Nick Hauselman is on vacation, but Jared Yates Sexton's here to hold down the store as he discusses the ongoing struggle between the White House and the GOP on voting rights, the history of federal versus state authority, and the need for definitive, courageous action.
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Tricky Nicky Haussleman is on vacation, so I am flying solo.
I appreciate you hanging out with me.
I just got off the road after a very long and tiring road trip.
I'm recording this late.
I was in my thoughts a lot as I was driving today and making my way Through America, having a lot of interesting experiences along the way.
Let's go ahead and get comfortable.
That's pretty nice.
I watched some interesting altercations between people when it came to masks and the accompanying controversies around it.
A lot of moments of heatedness between people wearing masks or not wearing masks and it's sort of becoming an issue between them.
I think pressure right now in this country is It's running pretty high and especially as this new Delta variant threat sort of comes together.
This is something that Nick and I have talked about quite a bit watching this come to pass and understanding what it represents and as well what is happening with our political environment all the way around and that's one of the things I wanted to talk about today one of the things that I was thinking about a lot there was an article that that dropped while I was traveling
That got a lot of attention and this was a New York Times piece by Katie Rogers and Nick Corisanti.
This came out on the 22nd, but it made a lot of waves and I wanted to discuss it.
The name of the article is Democrats Divide on Voting Rights Widens as Biden Faces Pressure.
And of course, this is on the heels of President Biden making an address about the struggle for voting rights and the fight against this new Jim Crow that the Republicans are constructing before our very eyes.
And of course, Biden and any defense against these intrusions and the infringements of the civil liberties and civil rights of Americans of all stripes is held prisoner in many ways by the filibuster.
Surprise, surprise.
Of course, the filibuster in America has been used time and time again in the assistance of and defense of white supremacy.
It's not that surprising to see it happen again, but it makes it no less infuriating.
And Biden, of course, gave a speech on this and referred to this as one of the biggest threats to America since the Civil War.
I appreciated that rhetoric.
It certainly is true.
It certainly is an accurate and mature assessment of what we're dealing with.
But I think myself and others like me are a little worried that it Might just be rhetoric.
It might be a way of framing this thing and not necessarily how people in power are necessarily dealing with this or treating this.
And this article comes out, this New York Times piece, Biden and his White House have been having a lot of calls with voting rights groups, which is how this works to go ahead and sort of pull back the curtain on this stuff.
When a major issue such as these voting rights infringements are taking place, you're constantly on the phone if you are the president or if you are in party leadership.
You're constantly on the phone with not just constituents, but you're on the phone with the groups that are on the ground.
I had mentioned in a recent Substack article that one of the most prominent voting rights groups right now is helmed, of course, by Stacey Abrams here in the state of Georgia, Fair Fight.
And, you know, it's it they they have to be in constant contact because these are the people who they're going to get out the vote for you.
They're going to get the base mobilized.
You know, that's where a lot of the donations come from.
That's where a lot of the rubber meets the road.
And these calls are oftentimes contentious and they are oftentimes used as a means of framing the entire situation.
So to go ahead and let people know what happened with this article.
And I read this and felt both conflicted and also curious.
Because what made the waves, particularly on social media, Was I'm going to read you the three paragraphs that caught the most attention over the past couple of days.
In private calls with voting rights groups and civil rights leaders, White House officials and close allies of the president have expressed confidence that it is possible to quote unquote, out organize voter suppression, according to multiple people familiar with the conversations.
I have heard an emphasis on organizing, said Sherilyn A. Eiffel, the president and director and counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who visited the Oval Office to meet with the president two weeks ago.
But, she added, we cannot litigate our way out of this, and we cannot organize our way out of this.
Several Biden advisors involved in the private calls said this week that they did not recall telling attendees that voter suppression could be out organized, but said organizing was integral to the administration's efforts.
So first things first.
I've talked about this quite a bit when people have asked me whether it was on a bourbon talk or in an interview.
They've asked how I feel about this and how I think this is going to play out.
