Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how the media consistently portrays the right, and the very real danger the Democrats have of losing control of their agenda despite broad support across the country. It gets worse as they portray President Biden as out of touch and unempathetic to our troops.
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What will we tell the Afghan refugees who just fled those schools for girls back in their home country?
I guess the girls here will have to fill them in.
Unfortunately, what we will tell them is that some members of the far right in this country have apparently decided they will resort to intimidation and, in some cases, even violence to get what they want.
And they could sweep into power faster than the experts thought possible.
Sound familiar?
Sort of like an American Taliban.
We should put all of that aside.
We have an extraordinary problem that's killing people in the United States.
Killing us, putting us in the hospital.
So that kind of politicization that you just mentioned, there's no place for that when you're dealing with a public health crisis.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Buckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Saxton, here as always with the Nick Haussmann.
Quick note before we get to the business of the day.
This Thursday, that is September 9th, we're going to be hosting a live show for our patrons at 7 p.m.
Eastern.
If you want to be a part of that and watch how the magic is made, You need to go to patreon.com slash muckrake podcast again.
That will be this Thursday September 9th at 7 p.m.
Eastern Yeah, come over and join us and hang out Undoubtedly Nick we're gonna be pissed off about something because these are days of rage.
Are you mad as hell?
I'm mad as hell and I don't want to take it anymore.
Unfortunately, it seems like I'm going to take it and we're going to continue taking it and As things continue to get more and more frustrating, of course, on last week's Weekender Show, we reacted in real time to word that the Supreme Court of the United States of America once again went along with its ideological bent
It allowed Texas to basically completely hollow out Roe v. Wade, which not only is going to happen in Texas, but is now going to happen in states around the country as they are following that lead.
There are more and more efforts to disenfranchise people.
And so what we're going to talk about today is not just that problem, but we're going to talk about just how screwed up Our political system and political economy is because we have a couple of articles that we need to talk about in the midst of all of this.
Before we get into these, Nick, would you agree with me that we're in the middle of a political, social, existential crisis at the moment?
Yeah.
I mean, throw in medical, if that's the right word.
Sure.
We, and by the way, like we're watching horrific reports and as an educator, Particularly a public educator.
My heart has been destroyed lately to see one educator after another betrayed by people like Ron DeSantis, who are dying needlessly of coronavirus.
Meanwhile, we're hearing about children who are dying in the middle of this.
I would go so far as to say that this is a horror.
Oh, how about all the footage we saw this past weekend of college football games?
Did you see that?
I mean, I went to Madison and I was not like I was embarrassed or not, but it was a hundred thousand people packed in a stadium without a mask to be seen.
And I, you know, you can't, the only way I can imagine this is that it's going to make what we saw before in last year's case numbers just dwarf that now going forward.
It's so terrible, and I had a weird thing this weekend.
I had to run to the library.
I'm doing research on this new book, and I had to run out and grab a couple books.
And while I was going, so I live in a small college town that is... Has libraries.
Yeah, well, it has a library, but it's also got like an absolute addiction to football.
And I get it.
You're here to get the experience of going to college.
You're excited to go hang out with your friends and tailgate.
Meanwhile, people, people spend ungodly amounts of money on like RVs and all of these like equipment that they, they drag out.
Um, you literally, by watching the people and watching it unfurl, you would have thought that the pandemic was over.
Right.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, I think it is for younger people who are listening to certain other people.
They feel like the worst case scenario is they get a little bit of a cold.
Right.
And that's it.
And, you know, it's just a thing that happens.
Meanwhile, again, we're having people dying left and right.
We're blowing through records, particularly in states like Florida.
So we're in the middle of this problem.
And again, like this all plays together, this idea that people think reality is one way or they're distracted from whatever.
We have to talk about a couple of articles that came out that I think are pretty putrid and I think also pretty endemic of the problem that we have.
The first is this article in the Washington Post that came out, and this was published on Sunday.
We're recording this on Labor Day, which, by the way, happy Labor Day.
Thank people who got you labor rights.
This was by Michael Scherer in the Washington Post.
