Texas Democrats have walked out of the state capitol, intent on making a stand for democracy as we know it, as co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how we got to this point and whether Tucker Carlson's influence has won over enough Americans to drive us deeper into an anti-democracy.
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We have a bunch of people running around, particularly progressives, who all they want to talk about is, well, let the people's will be done.
No!
No, no, no.
We don't want the people's will to be done immediately because you have the passions of the majority that... Remember, our Constitution was set up to protect who?
Minority rights, not the majority rights.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared E. H. Sexton.
Fresh off the road, I just drove for like 10 straight hours from the beautiful city of New Orleans.
I'm back, I'm exhausted, and because I have one of the best co-hosts in the game, Nick Alseman, here.
I have all faith that he's going to do the heavy lifting, much like Scottie Pippen during the flu game with Michael Jordan.
He is there.
He's going to take the load.
He's going to make sure that I survive.
I need to stay hydrated.
We're good.
I would be remiss if I didn't pass along the new conspiracy from that game, which was that Michael Jordan did not in fact have the flu, that he was actually hung over.
Hung over.
Yes.
But you're not.
I'm probably a little bit hungover, but I'm good.
I'm ready to go.
It's just like the Jordan flu game.
And, and the good news is that, uh, there's a purpose here.
We have important stuff to talk about.
Uh, while I was gone and while I was traveling, um, a couple of things came to a head, a couple of weird things that we need to talk about.
And, uh, first and foremost, um, we have this divide between the democratic party and the Republican party, um, that has been, Escalating.
We've talked about it a lot.
The GOP, as they grow more and more historically unpopular, have tried to disenfranchise voters, particularly people of color, particularly in what we would call purple states or in red states that are becoming blue states.
The Republican Party continues to make inroads towards disenfranchising while people scream for the Democratic Party to do something.
And meanwhile, in the state of Texas, which, surprise, surprise, is now a solidly purple state, and God knows what would happen there if disenfranchising and gerrymandering wasn't a thing, the Republican Party is again going to try and disenfranchise people, but a little bit of a different thing.
The Democrats from Texas, and we've seen this before, Nick, This is like, for whatever reason, this is sort of their move.
They love doing this.
They say, you know what, we're not going to participate.
We're going to get in buses.
We're going to get on planes.
We're going to get on trains.
We're going to leave the state.
And they have said that they are going to leave the state of Texas.
They're going to go to Washington, D.C.
and plead their case to the Senate Democrats to say this is something they need to take on.
But yeah, it just it keeps escalating.
Isn't that what happened at the Alamo?
Didn't they all just leave and go to D.C.?
Just got up and said goodbye?
I think it probably would have been a better idea than what they ended up doing.
Hey, these are the end times of legislative efficacy, right?
I don't know what else they're supposed to do at this point because clearly the will of the people doesn't mean anything to the Republicans at this point.
Yeah, and listen, this is one of those situations, and I wanted to talk about this a little bit because I want to talk about the ramifications of exactly where we are and what's happening with this process.
You know, I was doing a lot of traveling and thinking, but also, you know, listening and reading to what some people were saying.
There's a weird thing that is happening in this country where there is a escalating feeling That our politics are not just, there's not just a schism.
There is a permanent divide.
And as somebody who's currently writing a book and researching the 19th century and the Civil War of the United States of America, in which you had one side that simply decided that they couldn't work with the other anymore and they were going to take over at all costs and, you know, secede and carry out treason.
It doesn't feel great.
It feels like we are reaching a moment of impasse and 2022, obviously, these midterms are going to be a massive battle.
There are people already, Nick, I don't know if you've seen this, people are already looking at 2024 and they're like, yeah, there's probably two to three states that are just simply going to have their votes stolen.
And people are just kind of shrugging and being like, I guess that's what we have to look forward in America, states that just have their electoral college results hijacked.
And it feels like this is reaching a moment of real reckoning here.
Well, lest you think that the Arizona hootenanny that's going on still was an isolated incident, they're now doing it in Pennsylvania.
Can we have a quick moment, by the way, and point out that Arizona is quickly becoming the craziest ass state in the Union, which is amazing.
Florida's upset about it, but Arizona is like they're going for it.
I mean, listen, Texas is still wearing that hat to some degree as well.
Well, it's an interesting challenge to see who was going to take that crown.
But yeah, I mean, here's the thing.
There was a Rick Santorum, whether or not he's relevant or not, but a little video of him leaked speaking to donors about this, where he lays it out.
Whether or not he's relevant or not, he was on CNN until recently.
I think he's got his finger on the pulse of the mainstream Republican mindsets.