And I have said personally that one of the things that continues to give me hope is the fact that these groups, these organizing voter rights groups, particularly those helmed by African Americans who have been fighting for their right to vote, Since they earned the right to vote.
I mean, they have been doing battle with white supremacy and voting rights bills that disenfranchised them for forever.
I've said that I have confidence that they are better and more talented and better organized and have a better reason to be fighting for these rights.
I think that they are the absolute best champions that there are for making sure that people will have the right to vote.
And we've seen their ability to fight through these things and to make them better and make a difference.
So, I understand that sentiment, and I think whatever happens in this situation, a lot of it is going to come from the grassroots.
And that's simply because the national level of politics has gotten so sclerotic, and it has gotten so immobile, and it has been so defanged and depowered, that a lot of this stuff is going to have to happen on the ground in order for it to gain momentum.
The second thing that I'll say about this quote, and you'll notice how it was framed.
I read those three paragraphs specifically for this reason.
There are these calls that are going on, probably conference calls, there's individual calls, and they're heated.
You have these organizing groups on the ground who are working their asses off trying to make this happen.
And on top of that, by the way, they are looking at a serious, serious blow to civil rights in this country.
So when they're talking to the White House, they want action, they want commitment, they want leadership.
And so when all of a sudden people start hedging their bets and they start talking about out organizing this thing, it is rightfully frustrating and infuriating.
To hear from the White House to hear them say, well, we don't remember necessarily saying that even though that is one of the strategies that will depend on.
That tells me that that is a communication rift that tells me that there's a lot of different things happening in terms of context.
You've got two sides that are butting heads and that reveals something that this article does because this article didn't happen because the White House wanted it to happen.
This article happened because the voting rights groups, probably in this case the NAACP, there's a reason why Eiffel's name was like one of the main quotes about this.
This is the type of story that a group that wants the White House to get more involved would go ahead and call up the New York Times and say, you need to hear what the White House said to us and here's how they're handling a very serious issue.
This is a means of trying to use a little bit of leverage to make the White House do something.
The other thing about it is with this problem with the filibuster, with people like Manchin and Sinema and certainly other Democrats who are hiding behind Manchin and Sinema and want to protect the filibuster and keep the status quo and that they're bought and sold by some of the wealthiest and most powerful and dangerous people in this country, I'm sure that the White House feels like it can't get this done.
I'm sure that they are kind of hoping that this can be a grassroots cause that organization can take care of.
I have to tell you though, this is a major problem.
This is a major developing crisis and the administration needs to take it not just seriously but deadly serious.
This is a massive, massive situation and I know there are some people in the Democratic Party, I know there are people in the administration who Listen, this show we've talked and what I wanted to do today while we are talking about the background of this, I want to try and impart to you the necessity.
For this to be a large, bold action.
Because history shows us that there has to be a large, bold action.
This is a game of chicken.
That the Republican Party is playing.
A constant and constantly changing game of chicken.
They are not playing around.
They're playing for keeps.
And what keeps happening is they keep pushing the envelope.
They keep troubling good faith politics and anything even approaching like shared reality and old standards.
And as they do that, What they're doing is they are daring the Democratic Party to step up to the plate.
We've seen this time and time again.
We saw this right before the Civil War, in which the Republican Party, at that time, of course, the parties were switched.
The Republican Party at that time, prior to the Civil War, answered the challenge of the Southern Democrats in Congress.
And it led to fights and brawls and duels.
In this case, This feels a lot like what we saw in the 1960s.
And in the 1960s, particularly with the battle around desegregation and civil rights, what we saw was another instance in which we had a lot of people on the right, a lot of white supremacists, and a lot of individuals and organizations and groups and states Who dared the federal government to back up their words?
Now, one of the reasons we're facing this problem in the first place is not just that the Republican Party has been moving further and further right, that they're fear-mongering, that the only thing they can do at this point is stake their entire electoral chances and future on white voters, aggrieved white voters, and absolutely drowning in white supremacy and white supremacist paranoia.
But that they also need to make sure that they can disenfranchise people who would vote against them, particularly people of color.
It's an old trick.
The only reason that this is possible at this point is because the federal government has been hamstrung on purpose for decades now.