I'm going to read the headline first, which says, Republican wins on abortion, voting, and guns cap their banner 2021 with Democratic goals in dire danger despite Washington power.
So before we get into any of it, It's been a banner year, you say?
It's an interesting choice.
Washington Post has had a lot of interesting choices, so has the New York Times.
I think maybe even more than their headlines these days.
Yeah, there's there's a lot of stuff happening with this.
And we want to have a conversation, of course, about this whole idea that politics in America is some sort of fucking game.
You know, we have people listening right now.
I heard from a couple of listeners who live in Texas who now are second class citizens.
They literally are unable to be secure in their persons.
They have a state cracking down on them.
We have other listeners in states around the country who pretty soon are possibly going to be disenfranchised.
Who are possibly going to have their own individual rights trampled upon, and this whole thing is being treated like a fucking game.
Which, I don't know about you, it's one of my pet peeves in American politics.
Meanwhile, the ad right next to this article on my page, which my browser knows who I am, is from Mascara.
So I think it just adds to the levels of what's going on here behind the scenes.
Well, and I'm glad that you brought that up because I've got one of those sponsored ads over on the side.
This goes back to the whole idea that politics is supposed to be spectacle, right?
The Washington Post wants you to read this article that we're getting ready to talk about.
They want you on one hand, if you're a Republican, to read it and be like, yeah, my team is doing great or whatever, right?
They will share it.
They'll show it as something.
Meanwhile, a bunch of people on the other side who are terrified of this stuff are going to click on this article because it feeds into their... necessarily feeds into their anxiety and fear.
And meanwhile, you just have to sell them a bunch of stuff.
Well, let me ask you this.
The second part of the headline says, with Democratic goals in dire danger despite Washington power.
Dire is in quotes or in single quotes, but I don't think that's a lie.
I mean, so that part does feel like that is where we are and a precipice of something.
No, it's absolutely correct.
But let's look at the framing of this.
This is how the first few paragraphs go in this article.
New laws took effect last week in Texas that make it easier to openly carry a handgun and nearly impossible to seek an abortion procedure after six weeks of pregnancy.
On the governor's desk is a measure that would dramatically limit options for voting.
All of them are Republican wins that cap off a banner 2021 for down-ballot conservatives.
Congratulations!
More guns, more violence, cracking down on individual rights, taking away the right to vote.
I would say that's a win, wouldn't you?
I mean, listen, to those people, yeah, they're celebrating.
They're excited.
Well, by the way, the excitement has to be rooted in this...
What's the feeling?
You know, they know the majority of the country disagrees with all of these things.
Yes.
They know that if the ballots were open and fair, they would never get passed, right?
So it's almost like this sneaky feeling of like, you know, getting won over, or like, you know, I suppose it could very well be, in their minds, the Ewoks, you know, overpowering the Empire, right?
In some weird way.
Yeah, no, it's completely...
It's so frustrating already even thinking about this.
What we've talked about a lot on this show is that the Republican agenda isn't necessarily an agenda, right?
The Republican agenda is a plan on how to maintain control and power and exacerbate profits.
None of those things are good for anybody.
Like, they really aren't.
Like, maybe they'll allow the Republican Party to have control.
Maybe they'll allow white supremacy and corporate profits to grow.
But it's self-destruction, right?
What we're actually talking about, and I'm going to go ahead and read this next paragraph here.
This year alone, 12 states have passed income tax reductions.
Congratulations!
Right.
17 states have increased voting restrictions that are expected to hit Democratic constituencies more critically, and 18 states have enacted new or expanded school choice programs, according to the tallies kept by interest groups.
School choice, by the way, an interesting choice of words, which means that they're trying to move it to the point where private schools, which by the way don't have to answer to the federal government when it comes to segregation and also curriculum, which is a white supremacist dream, All of those things, and on top of that, less money for public works, less money for projects that make life better.
Those things are destroying the country, whether you root for them or not.
There are not wins.
These are self-inflicted wounds.
Yes.
We've talked about this a lot as far as how you can starve really important social programs by even the slightest tax cuts.