But he was saying, the quote was, we have a bunch of people running around, particularly progressives, who all they want to talk about is let the people's will be done.
No, no, no, we don't want the people's will to be done immediately.
He thinks that democracy is supposed to represent the will of the minority.
Is really what he thinks.
Because he understands that white people are becoming the minority in this country and will then lose the ability to have the power they've been so used to having.
That is threatening to them.
I'm not so threatened by that.
I really am looking forward to a time when we have a lot more voices and a lot more influence from a lot of other people's perspectives to make this country better.
But clearly this is what happens when you have a specific race who is hell-bent on I'm maintaining, you know, that crippling power.
Let me ask you this, Jared.
I'm kind of curious what your thoughts are, because that was sort of, it's been germinating, but not fully formed.
The notion that, like, even the COVID stuff, when we're going out, we're seeing with anti-masks, anti-vaxxing and all that stuff, has brought up the same kind of tensions, I think, that existed before the Civil War.
And I think it's geographical in that same sort of way, where there's like, you know, if it's not exactly north-south, there is this same sort of tension being, you know, applied to this country rooted in that.
And I think that there are some interesting parallels to this tension.
Does that ring true to you at all?
It does.
I mean, if you were to look at what has happened, and by the way, I want to talk about Santorum in a second, because I actually think he's a bellwether for all of this, so we'll get to him in a second, and I think it figures into all of it.
I think what we're seeing in a lot of ways is, and you know, I wrote about how after the Confederacy was beaten, the mindset and philosophy and ideology of the Confederacy It didn't go away.
It just it kind of went into the bloodstream of America and sort of infected.
This is one of the reasons.
So like I grew up in Indiana and I saw a ton of Confederate flags in Indiana, right?
Like you would see you would see signs that are like the South will rise again because the Confederacy became a symbol of white anger, white supremacy, and part of that Part of that is sort of stoked by a different type of divide that we have now.
It used to be the South, right?
And then the North.
And then, you know, like eventually as the country grows, you have like the Western states and the North and the East and all that.
Well, now there are divides within the states.
You know what I mean?
One of the largest divides that we have at this point is like an urban rural divide.
We have like middle America that is cut off from like the metropolitan centers.
And one of the things that we're talking about with democracy is the fact that you have and this is the same thing with the electoral college.
We keep seeing those maps, right?
Where it's like so many red states, and then of course, like within those states, you have like the metropolitan areas that in a very, very small, concentrated place, there's the ability for them to sort of compete.
Well, part of what's happening there, and let's go ahead and be very clear about this, there's an economic divide.
And what we're talking about to a large extent is the divide between people who were able to go to college and were able to fill like those sort of like what we would call sort of more advanced jobs, right?
They were able to go in and become part of the economic structure and then of course in the red states we have a lot of people who They used to rely on manufacturing.
They used to rely on industry, and those things have gone away.
And because maybe they didn't go to college, or maybe they didn't have the money to do it, they didn't, like me, they didn't, you know, want to take on tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt and live within it.
They didn't necessarily go to college.
And I have to tell you, like, that's a large part of the culture war.
You know what I mean?
Like when you actually see these people sort of hating each other, it has to do a lot with who has access to resources and who has access to opportunities.
So you actually have a weird thing at this point where it's not even necessarily a regional divide.
It's a divide within states and within areas and it makes it Strange and you actually see throughout history.
There are these like sort of You would call them a volkish movement a folk movement, right?
These animate all over the place.
We're like people are you know where the real soul the country is It's in the heartland, which tell me if that sounds familiar But to go with Rick Santorum very quickly.
I Rick Santorum used to be one of the most extreme members of the Republican Party.
We all remember that, right?
He was like one of the pioneers of the modern culture war.
Tea Party, I was going to say.
Yeah, exactly.
And now Santorum would go on CNN.
And Santorum, like remember a while back, he got caught on a mic being like, Native Americans didn't have a culture and they didn't influence America and white, he didn't say white culture, but he meant white culture was the dominant culture.
He apologized.
You know what I mean?
Well, he started to apologize.
And even starting to apologize is sort of antithetical to what the modern Republican Party is about.
But yet he was part of what led to them being like this.
And seeing that Rick Santorum is saying this stuff and what you just said, like he's talking about the literal disenfranchising of people and hierarchical ruling elites and hereditary is what they're talking about.
Right.
Seeing him do that should tell you how far the Republican Party has moved like you know it's it's like a mile marker like how far beyond him they are and that that should frighten everybody in this entire situation.
Yeah, I'm looking for the thing.