Now we'll talk a little bit more about the specifics here, but what opened the door in this particular case is what happened during the coronavirus pandemic.
And we watched in that situation where Donald Trump, who had no interest whatsoever in being president of the entire United States, instead taking care of his own demagogic empire that he had created while prosecuting his enemies and trying to hold on to power at any and all cost, we watched Trump and of course Jared Kushner decide that they wanted to leave blue states on their own.
And so what they needed was they needed to have the federal government back away from the process.
Of wielding power.
And this was a continuation of the Republican strategy and also the Trump strategy, which is to dismantle the federal government as a means of public good and as a means of wielding collective power.
It needed to be dismantled, which leads to privatization.
It leads to a lot of challenges, both by corporations and also the powerful.
And it leads to a point where you start having conversations about what states are allowed to do.
And when you say that the coronavirus pandemic and all of the problems associated with it are up to the states and up to the governors, all of a sudden what you do is you start hatcheting up the United States of America.
All of a sudden the federal government retreats, which is what Trump's presidency was.
It was a retreat and a betrayal, all at once, by the right's attack on the government.
It leads to a situation where all of a sudden, as he loses power, as Donald Trump is defeated as President of the United States of America, and we get a new Democratic President, suddenly that opens the door for a lot of sleeping parts in the red states and within this Republican apparatus to wake up, to snap awake.
And what you see is something that you also saw with Obama, but not to the extent that we're even seeing it now.
You start seeing Republican leaders in state houses and as governors start to flex their muscles and call into question the president, which, by the way, this is one of the things that you've heard your entire life, which is.
The Republicans believe in state states rights.
No, they don't.
They don't actually believe in the sovereignty of states.
They only believe that when they don't have federal power.
It's one of those transitioning cudgels that they have.
It's one of those principles that isn't real whatsoever until they need it to be.
In this case, what we're seeing is a lot of these red states Which have been dominated locally and regionally by the Republican Party, which has outworked the Democratic Party over and over again, both in terms of local government, state government, but also, you know, you got your judges, you got all of these things that they have been dominating that is now coming to the forefront.
And now that they're looking at the possibility of losing federal power, maybe even on an almost permanent basis.
I mean, in order for Trump to win, even with the Electoral College automatically tilted in the Republican Party's favor, he still sort of had to pull off a miracle to win in 2016.
So the fact that they're now looking at the potential of losing all economic viability, you have to start waging war on elections in general.
And also reality, which is another thing that is going on here with the critical race theory shit, is you're actually watching the Republican Party say, we cannot win elections anymore unless we go to extreme measures.
In this case, we have the actual construction of a new Jim Crow system.
Now, I want to go ahead and, like we always do, infuse this with a little bit of history to give you a little bit of background.
We've always heard Jim Crow, right?
It's one of those things that shows up in history books, maybe there's a paragraph or two, and we know that it's racist.
But let's point out what it actually is.
When the Civil War was over and the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect, in the South, there was an incredible mobilization of freed African Americans in terms of how they mobilized and realized political power.
In order for them to have their communities, in order for them to even start to taste the sweet breath of freedom, what happens is they start organizing so quickly and so dynamically that they go from bondage to the statehouse to power almost immediately.
One of the issues in all of this, and this was one of the reasons why the South was so terrified of slave uprisings and the possibility of the slaves being freed, is because in many ways they felt outnumbered.
This is one of the reasons why, when the country was founded and when the Constitution was penned, that they had the three-fifths clause.
Because by counting their slaves, their quote-unquote property, as three-fifths of a person, they then enjoyed a larger projection of power.
It was a deal that the framers of the Constitution, who needed to get away with the Constitution and did it at any and all costs, That they made with the South as the South held up the convention in order to ratify.
So what happens is?
There's this major swell of voters and organizations and the African Americans mobilize very quickly.
They win offices and they're really good at what they're doing again.
They out organized him like like nobody's business.
Eventually, a couple of things happen.
This time period is called Reconstruction, and there's a reason why in history classes, maybe it got mentioned once or twice, but it doesn't get talked about very much.
