a story about themselves, which is whatever I have right now, whatever privilege, you know, it's not from privilege.
It's something that I've earned.
And it says something about me.
And so as a result, there is a, there's a very base level thing that happens there when, you know, the, the GOP is like, these people are just trying to get one over on you.
And of course we live in not just a narcissistic society, but a zero sum society.
And the internet plays into that.
It's, it's a constant grind to try and get ahead and bolster your own brand or your own standing or your own reality.
And all of these things come together and it's not a coincidence that fascism is rising as that stuff reaches a fever pitch.
And so what we're actually talking about here, and I'd be interested to hear what you have to say, I actually think that this is an existential crisis as well as a political crisis.
Which is America has grown stagnant and, you know, innovation has been held back.
The meritocracy never actually existed.
You now have an economy and culture and political system which is dominated by the wealthiest and most powerful people, which has kept everybody else under their thumb and crushed them.
If we are going to figure this thing out, it needs to be a resurrection of Something there needs to be a recognition that we have lived through a lot of bullshit and a lot of oppressive techniques.
And if you look at history, it's when people recognize that they recognize how they've been lied to and manipulated and oppressed.
Those are the moments where you have actual grassroots.
Uprisings and revolutions that actually change history, but Americans are particularly and singularly inoculated against that because of our own mythology.
It's just more of an observation than a question, insight, because there's a theme to what you said.
There are two things.
Death, right?
Well, this version of capitalism is death.
It's predicated on death and destruction, right?
Absolutely.
They frame it as creative destruction and we're talking about human death, misery, destruction of the environment, gangster capitalism even more so.
We saw during the pandemic all these people died.
That's death, mass death.
What does that do to us individually, collectively, our sense of existence, right?
Existential questions of life and death in a country exposed as being this weak In terms of infrastructure and leadership, this was a character test and a morality test, and a test of how America failed.
So you got that death.
The Republican Party is a death cult.
It's sociopath if you look at its policies.
Literally, they were saying, talk about dystopian, right out of a sci-fi movie, you essential workers, me and Jonathan Lethem were joking about this, you've won the lottery, go out and die for America, for capitalism, because capitalism and democracy somehow are the same things.
They've been conflated that way.
So you got death, death, death.
And then, and I'm very curious as to your thoughts on this, given your background, the apocalypse and Christian fascism.
Do they even want to save the system?
Because the very rich are leaving the planet.
They're gone.
You've got the upper management, who may not be put on the spaceship, but a lot of them, these Christian fascist plutocrats, maybe they want to destroy the world.
They don't care!
Because God's going to rapture them, and maybe they think of themselves as a tool of the apocalypse.
Yeah, and this is a hard thing to get across to people who didn't grow up in the background that I did.
You know, for people who are listening to this for the first time, I grew up in a neo-confederate white evangelical death cult, is more or less what you would call it.
And people don't understand that the Baptists, particularly American Baptists, they are neo-confederate in their belief.
They truly believe in a white supremacist God.
Jerry Falwell carried out that idea, you know, they hid it behind the pro-life movement, but the animating influence on the right at that time was segregation and white supremacy.
And I have to tell you, and I hope that this makes sense, because this is one of those things that is just as plain as day to me.
It's like breathing, but to some people it's very hard to get.
Evangelicals, radical evangelicals, white supremacist evangelicals, We are excited as hell about the apocalypse.
We've been told to expect it.
There's a reason why all of these cults always tell people the end of the world is here.
And when you get told that, it's very important.
It's like being told that you're starting for the Chicago Bulls, Chauncey.
You are in the game!
You are part of the generation that God chose the end of the world because he trusts you.
And now you get to be a soldier in the apocalypse.
You are now going to personally serve the Lord, and that tells you, by the way, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, that you are one of the chosen.
And all of the thoughts that have been fed to you are completely true, and you are going to spend eternity in paradise.
Here's the thing about all that.
Maybe somebody's like, okay, okay, I think I get that.
I think I get that.
What you have to understand is that is the other side of the coin of Al Qaeda and ISIS.
It is the exact same thing as fascism in that regard.
Fascism tells the followers, you know what?
There's power in death.
There is power in destruction.
There's power in the end of the world.