There was a couple of really smart, who are they?
Two Harvard professors, because they must be smart, they're at Harvard, right?
Who spent more than 20 years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America conclude that the bulk of the Republican Party is behaving in an anti-democratic manner, which is the latest in The Atlantic, which is an article that was really interesting about that.
I mean, again, the screaming will be, oh, these leftist professors at these liberal colleges are just, you know, framing this bullshit, whatever.
But I'm willing to acknowledge and believe, you know, really well-sourced, you know, research into these things.
And when there's a lot of parallels to what we've seen in other countries, I'm willing to, you know, they're telling us what they're trying to do.
We can't ignore it.
Let me ask you this.
You know, before 1850, was this tension between the North and the South still?
Like, what was the genesis of it?
Because at some point, I'm sure, after we ratified the Constitution, there were some happy times.
Everyone was sort of, you know, no problems.
Hey, slavery?
Yeah, we'll worry about that later.
But at some point, it had to ratchet up and then leading into the war.
Do you have any sense of when that was?
Yeah, so what ends up happening, and just to give everybody a quick reminder, the Constitution was written explicitly and our government was designed explicitly to give preference to the southern states.
They were given, you know, you have the Three-Fifths Compromise, you have the way the Senate is put together, the Electoral College, and they did it because at the quote-unquote constitutional convention, the South held them up.
Like the South eventually, there was like a moment where they were like, We gotta get this thing signed, and the South is like, ooh, that's an opportunity.
And the South came in, and I know this is shocking, South Carolina led the way, and they came in and they were like, yeah, we're not going to sign any of this unless we get extra representation, and you give us the double duty of declaring our slaves' property, but also giving them numbers For representation, right?
So the South is given an advantage, which is why they held complete sway over the electoral process.
The South is how you won the presidency and you took control of the government.
Well, what ends up happening?
And by the way, our histories are completely wrong.
The North was not upset, necessarily, by slavery.
You had abolition groups and abolition movements, but the North was making money hand over fist from slavery.
By the way, so was the South, which is why they couldn't have cared less if they joined this collection of states.
They would have been perfectly happy to be on their own.
At that point, they kind of had their number written however they knew it.
But they also knew that they had the North over a barrel.
You know what I mean?
Like, they had the New England over the barrel.
So eventually, as slavery's happening, they're shipping the cotton up to New York.
And, you know, it's like there was an engine that was going in America.
It's not like the North actually wanted to get rid of slavery.
Some people did.
Abraham Lincoln wasn't interested in getting rid of slavery.
But what ends up happening is we start expanding out west.
And what happens is you start having these debates about the new states and whether or not they're going to come in free or slave.
And eventually people look up and they're like, if we let these states, if we let them be slave states, Everything in the future of America is going to be decided based on the idea of slavery because they're going to have control over the government.
So it starts turning into a hot war and what you have, and this goes back into what we're talking about with this Texas thing, the legislative process breaks down.
Like, all of a sudden you start having brawls in Congress, you start having these public media feuds between people, and then all of a sudden the conspiracy theories start going.
And if you can't trust elections, you know what I mean?
Like, if you can't trust that an election can be handled fairly, there's not much keeping you together.
And it's that mindset that, like, keeps us in an incredibly precarious position.
And I want to be very clear about this, because we like to call it on both sides of the issue, These Texans leaving in order to stay away from this is an admittance that the legislative process is breaking down.
This is, this basically, and what, you know, civil disobedience is the same thing, right?
It's like during the Civil Rights Movement, eventually people say, you know what, we're not going to follow the laws because the laws are wrong.
Well, a lot of people can say, we're not going to follow the laws because the laws are wrong.
But you can also be on the wrong side of history with that.
So you end up having two sides that say, this is too odious for me to play a part of.
And it gets weird.
It gets really strange when all of a sudden you start having those extra things outside of the process.
And that's the stage that we're at right now.
You know, it's also that rural versus city dweller, you know, culture war that lends itself to now saying, well, hey, we don't believe the elections were run fairly in those darn cities up in there, right?
Like, that's the other root of this whole thing.
What you described there easily affects every other part of the legislative process and the election process.
So that's an interesting part of all this, and sort of a germination of why we're here.
The funny thing is, there's no question in my mind that these civil disobedience that we're seeing, they probably feel like they're freedom fighters.
Like, this is not our president, we are going to redo the election because we don't believe in the laws that govern the election as it was in 2020.
We're doing the same thing as the people who marched on Washington with Martin Luther King in 64.
I have no doubt in my mind that they're considering it's the same idea.