By the way, they don't even have to make the cuts to cut taxes.
They could just divert this money in other places as well based on where they decide to see fit.
When they say all politics is local, I mean, we're going to get to this in a minute anyway.
I think that's what the evil genius of this whole thing has been.
They've been able to figure out, and we're going to get there, how to control the local politics in a much easier fashion, which is dominated a lot more by Republicans than anywhere else nationally.
And then, well, the judges.
But I don't want to jump too far ahead because I know this article is leading us there.
Yeah, one more notch to put on the belt here.
Republican governors in several states have also had success in undermining President Biden's efforts to require masks for school children and others in an effort to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
Which brings us to another thing that a lot of us are afraid to say, or at least our media is afraid to say.
The Republican Party is using the coronavirus and its growth and its spread And punishing their constituents, by the way.
Damning them to death and long-term disease and possible disability.
They're using that as a weapon against a president of an opposite party.
Oh, yeah.
Well, it's always been the fear, right?
The fear of everything that the Democrats want to enact has always been, this is what's going to cause the downfall of society.
And then masks become the same thing.
It's very strange, though, that they, you know, that they're willing to ban abortions under the guise of saving children, but then don't want to have masks for kids in schools.
You know, Texas has the most child deaths of anybody in the country right now from COVID.
And it's not a small number.
And yet, they continue to enforce these ridiculous, well, non-enforcing ridiculous mandates, or whatever I'm trying to say.
They're allowing these kids to go without masks.
And they're violent about it.
It's really, really... Again, this is that same twerk we talked about forever and ever, how they have so many opposing ideologies in their brains at the same time that it would probably make anybody crazy.
Oh, it's it's it's absolutely nuts.
You know, there was this story that came out last week where in Arizona, a principal reached out to a family and said, your child has been exposed to coronavirus.
It's time to quarantine and we'll figure this out.
And of course, like, you know, all rational law abiding citizens.
The dad rounded up a couple of his friends, grabbed some zip ties.
And went and told the principal that they were going to perform a citizen's arrest on her.
Well, don't forget, along with the zip ties, he had someone else filming the whole thing.
Oh, yeah, because you because you want people to see that, right?
Like, you want to put that out there because it shows and this is true.
This is what's happening at the heart of things like that.
You want to show people that you're not fucking around.
Everybody else talks a big game, but you're willing to go out and do it, right?
Well, yeah.
I mean, but it's also performative.
Oh, this is going to get a lot of hits.
I'm going to get a little bit famous.
This is what I'm doing this for.
Because it's like, a lot of times you might want to film these interactions because you want to protect yourself and make sure that if someone tries to accuse you of something, you can have the proof that you didn't do whatever they say.
That is not this.
This is some asshole father who's like, I'm going to go viral with this thing.
I mean, that's what it felt like to me.
Yeah, and I want to go ahead and I want to move the camera out at this point.
Think about a political party doing this.
And I'm talking about everything from limiting people's ability to vote, limiting people's ability to have autonomy with their own bodies, making sure that there's not enough money for social programs, social projects.
can't make infrastructure work, education is being intentionally destroyed, right?
They're literally attempting to take money out of public schools in order to fund their own private academies where they can indoctrinate people.
All of that you can hide behind political ideology, right?
You can say, "I believe in, quote unquote, small government.
I believe in whatever." I want to talk about the fact that there's a political party that's like, "Yes, more children should die in the middle of this." It is, it is so unbelievably, not, I want to say callous, but that's not the word.
You know what I mean?
Like it's so grotesque that it's almost hard to wrap your head around.
Well, I tweeted this out and then you responded to me in a DM about it because I guess it came across your timeline.
And you should always follow me.
Can you hear me SMH?
But, you know, I mentioned that, you know, when you start to mix religion with democracy, it's the destruction of democracy.
And I can't help but think that this is really mostly rooted in religion, where their faith in God is so, I guess, fervent, that they'll simply say, it's God's will, He'll either protect me, and I won't get it, or if I get it, that's His will, and I'll die, and oh well.