And it's all about facing mortality and feelings of powerlessness and isolation and loneliness and futility and telling people, no, put on the armband, put on the uniform.
You are death personified.
And so what we're talking about here is a moment where politics has moved so far away from the individual.
Like, you're told to vote, sure, but I mean, you know, our government is more or less captured by the wealthy and powerful at this point.
The one way that you can fix that is to put on the armband, to put on the uniform, to become death personified.
And that is, unfortunately, a really seductive call for a lot of people.
You know, a lot has been written about that.
There's a great book now translated a few years ago.
You may have seen it.
It's called Soldaten.
And it's basically looking at diaries and accounts of members of the German military from, you know, death's head SS guards down to infantry on the ground.
And death.
And their experiences of killing.
And their feelings of immortality.
And how they negotiated, you know, putting people in furnaces.
Mass genocide.
And that was one of the themes.
Death everywhere, but I am immortal.
And I live forever through the state.
Through the Hitler concept.
You know, so when you actually read folk writing about this in their own words, there's another book that came out that's probably going to be of interest to folk, too, on these questions of, like, societies and war and death and death culture.
And the person who wrote it, the historian's coming under a lot of fire, but a lot of folks are defending him.
And I got the book right here.
It's called, where is it?
It's called Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself.
And again, this is an account of World War II and the Germans and how after the war, the folks who survived, the folks who survived, the noise back there, The folks who survived, Germans, sent letters and notes to their neighbors who supported the Nazis, telling them to kill themselves, to commit suicide.
And just how a society dealt with all that death?
But here's a personal question.
You know, and feel free to pass, because I've been pretty public about this.
Given what we write about, what do you think this has cost you?
In terms of, like, your life, your energy.
Because I think my number is five years.
I think this has taken five years off my life.
Well, you know, I...
That's such a hell of a question, and I have not talked about this publicly, but you know, I've had heart problems in the past few years.
I'm healthier now, but the stress of not just seeing this, but also like constant harassment and threats, it took a real toll.
And you know, I've got it under control now, but I mean, it was bad.
If you look at me, you know, if anybody wants to go back on the internet, go and find me back in 2016 and 2017 when I was first starting to ring the alarm on this thing.
I, uh, I've got a whole lot more white in my beard and my hair at this point.
You too.
It has, it's aged me and I, I, it's really weird to talk about this and you're one of the few people that, uh, I, I feel comfortable doing it with, but you know, on one hand, I'm really proud of myself for doing it.
There were a lot of frightening times and I had a lot of people that loved me and cared about me who begged me to stop, but I would rather sacrifice five years.
I would.
And I don't want to be one of the people who watches a tank roll into a town and not think that I didn't do enough.
And I think that it has – I think it has exhausted me.
I'm actually, I think it's made me sort of face who I am and who I want to be in a different way, if that makes sense.
And it has clarified life for me, is what I would say.
That sounds like a really grandiose statement, and maybe it should.
You know, I'm nodding with a tear in my eye because of a sense of brotherhood and kinship.
Because we're not alone, but nobody talks about it.
Because, you know, when this, you know, it still is a crescendo, but I've been asked by more than one person in my life You know, girlfriends, you know, others be like, please stop.
This is killing you.
And I, and I said it, I said back to my girlfriend at the time, I said, well, it'll just kill me then or they'll have to kill me.
Cause I'd rather be dead than to lay there and be like, I didn't do something.
I didn't try.
And it's a great sense of utility.
I'm curious too, about how you've dealt with the frustration of utility.
Cause there's some days I joke on Twitter, I'm going to turn heel and I'm not kidding.
A lot of times they got their shit together.
Yeah, I don't... I don't know.
Not so much.
But my conscience won't let me do it.
I mean, why do we persist?
I mean, what do you do with that frustration?
Because when it came out of my mouth, they'll have to kill me.
She looks surprised.
And I said, you don't have something you believe in that much.
I said, I'm a patriot.
They may not think I am, but I love this damn country.
Yeah, I don't.
I don't know.
For me.
When I get frustrated, I what I what I actually do.
And you've been good for this.
Like, you know, let's go ahead and turn the last couple of minutes of this into this sort of a mushy type of situation.