And it's also rooted, like we talk about all the time, in the same idea with the Southerners and where they're coming from because, again, they were fighting for what the Constitution was originally written as, like you described.
They are fighting for the actual original soul of the country.
In some weird, twisted way, they're right.
Right.
They were they were right in their minds and they were right because it was on the paper.
So, you know, it also then connects with the notion of there's no there's never going to be any kind of progress.
Right.
Because if we can stick to the original list of what the Constitution said, then we'll never be able to update that and progress into having a free, more free and more fair society.
And so as a result, we're basically having the same argument over and over again.
And we're probably leading again to that same civil war in some weird way.
And it's like, I keep seeing the patterns now, and you keep seeing the things about people talking about how the Republican Party is not acting, you know, in a democratic fashion.
They're now the South, right?
Like, the Republican Party are basically the Southerners, wherever they are.
And we have to resort to these things, like walking out to get anything... It's not even like we can get anything done, right?
They're not gonna get anything done now.
But at some point you have to make a stand, I suppose, and force the issue to do something.
But I agree.
I don't think that there's a real easy solution to this to get back into some legislation.
Joe Biden ain't it.
I'll tell you that.
His notion of bringing some senators into the Oval Office from the Republican Party and, like, smoothing everything out, that ain't happening.
That's not working.
Well, and there is... So, like, let's go ahead and let's break down exactly what you just said, because Like, let's go down to the South.
And by the way, I've had to spend so much time reading the writings of the secessionists, the traitors, right?
I've had to read all of the Southerners who, like, total white supremacists who are like, slavery is right, all this stuff.
And by the way, for the record, just to get everybody on the same page, in the South, before the Civil War, They're writing articles left and right, Nick, that are like, you know, not only is slavery right, but what they're teaching in the northern schools is dangerous, right?
These teachers in the North are talking about abolition, and guess what?
When they talk about abolition, all of a sudden you start having socialism, and you start having feminism.
And these articles are really crazy, Nick.
They truly are, because when you start reading the actual mindset of the people who are like, we should secede and form our own country, They're like, these educators are dangerous.
These women are becoming too feministic.
They, you know, they're pushing away, like, their actual roles in the home.
This is gonna lead to ruin.
And if you read, and I want to put you in the mind, unfortunately, of these Southern traders, right?
Like, during the run-up to the Civil War.
So, these people, the ones who push for secession, they're wealthy.
Landholding, slaveholding, southerners, right?
And in their mind, and think about their material conditions.
They own, I mean, they probably own 300, 400 slaves, and like their entire family has forever.
They've built up these fortunes, these small little fiefdoms.
Do you know what I mean?
And they have their culture that's built around it.
And they start doing the math.
And I think the, I read the number, it was millions upon millions upon millions of like dollars in the mid 19th century.
You know what I mean?
Like an incredible amount of money.
And the idea that slavery might be abolished would cost them unbelievable amounts of money, right?
And their power base.
It would throw the entire chaos in.
So the mind does a thing.
Right?
And that's what we're talking about in all of this.
It's an economic power decision, right?
So if your entire economic future plus your political power depends on feeling some way, you better bet your fucking ass you're going to feel that way, right?
So they're just like, listen, yes, we are the superior race, but you know what?
God teaches us that we have a responsibility.
We have to take care of these poor, inferior creatures.
And you actually see, this is weird, man.
In the North and in the South, the preachers are competing with each other.
Is slavery condoned by the Bible?
And every preacher has different quotes that they're throwing at each other, right?
And so in the South, they're like, we have to take care of them.
This is our mission.
This is our goal.
We are being charitable by taking care of them.
Right, so that mindset gets in the place and you're exactly right.
The people who tried to steal 2020, the people who were working to get to 2024, a part of them obviously at times knows that they're like sort of pulling levers and trying to do this, but there's also a moment that happens when their economic and political conditions All of a sudden they're like, no, I'm saving America right now and I'm a hero.
And like, it totally convinces them and it puts them in an alternate reality.
And when those battle lines get drawn, I think we've all seen very, very clearly, there's no talking.
There's no ability to even begin talking with these people because their conditions rely on it, but their mind has also convinced them that they are on the right side of history.
Well, and I'm really glad you brought in feminism there as that was also being conflated with slavery and the notion of socialism even back then because it took women another like 60 years until they could get suffrage and actually vote and be treated unlike because they were treated like property as well.
And another tweet that went viral since we last spoke kind of caught my eye because there was a woman who was saying that she had never thought that voter ID was discriminatory at all.
I was like, of course, go get an ID, what's the big deal?
She moves, she needs to get an Indiana ID.