That's sort of where I think a lot of the people are coming from, and you could, you know, weigh in on this even better than I can.
Well, there's a lot of weird ass mindset in all of this.
So on one hand, you know, I talked about this.
God, how long has this pandemic been going on?
I mean, it's going to be two years before you know it.
Before it's all said and done, I had a good time.
I came back from seeing all the people going to this football game, and I came back and then promptly read about, I believe it's the Mu variant.
M-U is the new anti-vaccine strain that's coming out, which is just, you gotta love it.
You gotta love living in this circumstance.
But I wrote about this going back to the first Easter after everything was starting to fall apart and how Trump was talking about reopening the country.
And I was talking about how the evangelical right wing looks at this thing and they're like, well, if it kills us, we get to go to heaven.
And it's God's will and we get to choose.
And on top of that, like, I'm sure God will use this how he wants to use it.
And some of the people who die are sinful or deserve to die.
I mean, it's the old Pat Robertson.
Oh, there was an earthquake in X. Well, that must be because they sinned.
Right?
That whole mindset.
And in this case, I think you're right.
It's an apocalyptic mindset.
Because I want to read this next part, which Oh man, I tell you what, Nick, every time I come across this guy's name, I love it.
Democrats may control the elected levers of power in Washington after a remarkable three-year run in which they took back the House, reclaimed the Senate, and evicted Donald Trump from the White House, but the battle over the future direction of the country remains wide open.
By focusing on state and judicial power, Republicans are enjoying something of a provincial policy renaissance.
Choice words, by the way, a provincial policy renaissance.
Sounds great, doesn't it?
You know, it's got the Stephen Miller alliteration going on there.
And you know what?
I love any time that we can laud a political party for killing people and call it a renaissance.
I think that's fantastic.
We're really on this precipice, this knife's edge, and each party goes, if I just push a little bit harder, I can control politics for the next 20 years, said conservative activist Grover Norquist.
Nick, do you know Grover?
Do you know the story of old Grover?
Um, you know, he always pops up in these things and so, yeah, I mean, I certainly know who he is and I'm kind of looking up his age because it seems like he shouldn't be around anymore, right?
But I bet you he's like 60.
Yeah, he's 64.
In my mind, he's like 90, but he's only 64.
Grover started young, and to go ahead and get people, and Grover is one of these people who, like, helped set up this current system that we're even talking about right now.
Grover Norquist was this sort of online, like, conservative presence, and he spearheaded this idea among the Republican Party, which was, I'll have all members of the Republican Party take an oath.
And the oath, basically, was that they would not raise taxes.
And in this way, Grover Norquist exercised this outsized power on his part to hold Republicans to never ever compromise on anything that could possibly ever raise taxes, even in the worst situation, even as the government is falling apart, even as infrastructure, education, healthcare, all of it starts to absolutely collapse.
And the entire point was, this goes back to a lot of what we've talked about, which is the expectation of performing these ideas, of staying ideologically pure.
And in that way, Grover Northquist, who basically was like, I don't know, a celebrated type of blogger asshole, eventually came to control almost the entirety of the Republican Party in that way.
You know, it's really ironic you bring him up this way because I was just thinking about this yesterday.
You know, George H.W.
doesn't win a re-election, you know, primarily because he had said, I will not raise taxes.
And he did, as he should.
And he was smart that he needed to do it.
And that's rooted in what Grover Norquist was doing.
But the other idea I had just because, you know, it's about to be on 9-11 and we're all kind of going through all these documentaries and we're sort of reflecting on what that means.
And the root of that goes from the Soviets and Afghanistan all the way through.
So I was thinking, you know, on the precipice of democracy winning, right?
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1992 when he's running.
And this is a chance for, you know, Pax Americana to be completely taken over.
And this asshole, H.W., loses.
How bad of a president do you have to be to lose that election?
Of course, it was Clinton of all people, but I was just thinking about that.
That was his reign.
That should have been eight years of H.W.
Bush, and I guess in some respects we're lucky that didn't happen that way.
Not to say that Clinton didn't continue some of the same policies anyway, but I was just reflecting on that.