And one of the reasons is because the African American community was completely betrayed and just left out to dry.
One of the most famous protectors of this Uh, reconstruction and particularly the rights of African-Americans was Ulysses S. Grant, who fought constantly to make sure that this project was carried out.
But, uh, a lot of white citizens in the North, um, got tired of paying for it and having the government so focused on that.
Uh, and they just lost their taste for it, particularly as Grant was attacked by his political rivals.
A lot of white supremacy and racism was used there.
But it needed to be done.
The military needed to be there in order to protect both African Americans and northern organizers who were in the South making sure that people were kept in line and playing by the rules and not violating civil rights.
And eventually what ends up happening is, because Grant kind of loses the battle for the soul of the country in that regard, is it just sort of falls out of favor.
And you start seeing this period of time where all of a sudden groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other paramilitary organizations, and just the power structure down in the South,
They start gaining back control over all of this apparatus of power, and they deal with the organization, they deal with the mobilization, and they deal with the quote-unquote imbalance of power that they believe is there, the unfairness of it all.
By instituting all of these safeguards, all of these absolutely racist, prejudiced roadblocks to people being allowed to vote.
And of course, this is a weapon that is wielded towards African-Americans, and it keeps, it pushes them to a subservient state.
And this was intentional.
This was not accidental whatsoever.
The entire idea behind it was to make sure that politics in the South was a game for the white man.
It was explicitly that.
You also have a lot of post-Civil War Uh, they were former slavers.
People, of course, who ran plantations and also the governments that wielded power, who wanted to keep the freed African Americans as close to human bondage and slavery as possible.
And that's how those laws were written.
Now, the African Americans in this situation were completely betrayed.
They were left behind, particularly as the country wanted to move forward.
They wanted to get past the Civil War.
They wanted to get back past the headache that was Reconstruction.
They wanted to believe that they had been baptized in blood and all of this Warring and all of the death and the tragedy had finally cured America of its of its racism and white supremacy.
The problem, and I've written about this before, was that it instead of going away, it burrowed into the very marrow of the American body.
It survived in our laws and our politics and our culture.
It was who we are and who we've been.
And so for years and years and years, African Americans, particularly in the South, and in, I mean, not to tell you it didn't happen in the North and the East and the West because it did, but primarily in the South because of Jim Crow.
African Americans were kept in a segregated Jim Crow existence and it happened because we needed to get back to the business of business.
A divided country, particularly one that's still fighting cultural and political wars, isn't necessarily a country that's going to grow the way that the post-Civil War America grew.
With industry, and with railroads, and telegraph, and telegrams, and all of this business, you start to see America really start to hum with big business.
And so, the African American freedom, was more or less sacrificed.
In fact, one of the most damning things that happens at this time is the laws that were put in place to ensure that freed African Americans would have access to their rights is co-opted by corporations.
It's the reason why we now say that corporations are people is because the laws, the amendments that were put there to help freed slaves were co-opted by corporations.
That's not an accident.
So for years and years and years, this American prejudice that is absolutely essential and ever-present in our culture and in our politics, it's hidden.
We pretend it's not there.
We had a civil war.
Of course we cured all of this.
I've talked about this before, talked about it in American Rule.
People like Woodrow Wilson cover it up with propaganda.
They don't want the world thinking that we have a race problem.
Meanwhile, we have a massive race problem.
Always have.
We have riots.
We have slaughters.
We have mass lynchings.
All because people want to keep these people as close to a state of slavery as possible.
What we see, of course, in the mid-20th century, post-World War II, in which we were supposedly living in a paradise of freedom, liberty, equality, and all that bullshit.
In the middle of the 20th century, again, African Americans organized themselves into what we now refer to as the Civil Rights Movement.
It was not going to get done from the top.
It was not a major topic that the presidency was going to take care of, or Congress was going to take care of.
There were some people who called for equal rights and desegregation, but it wasn't the topic du jour.
It wasn't the thing that people talked about and argued about.
It was just part of life.
Until the people who were fighting within the civil rights movement made it a part of life.