This is a story close to home for you.
It turns out that if you have ever changed your name in your life, you need to be able to prove two or three different documents with every single name change.
So, you might wonder, who gets affected by that more than anybody else?
And is there a particular gender, would you imagine, that actually deals with having to change their name way more often than the other gender?
Strange how that works out, isn't it?
Yeah.
So there isn't going to be hardly any men that are ever going to have to deal with any kind of name changes, right?
So you start to realize, look, where these... By the way, it's almost diabolically genius how they can come up with these things and really think about... Because it's not random.
It's like, if you film a movie, like we talk about Room 227 with Kubrick and they're talking about the background stuff.
Nothing in the background of a movie is by chance.
You have to put everything into place and everything has a meaning when you're doing that.
This is the same thing with these laws.
They're not just making them up and saying, oh, well, just, you know, if you ever change your name, that's a good idea.
No, they had to probably reverse engineer this and say to themselves, well, let's see here.
Women change their name a lot.
Let's see if we make it harder for them.
There was no other explanation.
Well, and by the way, like, let's go ahead and we're getting in the weeds, but I like getting in the weeds, so let's do it.
So that whoever passed that legislation, right?
There's an outside chance that it was some Republican asshole who just like was like, I want to stick it to whatever.
Chances are that whoever it was that introduced the legislation didn't write it.
Chances are that these things and this goes back and we're going to talk about the CRT shit and we have to come up with a different name because it's not about critical race theory.
We got to figure out they own the linguistic space so well.
You know what I mean?
They're so good at determining it.
But this whole thing with education that's happening right now, we talked about it before this whole thing started, right?
Back when people were like, this isn't going to be a thing.
Meanwhile, we haven't talked about anything else in this country for weeks at this point.
And it was introduced by think tanks.
And it's introduced for a very specific reason.
And I want to say something.
Like, remember how the saying about how, like, your economic and your political conditions are usually what go ahead and make the choice for you about how you feel for it?
But then all of a sudden your mind gives you a reason to feel that way?
Those stories are like the surface level politics, right?
That's where we hear rhetoric and we're doing this for freedom and bald eagles or whatever.
Do you know who is not interested in stories about waving of flags and bald eagles?
Think tanks.
They are not interested in the flowery rhetoric.
They're not interested in higher ideals.
These are people who sit around and they're like, we have one goal, which is to keep women and people of color from voting.
Because that will help us win elections so that we can do X, Y, and Z.
Those people are sitting around putting this stuff together and they hand it to the politicians and the politicians supply that upper level to go ahead and assuage people's guilt.
So you have this monstrosity that is just continually churning out this really bad faith bullshit.
But then people are slapping on a coat of paint to go ahead and get people to support it for their economic and political considerations.
But to still pretend like they have a higher reason for doing it.
Well, I also think that the reason why it works so well and why they control the space so easily is because they're always predicated on anger and fear.
Those are, you know, those are the, you know, in the cerebral cortex, like, those are the things that respond so quickly to that.
Look at critical race theory.
Three words.
Critical.
Oh man, critical's not good.
Race.
Ugh.
Okay, theory.
Oh, you mean some smart assholes were coming up with this?
It just, they took it and they knew it was a perfect rhetorical term.
You're exactly right.
They owned that fear-mongering space.
And so what we discovered out of the weeks and weeks of all this hemming and hawing and screaming and lathering up about it is that, you know, critical race theory, like, yeah, if you happen to be in an upper level, you know, law school, like, you're going to learn about that.
It's not happening in the third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade.
So we're learning more and more.
We're having more and more teachers who are being interviewed, and they're saying, like, we have no idea why this is being a big thing.
Why are they trying to, like, demand more oversight or legislate our curriculum to not have critical race theory when we're not Teaching critical race, they're teaching facts.
They're just teaching the actual true history of what happened in our country.
It's but again, it's that fear and that anger.
Actually, I'm not sure what order we're talking.
Is it anger and then fear or is it fear and then anger?
It's interesting question.
But but it's that's that's the sixty four thousand dollar question right there.
Yeah, I mean, I think it kind of could be malleable depending on who you are.
But those two are the big ones.
It doesn't matter what order you want to put them in because they both get the same response.
I mean, you've seen the videos, right, of these school board meetings and people getting arrested for, you know, doing the Freedom Fighter thing.
Again, they literally think that they're Norma Rae.
You know, obviously they would never stand up for a union, but you know, that kind of idea.
They are these martyrs who are going to lay themselves on the sword of freedom in the name of making sure our kids are educated properly.
It's crazy.