How bad of a candidate do you need to be to not be able to win a re-election in that environment?
Well, to put that in a historical context, and we can bring that around to what Norquist is saying and what this article is talking about, in one of these situations, Like, with Bush.
Clinton was able to unseat Bush not just because of the tax comment, and that certainly played a role in it, but on top of that, Clinton actually sort of ran to the right of George H.W.
Bush.
We talk about this, and just to keep everybody on the same page, Clinton and these people within the Democratic Party, a guy by the name of Al Fromm, They started pushing the idea that the Democratic Party had to move to the right.
They had to embrace Reaganism, and neoliberalism, and this idea that the market is the way that the country should work, and the world would work a lot better if it was based on markets, and all of these types of things, where meanwhile Clinton was like, I'm gonna go after welfare, I'm gonna cut social programs, things like that.
He actually ran to the right of H.W.
Bush in that regard, while putting like a human face on it.
And in that case, that mindset that Norquist did where he says, we're talking about the next 20 years, right?
We're talking about two generations more or less.
The idea that right now is a battle over the next 20 years.
The Republican Party thought someone like a Bill Clinton who should have been their dream.
You know what I mean?
Like somebody on the quote unquote left that they could work with and enact a thing.
And he continually reached across the aisle.
Tell me if that sounds familiar, right?
So he continually reached across the aisle and they were like, oh, if he has too many victories, if America gets better under him, if anything happens under him, we can kiss the next 20 years goodbye.
So what do we have to do?
So automatically, the best hardball, the best strategy, right, is to undermine the President of the United States of America, eschew consensus, which is what was taking place, and to engage in conspiracy theories and fear-mongering and tell everybody, oh, he's a lefty socialist.
He's going to betray the country.
He's going to hand you over the New World Order.
He's going to take your guns.
He's going to throw you in camps.
It's the same story, but it's constant apocalypticism, right?
Oh, if he does anything, if the country gets even a little bit better, it's going to end up in the end of the world, or we'll never win another election, which is the exact same cycle that we're looking at now.
So here's what's fascinating.
So I had woken up in a fever dream and for some reason was compelled to look up the transcript of the Gore-Quayle vice presidential debate in 1992, in October of that year, because I remembered it really well and it ties into what's going on in Texas with the abortion law.
But in that debate, when you read what Gore laid out and said what the Republicans intended to do with trickle-down economics, with abortion, with religion, He was right.
It all comes true.
Well, does anything come true from what the Republicans say?
Like, no, it never does.
That's like the big difference, and yet they're treated the same.
Oh, they're all the same.
They all lie.
They all, you know, they're all gonna be whatever.
But it's like, no, the Democrats have in a reasonable way outlined what they're trying to do and why and how.
And then it's happened now, you know, from 92 till now.
We've seen every single thing that laid out that they have we've warned about the Republican Party.
And meanwhile, the Republican Party has warned like the destruction of the of civilization in, you know, in rubble.
uh clearly has not happened in fact we've had more moments of uh national prosperity you know under clinton and under obama than we ever had under any of the other uh republican administrations i guess there's only the one well there's two now um and uh it's it's really uh it's still treated the same in a way that um that's that's part of the reason why we can't get anywhere do you remember jade helm do you ever hear about jade helm
no jade helm was this situation during the obama administration where there were these military exercises that were being carried out Just routine war games type stuff.
And it became the biggest story in right-wing media.
It was like, listen, this is Barack Obama making his final move as a tyrant.
This is how we get put in camps.
This is how America is destroyed.
Meanwhile, Greg Abbott, who is the current governor of Texas, made his name on being like, that's not going to happen under my watch.
I'm going to stop the threat.
None of it was real.
None of it even approached.
Obama, if you want to be an absolute right wing conservative and look at Obama through the worst lens imaginable, you could say that he was like center left.
On social issues?
Barack Obama wasn't going to take anybody's guns.
Barack Obama wasn't going to institute socialism.
Barack Obama believes in free market capitalism.
That's his thing, right?