The whole idea behind what we now call nonviolence was a matter of putting the plight of the African American in front of the privileged white American.
It was a matter of making the situation so obviously odious and disgusting The people had to start taking notice.
They had to start taking sides.
They had to reach the conscience of people who otherwise were pretty much living comfortably.
They had to get on the evening news, in the newspapers.
They had to push the issue until it was something that everybody had to talk about.
They changed reality.
Is what I'm saying.
Which is something I try and talk about a lot.
Which is, we feel like reality is locked in.
We feel like nothing could possibly change.
And then people make the conversation change.
And they change the world.
This is what happened with the Civil Rights Movement.
They pushed the issue.
They got it in front of everybody.
Now down in the South, and this is an important thing that we need to understand about the resistance to the civil rights movement that is often glossed over in our textbooks and a lot of our books and our accounts.
The stories that get told are that the Southerners just were there and they were fighting them and they were angry and so they were being violent.
There's truth in that.
But a large part of it.
was that they believed that there was a massive conspiracy to destroy America.
I'm talking, of course, about the segregationists.
I'm talking about the southerners who are the ones who would beat civil rights marchers, kill them, attack them, fight them in the streets.
A lot of them believed that this was a communist conspiracy.
They believed that the Civil Rights Movement was a puppet movement from Russia.
That Russia was trying to undermine the United States and sow discord by inspiring leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.
to march and upset people and make America look bad.
And so you would see all of these meetings and these speeches and these organizations that would sprout up to fight the civil rights movement.
And as they did it, they would say all along that they were actually protecting America, that there was a conspiracy against it, and that the Civil Rights Movement was the embodiment of it, and that they were actually traitors, and they needed to be subdued.
Now, one of the people... One of the people who pushed this idea was Alabama Governor Wallace.
And George Wallace, one of the most disgusting figures in modern American history, constantly talked about how this was a communistic conspiracy.
And in the 1960s, and particularly in 1963, this is a very famous moment, of course, where George Wallace says that he, you know, segregation now, segregation forever, he decides he's going to stand in the way of desegregation.
And as Alabama is going to be integrated, there is this moment of crisis.
And what happens is that Wallace, who, you know, as he's campaigning and making speeches, he's standing deliberately in front of the Confederate flag.
He's speaking as an avowed white supremacist, where he starts talking about states' rights and how he's going to stand in the way of this, and there's no possible way that the federal government is going to make this happen. and there's no possible way that the federal government is There's a very famous movie about this.
It's called Crisis.
It's by a filmmaker named D.A.
Pennebaker, who is one of the greatest documentarians of all time.
You might have seen a couple of his movies.
He did Bob Dylan's Don't Look Back.
Which is one of the best portraits of artistic genius that you will ever see.
It's incredibly good.
But so, Penny Baker does this documentary called Crisis.
And he is in the John F. Kennedy White House as JFK and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General.
are trying to decide what they're going to do about Wallace interfering in this integration in Alabama.
And what you see in this moment is you see Kennedy as president deliberating how do you handle A governor of a state in the United States of America who is openly defying federal authority.
Now, when we think about politics, particularly in America, oftentimes states sort of get lost in the lurch.
But this is a constant sort of battle that's going on.
States are constantly suing the federal government and, you know, Going against their wishes and campaigning against them.
A lot of the times it's a lot of chest thumping.
But in some of these moments, the fact that we are a union of states really comes to the forefront.
Wallace played chicken.
He dared JFK to act.
He made a bet.
And what Wallace bet was this.
That Kennedy didn't really care about civil rights.
And that faced with this crisis, he would blink.
And Wallace would have a victory.
It would help his political standing.
It would give him political power.
It would also change the balance of power between the states and the federal government.
And so he played a game of chicken and he made a bet.
JFK called him on it.
JFK went through with it.
And actually, JFK and RFK came up with a pretty good strategy on how to take care of this thing.
Because what Wallace needed was a symbolic victory.
So Wallace got a symbolic victory.
He made his grand gesture.
And then he stood aside as Alabama was integrated.