But I have to tell you, it's people like yourself.
And on top of that, it's people like, you know, the readers and the listeners who they care.
They really, really care, and they care for the right reasons, you know?
It's not, and like right now, like we're looking at this climate apocalypse in the face.
Like, there's one way to do it, which is to fund your own space agency and hopefully get yourself to Mars so you can, you know, create your own libertarian kingdom away from the apocalypse.
That's one way.
That's self-preservation.
But the people who I care about and the people that I love and the people I respect, they see this and they understand that they have a part to play in keeping genocide at bay.
And listen, this is not hyperbole and this isn't reactionary.
This isn't trying to make money.
This isn't trying to build a social media brand or to build clout.
If you think right now is bad and right now is bad.
Wait until the climate apocalypse starts taking away land.
Because what you're going to see is you're going to see countries shrink.
And that's never happened before, but I can tell you when resources start to dwindle, that's when things get bad.
If you think forcible sterilization of refugees was a problem, wait to see what happens when that dehumanization deals with millions.
And, you know, you've got that problem, our economy, for people who don't pay attention to economies, These things crash all the time and this thing is on the verge of crashing.
It's, it's a total, total mess.
This, this political and economic system is just, it's running on fumes at this point.
I have to tell you, if we don't take this seriously, if we don't have some sort of a spontaneous revolutionary type situation, if we don't look inside, realize that we don't know anything and then try and find the answer, what we've seen so far, it's, it's, it's going to look small compared to what's coming.
Mmm.
You know, and going back to that personal note, because I'm sure you get emails about this too.
So we got all these crises, right?
And I get emails like this all the time.
How do you write every day?
How do you do these podcasts?
In your case, all the things you do.
I'm sure you get those emails.
And I sometimes, I think I surprise folk when I say, you don't have to fight every day.
You got to take care of yourself.
Don't have a nervous breakdown.
Don't kill yourself.
Don't drink yourself into oblivion.
And that's another story among, you know, folks who write about this and activists and are working on these issues.
So many folks have killed themselves.
Yeah.
Passive and active.
I know of several people who had nervous breakdowns.
So I tell folk, you gotta be in the game, but even soldiers, I call them hope warriors, and that's Dr. King talking about hope warriors, you got to do stuff for yourself every day.
Like one of the things I do every day, I wake up, I got a tear in my eye for the state of the world, and I just feel it.
And then I go for a long walk.
I feed animals.
People laugh at me.
Nothing brings me more joy than going to see a series of movies and just stay in the movie theater all day.
It's another world.
You know, so folk got to take care of themselves or you will burn out in the worst way.
And I think a lot of folk are just so wrapped up in what's happening every day on 20 or 24-7 thinking they got to read everything, doom scrolling, that they're just exhausted because the enemy that we're fighting, they take care of themselves.
And this destruction is fun for them.
I mean, it's part and parcel of the plan.
What you have to understand about authoritarianism and fascism is that its main weapon is the crushing of the spirit.
Yes.
They they want and and and you know this is one of the things it's it's with Trump and everybody around him and the right like They're gleeful in their deception.
Like, there's a reason why their lies are so obviously lies.
You know, one of the things that I keep trying to tell people is they love getting arrested.
They love it because they're not going to be held accountable.
And it actually hurts people to see criminals not get punished.
Right?
Like to watch the system be so broken, make sure that you do not have faith in the system and that you don't have faith in anything.
And what happens eventually is it reaches a point, and this is what they love.
They love reaching a point where you still have elections, but nobody believes in them, right?
Like Vladimir Putin comes out and wins 98% of the vote.
And everyone's like, of course, that's what's going to happen.
They love it when you have rights, but you're afraid to use them, right?
When there's like that soft depression, they want you to feel alone.
They want you to feel powerless.
And they want you to have an apathy or a depression that will destroy you.
And you need to understand that these things are not on accident.
This is their weaponized strategy.
And so the only thing that you can do is find a reason to fight.
If your eye is on the ball constantly, like you said, doomscrolling, looking at all this stuff, well, you start to believe that there's nothing to fight for.
Right?
All of this is terrible.
Why would you fight for it?
Obviously everything is destroyed.
There's nothing beautiful.
That's what they want.