He's in that same mold of sort of a neoliberal idea.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party kept talking about he was going to be the next Mao, he was going to be the next Stalin, he was going to do this, he was going to do that.
And they undermined everything that he could possibly do as president.
And continued to kick the can down the road of actual progress and reform.
Now, all of that that we're talking about is undisputed truth.
That's what the Tea Party was.
That's how they moved further and further into racist conspiracy theory, authoritarianism.
But here is the problem.
The media that we're discussing right now would discuss all of that through the prism of winning or losing.
Is that a smart strategy?
And they would say, yeah, that was a smart strategy.
They got the Supreme Court.
Look what they've been able to do.
Look at how much money they've been able to raise.
They've been able to maintain power, this disenfranchising, the way they've treated COVID.
Those are quote-unquote smart moves.
Meanwhile, people are literally suffering and dying.
And the media cannot get it out of their head that this isn't some sort of a fucking game.
Right.
Well, let's talk about this because what we know as facts is that they've engaged in a decades-long attempt at disenfranchising voters.
This is the thing that they've developed.
And we had emails, like there's receipts that they were dumb enough to write out about wanting to do this.
And then also the court packing, which we've seen from the Supreme Court, but even into the lower courts as well for all those for the years that McConnell was pushing all these guys for Trump.
So what we said in the past is the same thing is so they've realized they don't need the votes to get their agenda done.
Right.
They can get it through the courts and they can get it through disenfranchising the votes, at least they can't even get the votes in.
And so that in my mind is a tacit, not approval, their acknowledgement that this is not democracy.
They're acknowledging that, yes, we're not going to do this democratically because we can't, because the will of the people wouldn't accept it.
So there we are.
It's out in the open now.
They don't want democracy.
They've already threatened that they're going to move to fascism anyway because it'll be our fault.
But still, that's where we are.
They don't want democracy.
I almost feel like it would be an easier conversation, easier debate between the two sides if they would acknowledge that even more clearly.
But even the politicos that we're talking about would be like, oh, that's a bad strategy to admit openly that you don't want democracy.
So if the Republicans and this is the thing, like I'm getting ready to go into my best Chuck Todd.
You know what I mean?
Because it's like, honestly, when we're talking about these people, these status quoers who even as things get potentially worse, like this is really interesting.
You know, what's happening here is really fascinating, these movements that we're watching.
And what it is, is it's recreating a Washington D.C.
cocktail party, which is where Democrats, Republicans, independents, media members, journalists, they all get into a room.
And by the way, that's not even the end of it.
There's editors, publishers.
You know what I'm talking about?
It's like the entire complex of the idea of politics It's all of the actors who engage in this back and forth and then they drink and hang out with each other when the cameras are off.
The whole point of this is that somebody like a Chuck Todd, even as Republicans are trying to overthrow abortion rights, they're trying to overthrow voting rights, they're trying to destroy education, healthcare, all these things, you'd be like, ooh, I wonder if this is going to work.
Let's check out the polls.
Let's see how people are feeling about this.
What messaging is working?
What messaging isn't working?
Oh, the Democrats, they just haven't been able to play the same type of hardball that the Republicans have played.
And what does hardball mean when they say it?
It means destroying democratic institutions.
It means literally playing outside of the lines of the established system of government and society that we've decided on.
We can't forget school boards.
In a vacuum, children as they grow up are usually progressive and they're going to be more liberal than adults unless they're taught at birth to not believe those things.
And so that's the other diabolical genius that they've uncovered as a way to change curriculum and also harass these school boards to so much of a degree where they're going to end up, everyone's going to quit.
And it was reported on September 2nd when I was on Twitter watching Zoe Tillman was saying that, oh no, I'm sorry.
Wait, anyway, where did it go?
One of these tweets was like, yeah, people are now quitting school boards.
The threats on their lives and their families, they're doxing them, and it's not worth it.
And I don't blame them.
I do not blame regular, normal people who want to just be a part of a school board to help kids would get out of there.
And then what's left?
Who is left to take those positions?
And that's what's so scary about it, because that's what changes things for a lot longer than 20 years.
So here's the problem.