In this case, It didn't come to blows.
It didn't end up a bloody conflict.
Although, I have to tell you that desegregation ended up a bloody conflict in many a case.
In many a case.
This ended up really, really bad.
If you're looking into this, take a look at what happened at Ole Miss.
Brutal stuff.
Brutal stuff.
More or less an insurrection.
Just awful.
Awful shit.
But what ends up happening is that the Civil Rights Movement, with all of the work that it did, it changed the issue, it changed the political calculus, and it pressured the White House into acting.
They put it on the radar, and then it made the White House make a decision.
Are you going to be on the right side of history, or are you going to be on the wrong side of history?
In that case, JFK made the right choice.
What happens post desegregation, and by the way, do not be fooled by the way that history books take care of this, desegregation was not instantaneous.
There were still places around the country that, I have to tell you, they dragged their feet for quite a damn while before they finally desegregated.
And they didn't do it on their own accord.
They were forced to.
What happened post-desegregation?
Is that the Republican Party?
Because of course, Lyndon B. Johnson passed the civil rights legislation, they saw an opportunity to use this idea of states rights, which is a whole lot of hokum that just stands for people should be allowed to be racist if they feel like being racist.
They saw an opportunity to once more shift the political calculus.
So what the Republican Party do?
When you have a Democratic president who pushes civil rights for African Americans, you embrace segregation and you embrace white supremacy.
So what happens post desegregation is that the right in the United States of America begins a massive war against the federal government.
In this case, we start having a lot of private academies.
That's one of the first steps, because what happened was that public institutions were desegregated.
Suddenly, you could not have a school with segregation.
You couldn't have a military with segregation.
So what ends up happening is you start seeing a lot of private schools, particularly private Christian schools.
This is a major phenomenon in the South post-desegregation.
So you start seeing a lot of these pop up.
Oh, weirdly enough, I know this is shocking.
They're named after Confederate generals.
They've got a lot of Confederate mascots, right?
And they even advertise that they're white-only academies.
So you start seeing the right and the GOP start emphasizing private schools and quote-unquote school choice, right?
Meanwhile, this systematic war begins in which the GOP begins attacking the federal government and federal authority.
They start arguing that the federal government is too involved in states' matters, that they need to show restraint.
Now, this is obviously a cover for these things.
You'll later see this change.
Um, you know, we now sort of look, well, we don't, but a lot of people do.
They see the right as having the main animating issue as abortion.
That's the thing that keeps them together.
But make no mistake, abortion was a decision to change The battleground from segregation and white supremacy over to an issue where they could start bringing in some more evangelicals, they could start bringing in some Catholics, they could start building a different type of base.
But meanwhile, at the heart of all of this has been a decades-long project to starve the federal government You've probably heard people say that they want to reduce the size of the government until it's small enough to drown in a bathtub.
And a large part of that is because the federal government was able to end segregation.
What's happening now, the point where we are, this thing that we're watching happen right now, is a new game of chicken.
We are watching Jim Crow be reestablished.
Now, of course, it's not going to be called Jim Crow.
Nobody has pushed a literacy test at this point, but I mean, the way that the riot is escalating things, I would not, I would not bet against something like that occurring.
But this right now is setting the plate for the future.
The big lie that Donald Trump had the 2020 election stolen from him was a vehicle.
It was used by the GOP and their media apparatus to condition their base to be ready for an attack on individual rights and civil liberties.
It was a means of telling people, you cannot trust elections anymore.
And on top of that, like that election was stolen.
So we have to start putting in some safeguards.
So if you ever want to win an election again, if you don't want to live in a hellscape where these people are in charge of things, we need to really make elections secure, which is code.
And it's all about disenfranchising people of color.
This isn't the end of it.
There have been a lot of bills passed so far.
Some really, really awful, racist bills.
And they were done, along with a lot of this posturing, in order to take and steal future elections.
To undermine any sort of effort to mobilize or organize and actually have the will of the people.
This is an existential threat.
This is what we used to call where I'm from, bellying up to the bar.
This is the situation where it's another game of chicken.