You need to find the beauty in the world that is worth saving.
You need to find faith in yourself and your own dignity, but also look around at the world and find the things that you're going to miss if this thing comes into fruition.
And you have to start having trust in other people.
The only way that this can get beaten back is if we somehow or another realize a new solidarity, a trust and faith in our fellow human beings and in the beauty of the world.
And that is what they're trying to crush out.
That is what they're trying to make extinct.
In that sense of solidarity and joining, folks ask me what to do.
One of the things I tell them is do something local in your community that you can see tangible, immediate benefit from.
It doesn't even have to be public.
Go out and pick up garbage.
Yep.
Do something.
Mentor kids.
Volunteer at the animal shelter.
Do something so you can see change.
And then you have that solidarity with other people doing the same thing and you build it from the ground up.
But if you take on the whole thing as one big monster, you're never going to win.
You know, and that's why people ask me how I'm doing.
I always say, one day at a time.
I got a big plan.
I got a vision.
But one day at a time, and the metaphor I use with folk is, I'm a soldier in a war.
I got to worry about the hill in front of me.
I cannot worry about everything else.
But they win because they overwhelm you and they want you thinking about everything.
Focus on one thing and get really good at it.
And then focus on another thing and get really good in terms of resisting.
Because the powerlessness, the sense of being overwhelmed is how they beat you.
It absolutely is.
And let's take that a step further and, you know, just we can't get too far in the weeds at this point, but let's be, let's be fair about it.
Politics has been turned into a television show for profit.
It's something we're supposed to watch on TV, like American Idol.
We go out to vote every two to four years, but it really doesn't have anything to do with us.
It's a second screen experience.
We voice our displeasure on social media, but it's the same thing as we're rating performances on American Idol.
One of the things that the right is really, really good at is making sure that their people actually participate in a meaningful way.
That's right.
This whole, and again, I hate having to call it this, but this whole critical race theory thing, it isn't just about winning political battles and symbolic things.
It's about making sure that the right is getting into school boards.
And that they're taking over curriculums.
Because I can tell you from studying history that oppression starts with taking out teachers and actual information.
They want to make sure that you don't know what's going on and how you've arrived at this point.
And that makes you a possible voter or a wonderful, oppressive, worthy citizen.
So, I'm sorry, but we're going to have to start caring about our local school boards.
We're going to have to start worrying about our city councils.
It's the same way Newt Gingrich nationalized politics.
It's from the top down.
The right knows what they're doing.
They know how to take over the system as it is.
We're going to have to get some skin in this fight.
We're going to have to spend some hours in some meetings.
Like you said, we're going to have to go out and make sure that we're active parts of our communities.
And that we know people and that we can form that solidarity.
And if it sounds exhausting, it is.
But I can promise you it's so much more rewarding than doomscrolling or having a viral tweet.
So you made a lot of folk upset with that because they think somehow being on the internet is a type of political, substantive political engagement, and there's a great new book out about Twitter politics, political scientists, I forgot her name, Michigan I believe, basically showing that this type of behavior does not translate into substantive political outcomes.
It's all distraction.
And then you factor in, and I know a lot of members of the chattering class get mad when I say this, what is the last number, maybe you've seen it, what is it only like 8% of people are even on Twitter and very few use it frequently?
So you got these folks, I get the business side, But you ain't changing the world doing this.
You're not affecting meaningful political outcomes.
I know you like it because you get a dopamine hit.
Listen, I'm weirdly attached to Twitter for different reasons and purposes, but I have to be honest with people.
I try and use it to educate.
I try and use it to seed information.
I have had to recognize what Twitter is.
And what Twitter is, is it's like a pinball machine.
It's a capitalistic pinball machine.
Where, you know, it doesn't matter how many followers you have, it doesn't matter how many impressions or likes you have, like, it's a system.
It never ends.
There's no end boss, you know?
It's not a platform video game.
It's a pinball machine.
And on top of that, it has led to us, much like corporations who don't give a shit about Black Lives Matter, they don't care about any of this stuff, It leads to people starting to release press releases about their espoused principles.
And in the meantime it's about recognizing that progressive ideals open up demographics.
It makes you more marketable.
It makes sure that you're not going to be penalized in the public space when it comes to people's wallets.