The funny thing about Make America Great Again for me is certainly back in the 50s, let's say, the parents had no role in the curriculum.
They sent the kids to school.
If there was ever a problem, it was the kid's fault and that was it.
If they wanna go back to that, great.
Let's get them out of the school board meetings and let the people who are design curriculum have their jobs. - Well, and I took off before we could talk about this, but it's really important than we do Tucker Carlson, of course, that piece of shit.
And that's another thing.
So we just talked about how think tanks provide legislation and strategies, politicians go ahead with them.
We've talked about in the past where ideas come from and how they're tested.
It used to be Alex Jones or somebody like him would get on TV and say a bunch of crazy shit and they sort of monitored it.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, they were like, you know, that really took off.
So we're going to go ahead and bring that in and we're going to digest it.
It's hard sometimes to know whether Tucker Carlson is inventing things.
Or if he is taking things from the far right, white nationalist zeitgeist, right?
Obviously, his main writer there for a while was one of those people, a straight up white supremacist, white nationalist, bringing in the talking points directly from that sphere that Tucker would then put a spin on.
Well, Tucker gets on TV the other night and in this very pointed rant says, That we should get cameras in every single classroom, in every single town and city in America, and that we need to set up ideological review boards.
Now, when this first came out, there was a moment where I was like, what's Tucker doing here?
Right?
It was like this weird venomous type of thing, but he also is like sarcastic.
You know, and like, so he does this and I was like, what the hell is Tucker doing?
But I'm telling you something, man, within minutes, whether he's been sarcastic or real.
What happened was he floated this idea on TV and the right wing was in.
They were in.
They were like, we need to do that.
That's exactly what we need to do in every classroom in America.
And I want to point out what is happening here.
It goes back to what we just talked about.
with the Civil War and what happens when trust breaks down in society.
So there are different stages in all of this, right?
The first stage is a democratic stage.
You live in a country, you vote, you see what happens, maybe you win, maybe you lose, and then you sit around and you see if the President or the Senate does good stuff and then you have the next election and you go on and so forth and whatever.
You know, but then there's like something else that happens.
All of a sudden you start having the erosion of democratic norms.
You start having gerrymandering.
You start having institutions that start being broken down.
Well, eventually that sort of erosion and destruction leads to oppression.
And we're talking about targeting specific groups Making their lives worse, and then making them either afraid to live with their freedom, right, to say what they want and how they feel, which, going back to the 1950s, people were terrified to live their true selves.
There was, like, fear of being tossed out, losing your job, getting killed.
Right, exactly.
So eventually what ends up happening is you end up in a place, and I keep finding this in all these, like, different movements, you get to the point where you're like, You know, I don't know if we can have a country if these people are alive anymore.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, they either need to be put in a jail or they need to be eliminated and we have to make sure, like, we have to have ideological review boards.
I mean, that's the type of shit that was happening in France, you know, in the 18th century.
It was like, the revolution will never be safe as long as we have people who disagree with it.
Bring out the guillotine, see what happens.
And what we're watching is the breakdown, not only of the legislative process, But we're seeing this moment where you might not even have a shared society anymore.
You have to investigate people, right?
I mean, the House of Un-American Activities.
You've got to get in people's lives.
You have to see what they think, how they feel.
Ideas become dangerous.
And eventually over time, that can lead to some really fucked up moments, right?
Where in order to save the country as a crisis occurs, You have to start imprisoning people, ostracizing people, costing them their jobs, and in the extreme cases, far down the line, you have to eliminate them.
And that fervor shows how deep this schism is and the possibilities that these people might accept in the long run.
Right, you know it's funny because I was a teacher for four years in a class in high school and I can remember like hearing evaluations of my teaching and I'm like how did they where are they getting this no one ever came to my classroom and observed and I would have loved it like I was a young kid with a you know as 25 whatever I didn't know I didn't barely know what I was doing I'm like please someone come sit there watch me and tell me what I'm doing
I was always astounded that there was these somehow these magic ways of evaluating how I taught without anybody ever actually evaluating that.
I would imagine if you were to put cameras, let's just say, I mean first of all, I'm not sure how that would work because then you have someone who has to watch it the whole time.
Well first of all, do you think that there was like an undercover kid in your class?
It was like, it was like a guy who just, like, looked a little young.
Oh, interesting.
Probably.
He was, like, smoking Paul Malls.
No, I mean, I had guys like that who were, you know, not smoking.
They were smoking a lot stronger than Paul Malls.
Well, let me tell you how this works, actually.
And I'm glad that you asked that.
So I'm going to go ahead and give people some inside baseball just so we can, we can, we can have a conversation.