The Republican party, particularly the Republican party at the state level, is testing Joe Biden's resolve.
They're testing the Democratic party's resolve.
They're daring Biden to do something.
They're daring Biden to use the bully pulpit or the power of the presidency to make something happen.
They're daring the Democratic Party to take sweeping action, which by the way, that immediately if they did that, they would call it tyranny.
They would say it's overreach.
You have to understand that that is what's there.
They're also, of course, using their radicalized base who are absolutely obsessed with their guns.
They've already attacked the U.S.
Capitol to try and overthrow an election.
The violent rhetoric is growing left and right.
You've had supporters sending bombs.
You've had supporters making threats.
There is a message here, which is... Blink.
You have to blink.
This game of chicken.
You're not going to win.
And if you win, it's not even worth winning.
So blink.
I don't know what the Biden administration said to these organizations.
I have to imagine.
Knowing a lot of politicians, knowing a lot of people who work in politics, that the conversations were probably telling these groups who are working their asses off and just stand to be disenfranchised, that don't worry, this is a priority.
We've got your back.
We're going to fight like hell.
But it probably came with another message, which was, You know, we're going to try and make this thing happen, but it might come down to organizing and I think you're capable of doing that.
It's not boldness.
It's not courage.
What we've been seeing for the past few months as these Republican legislatures have been pushing this new Jim Crow What we've been seeing is a lot of gnashing of the teeth.
They don't want to make a decision on this chicken game.
But there has to be a decision.
Chicken demands a decision.
There's a time period for chicken.
There's a car coming.
You're racing at one another.
Somebody has to blink.
History shows us that fortune favors the bold.
It shows us that in our past, the times in which we've actually done great things.
And listen, I'm as much of a critic of America as anybody.
I'll tell you where I think that we've gone wrong.
And we have gone considerably wrong many times.
But the times in which this country has been great, it's because people who are in charge and people who are on the ground, they take chances.
They show courage.
The deck may be stacked against them, but they're still willing to try and fight and they refuse to blink.
If any of this is going to work out, it's going to have to be bold, courageous action.
I hope that happens.
And I'm worried.
But I have hope.
And I just, I hope it, I hope it dawns on some of the people who are in the room, maybe they'll check out D.A.
Pennebaker's Crisis.
You should.
It's a good film.
It's good stuff.
And it's important to watch people making the hard decisions, and choosing not to blink, and choosing to fight.
So, we'll keep an eye on this.
A bunch of other stories.
I hope, again, Tricky Nicky Houseman is enjoying his vacation.
It's a much-earned vacation.
I hope you're well as you're listening to this, taking care of yourself, staying safe, staying healthy.
We're gonna have our regular bonus episode on Friday, The Weekender.
If you haven't checked it already, we had an episode drop last week in which we went real in-depth about 1987's Paul Verhoeven's movie Robocop, in which we talked about privatization of the police and cities, what a fascist society looks like.
I think it was a pretty good episode, whether you like the movie or not.
I think the episode turned out pretty well.
Again, if you want access to The Weekender, as well as live shows and other bonuses, including our wonderful Discord and the Muckrate community, which is I'd put you all head-to-head with any other community.
Period.
I would.
You're fantastic.
But if you want access to all that, you need to go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast and become a subscriber.
Just a reminder, we depend on you, and we are so thankful to have your support, but we want to keep this show ad-free, and we also want to keep it free of editorial oversight.
The only way that we get to have these conversations and talk about the things that we want to talk about and the way that we want to talk about them without someone saying, yeah, I don't know about that, I don't know, that feels, It feels different.
That doesn't feel, you know, conventional.
That doesn't feel like it necessarily fits the regular sort of storyline.
The only way we get to do that is with your help.
And we are very, very grateful for it.
So that is patreon.com slash muckregpodcast.
You'll help us out.
You'll support us and you'll get access to free shit too, which I think is pretty cool.
All right, everybody, I'm going to finish this beer.
It's good.
And then I'm going to go to bed.
I'm going to sleep for a while.
If you need us until next time, you can find Nick over at Can You Hear Me?