And you can use it for good, but let's not mistake the virtual space for actual reality.
The two interact, the two flirt, and they can be used to deal with one another, but it is not the end-all be-all, for sure.
You know, because I know you're pressed for time, and I'm gonna go for my daily walk, because you're very much in demand.
We're gonna see you on the movies, the TV, everywhere.
And I say, I knew him when.
But very quickly, I got to ask this woman, because you and I, you called it and I called it.
So we have a moment of synergy and people laugh.
They make fun.
They have jokes.
Mr. J.D. Vance, I'll make the prediction.
He's going to be a senator and a vice president.
He may be president, but they laughing at him.
And I just shake my head.
I was like, again, you don't know what you're dealing with.
No.
And listen, I don't know if he's going to win this election, but he is going to play a role for a very, very long time.
Because he serves up the exact kind of home cooking that these people love.
They love someone to come in and be a traitor.
They love somebody to come in and just absolutely throw everybody under the bus, talk about bootstraps mythology.
On top of that, he's had a jet pack put on his back by Peter Thiel and Big Tech and all of those, you know, capital groups.
And no, he's a really, really dangerous dude.
I mean, the best thing that could possibly happen is that he gets, you know, Booted out of the political scene, but I don't see that happening.
I really don't.
But why do they laugh?
I don't want to answer my own question, but why do certain people, mainstream media, commentary, chattering class, why are they always laughing at these people?
Ha ha ha!
Where does the laughter get them?
I don't, I want to understand that psychological process.
Why do you think they laugh?
You know, that's a really interesting question.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact, I had this realization, it was again during the pandemic, which is Twitter is high school.
You know what I mean?
Like, you don't want to seem like you care about things because to care about things means you're lame.
It means you can be made fun of.
You can be ground down.
You want to be ironic.
You want to be above it.
You want to make fun of things through sarcasm.
And, you know, there are a lot of people, and I think you and I know a lot of really intelligent, talented people who they get on Twitter and they're reduced to Weird bullies and they want to perform for it and it just, it takes, it takes calls for caution and alarm and actual intellectual innovation and just sort of like smashes it down into a thousand pieces.
It doesn't reward that, I don't feel like.
And to put a bow on it, you know, because you have to go, correct?
And we'll edit this and pretty it up.
Yeah, I got to jump here in a second.
Yeah, so July 4th.
What's your July 4th message?
You got one?
You know, going back to what we were talking about, man, I think it's a matter of figuring out what you want to save.
Like, don't lose yourself and drown in American exceptionalism.
All that's bullshit.
Like, figure out what's actually worth saving and spend some time looking inside and understanding who you are and maybe who you need to be.
My message is, you willing to bleed?
You willing to suffer?
Because that's what it's going to take.
Because 2022 may be the last chance you even get to vote.
It's something that even appears to be, quote-unquote, free and fair, even though it's not.
And I don't think enough people are ready to bleed and suffer.
Blood, sweat, and tears?
They ain't ready.
That's the $64,000 question, right?
Always a plus.
See, we're both used to being hosts.
So... Do you just want to end it there, or do you have some... Let's bring the plane in for a landing.
Chauncey DeVega, one of my favorite human beings.
Thanks for doing what you do.
Alright everyone, that was Chauncey DeVega of Salon and of The Chauncey DeVega Show.
Always a good thing to have him on.
A crowd favorite, as always.
For sure.
Yeah, so we are going to have a Weekender Edition coming up, and a reminder that is for Patreon subscribers only.
All you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
You get exclusive access to the Weekender Show, which this week we have a big guest.
I had a chance to talk to Bryn Tannahill of American Fascism, who has a really, really good book, How the GOP is Subverting Democracy.
Which I would recommend to everybody.
But we had a really good conversation.
That will be the weekender for this week.
We thank everybody who subscribes on Patreon.
It makes this show possible.
It ensures that we don't have ads.
We do not have editorial oversight.
And it is just absolutely wonderful.
Yeah, thank you.
And this is an amazing community of people who share ideas and share thoughts.
And it makes it feel a lot better to get through these times.
Absolutely it does.
It brings me a lot of hope and a lot of joy.
If you need us, until next time, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