How about that?
Yeah, let's pull the curtain back and let people know about this for a second.
So during the pandemic, I taught all of my classes on Zoom.
Oh.
So while you're teaching on Zoom, you are technically teaching within a space that is owned by the university or by the state.
They pay for the Zoom and The sessions get taped.
Oh.
And so what ends up happening is, and this is also part of like what I'm talking about in the long run, this is, and you're exactly right, the immediate reaction that people have is, who the hell is gonna watch all this?
Right?
Like who's gonna volunteer to do that?
That's not what happens.
We're heading towards a technological dystopia.
All you have to do is create an artificial intelligence program that goes through all of the recordings.
I mean, you know, it's going constantly through every single recorded thing.
And you put in keywords.
Race, privilege, oppression, white supremacy.
And any time that that happens, it gets flagged.
And then all of a sudden you're like, hey, keep an eye on this.
And so what happens is, and by the way, I'm sure we have listeners who are telecommuting, right?
And every corporation in America has software that they have purchased That keeps track of how much you're working, what your keystrokes are, what your history is.
And while that happens, your life is just sort of shrinking a little bit.
Do you know what I mean?
Like there's just, you're being put a little bit in a box that can be sort of sorted and surveilled.
And this teaching thing, it's heading there.
Like this is almost inevitable at this point that this might happen in states.
Yeah.
If not, Well, it's funny, because having taught in the blue state of California, and the even bluer city of Los Angeles, I was trying to sort of get a sense of like, what I would imagine, how many teachers would simply just take the directives that they're given about this stuff and just do it, right?
That they're told by the school board, or told by the superintendents, by the principals, you have to, you can't say this, you can't say that.
Well, Nick, if you have nothing to hide, what are you worried about?
That's what people have been telling me for years!
They're like, I would say a majority of teachers would simply just do it, right?
Whatever.
What do you want me to do?
Fine, I'll just do it, right?
Are you gonna quit?
Because I have to tell you, as a liberal arts university professor, I'm a tenured Professor in the liberal arts.
Do you know how hard it is to get a tenured job in the liberal arts at this point?
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Like they have a captive group of laborers and they're specialized.
They went to school, they specialized in it, like they can do other things, but not that much.
So all of a sudden you have a captive workforce.
You're exactly right.
Most people would be like, well, it's a job.
Yeah, I'm looking through the prism of high school, not much less, not even college.
And those jobs don't pay very well at all.
And that's why they, you know, people who do them tend to think they are dedicated.
They really are out for the best interest of your kids.
I would say most of them.
I remember I had to replace one who lost their mind, but they didn't intentionally be a bad teacher.
And for the most part, yeah, that's why you're doing it.
You're not doing it to get rich.
I'll tell you that.
The most you're going to make at the big high school after 30 years is you might get somewhere close to 80.
A year.
Maybe.
Maybe in California.
Yeah.
But remember, the cost of living in L.A. is so much higher.
So 80 doesn't get you hardly anywhere.
Maybe it's like 90.
But that's also if you're going to be like an assistant to the athletic director.
They kind of find these other odd jobs you can get another 10 or 15 from.
They have systematically attacked the wages and money of teachers.
It's the unions, Jared, the unions!
They vilified teachers for years and years and years.
They cut funding to education.
As we talked about, they're looking to get back to a point of segregation within the educational system.
They've attacked people.
They've vilified people.
They've kept them from being able to buy supplies for the classroom.
What was it, two years ago?
They were like, you know what?
We shouldn't ban guns.
What we should probably do is arm the teachers.
And so what ends up happening is you end up having a group of people who have just been... And I have to tell you, I love my fellow teachers.
I do.
We are a beat-up group of people.
You know what I mean?
Like at this point, it's one of those, like, beatings will continue until morale improves.
And they have broken a lot of people and a lot of spirits.
And like you just said, a lot of people are going to look at it and they're going to be like, I have a job.
I don't know what else to do.
Our economy sucks.
Sure.
But you also described the state of mind of the students.
The students in public high schools without question are feeling the same.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Without question, that also exists.
Now, we're not supposed to like school, right?
Nobody likes high school necessarily.
It's like, whatever.
But there's no question that the way this thing is set up, and we talked about this before, like if aliens ever came down and observed our civilization for a month, They'd be like, yes, you don't want these people to succeed, right?
You need them to work in these very menial jobs for the rest of their lives, right?
That's the whole purpose of this thing, right?
Isn't that what you're doing?
And obviously, we have to say, no, we're not really doing that.
But that would be what the purpose appears to be from an outside perspective.
We are the wealthiest, most powerful country in the history of the fucking world.
I just want to go ahead and say that one more time.
We are the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the history of the fucking world.
We have completely depleted our educational system which You don't have to be a leftist to understand why that's a problem.
And why we have a stagnant imagination and culture in this country, right?
Why we don't understand history.
Why we don't know where we're going.
Why we don't innovate energy alternatives.
Why we don't trust science.
Like, there are consequences of what has happened at this point.
But I want to point out, and this goes back to the very beginning of this conversation that we were having.
One of the reasons why the legislative process is breaking down in this country, why our politics is breaking down, why culture is breaking down, is because we have reached a point where government has been intentionally hindered and defanged and depowered to the point where, and by the way, you want to pick one person who can be the head of that, that's Mitch McConnell.
Mitch McConnell is one of the most consequential politicians that we have had in the history of this country, and he is consequential for completely paralyzing the political process to the point where nothing can get past that actually changes anything, right?
That's like right now.
Biden passed a stimulus package, and when it happened, you couldn't go outside without tripping over a headline that's like, is he FDR?
Is neoliberalism over?
A stimulus bill?
Oh my God.
But the government does not exist to make conditions better for people.
It exists to make sure that the market continues to hum along and that American foreign policy continues to be carried out.
Well, meanwhile, what happens when you paralyze the process?
If you're not using government to make life better, What happens is, you start using government to make other people's lives worse.
And you get into a punitive moment, which is where we are with the Republican Party.
Which is where they go out, and we've talked about this before, they say, well we don't have anything to promise you.
We're not going to get you jobs, and we're not going to do anything.
But I'll tell you what, we're going to make life fucking hell for liberals, leftists, Gay people, trans people, oh and the people at the border.
You won't even believe the shit we're gonna do to those people.
And so what ends up happening is you get to an offensive, cruel government versus a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
You reach the point where nothing else is being done for them.
Well, on that note, and by the way, good on the Texas Jims.
Best of luck.
I hope you go to Washington, D.C.
I hope you see maybe some museums.
I hope you talk some sense to the Senate.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, Lord knows I went for a weekend and didn't get through half of the monuments needed to go see.
So if they have enough time to go, they can catch them all.
Have you been to the Smithsonian History Museum?
You know, my son, my wife went, and I opted for something else because it was something more important.
I forgot.
And so, it sounded like they had a better time than I did.
I forgot.
So, a couple things.
George Washington's general outfit is there.
It's kind of tiny.
Like I know that he was a bigger dude.
It's a little tiny looking.
Interesting.
I thought he was like 6'2 or something.
Maybe that was the fashion.
They also had, and actually this was a weird thing, they actually have They have the table where the Civil War ended at Appomattox and I just kind of like stood there just sort of like I wept a little bit you know what I mean like it shouldn't why was that in the room with me it was very odd.
Well you know we did have some interesting stuff talking about Valley Forge with Mo Representative Mo Brooks, you know, getting his... very strange.
Did you see that speech where he was trying to say that, you know, we don't have to like, you know, scream and yell at the Republicans for using such rhetorical language of like, you know, war and blood and kill whatever, but he tried to evoke Valley Forge and what they fought for and everybody wanted to, you know, sort of make fun of him because nothing was fought for in Valley Forge.
You simply had to sit there all winter and Not dying.
Die.
You know, I suppose that was fighting for something, but like it's all I know is I've looked into a little bit more.
It just seemed a little strange why they did that to themselves.
They don't know.
They don't know anything.
They don't know history.
They have no clue what's... Oh, man.
And why did Washington need to hunker down there of all places and have such a long supply line that was going to get disrupted?
It was, you know, strange.
So, listen, maybe we need a spinoff show, which is just analyzing small moments in the Revolutionary War, right?
Let's work on that.
Maybe that'll be our next audio documentary after we finish A Certain Route to Failure But yeah, hopefully the Texas Democrats and by the way, I I think there are moments It's like there are moments where you have to throw your body on the gear of the odious machine You know what?
I mean like and and we are we We are tiptoeing up to it, and that's the issue here.
But Godspeed to them, and Godspeed to you.
If you need us, we're gonna have, obviously, our weekender show that'll come out on Friday.
You know, that is for patrons only, so if you want to support the show, keep it ad-free, editorial, oversight-free, all you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash mcgreggpodcast.
You get an extra show every week, you get some live shows, you get updates on our audio documentary, you get our Discord channel.
It's a really, really good time, and we depend on it.
That's patreon.com slash Mike Rake Podcast.
We'll be back on Friday.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