All of this conversation that we're having is DC politicos hanging out at these parties talking about things as if they don't have real consequences.
Meanwhile, you have people who are being harassed, who are being stalked, who are being assaulted, who are being confronted.
That principle in Arizona.
Here's the thing that's happening that is barely getting any attention whatsoever.
The unemployment benefits are getting ready to expire.
It's going to leave over 7 million Americans on the verge of not just poverty, but possibly economic and personal destruction.
Those are real things.
Meanwhile, the coronavirus has exploded so badly to the point where we can't even fully grasp our heads around it.
We're all living in fractal realities where we're either in denial of the thing or pretending like it's not actually happening.
There are real-world consequences to this shit.
People actually suffer while people are like, oh, that's a great move by the Republicans.
Let's see how that plays out.
As if they're watching a preseason NFL game.
As if that is like the most that, like, Lies on any decision is just whether or not it works out politically or not, whether or not it's successes or whether or not they're failures.
But it gets worse because the people on the right, the followers, are shitting out their own intestines right now and bumping in the doors because they're so dizzy because they have no visual perception after taking ivermectin.
And it's particularly the ivermectin that's not for humans.
Nonetheless, even the prescribed one is not for COVID.
There's no evidence it works.
On the Ivermectin.
We gotta talk about this for a second.
Do you ever have moments in the midst of all of this bullshit where you just have to like shake your head and throw up your hands?
And you're like, there's not a better metaphor.
There's no better metaphor in this entire situation than watching portions of America, like you said, hundreds of thousands of people going into a football stadium and hardly any sort of like infrastructure put in place to make sure that that's safe.
Meanwhile, other people are going out to their local rural king and guzzling horse medicine.
Like, literally, that's the place where we are as a country right now.
Yeah, I want to go to the Nine Perfect Strangers place and be healed there and then never come back.
Someone just did an edit of all the Fox News mentions of Ivermectin in the last couple months.
And you would think that they all owned a lot of stock in this because they are just pushing it.
And again, they're all hanging out in the cocktail parties and it must test well or whatever.
But, you know, but they know it's in their face how bad this is for people to take and how, you know, ineffective it would be for COVID.
But they continue to do it.
It has to be because that's what the polling is telling them or the numbers the research is telling them I guess but I can't believe it though at that level those people on Fox News and even you know the the politicians who are talking about it don't know indirectly in their face how dangerous taking that medication is.
Oh man, and they just push it and push it and push it.
And it's all about political gain and profit.
And it's turned into the most cynical thing imaginable, except for, and this is the second article that I wanted to bring up because I think that this is really endemic of this bullshit.
And I want to say before I begin this, because we like to put this out there just to make sure that everybody's aware, this is not a partisan show.
We're not here to carry water for Joe Biden.
I think Joe Biden sometimes makes good choices, sometimes makes terrible choices.
I think his past is really problematic, particularly with that right-wing turn that we were talking about with the Democratic Party back in the 90s, early 2000s.
I think pulling out of Afghanistan was an act of political courage that the media has still not forgiven him for.
You know what I mean?
It's every single day that they are just absolutely crushing him, which leads us to this.
This article is disgusting.
It's in invoking Bo Biden broaches a loss that's guided his presidency.
And a reminder to everybody, of course, that Bo Biden was Joe Biden's son.
Joe Biden has had an incredibly tragic little life in a lot of regards.
Of course, he lost his first wife and a daughter.
Uh, and had to take care of his kids by himself.
Later on in his life, Beau Biden, who by all accounts was the apple of his eye, he tells everybody in the world that that was like the most important person and, and he should have been president.
It kept him from running for the presidency in 2016.
He is still really emotionally torn up about this.
And meanwhile, the lens from that first article, that sportification of politics, the winning and the losing idea is now being turned To a man grieving the loss of his son, and I find it really hard to oversell how disgusting this shit is.
I agree.
Are you going to read from it?
Yeah, so let's take a look at this thing.
And again, this is from, this would have been Saturday in the New York Times by Katie Rogers.
In the hours before Lance Corporal Jared Schmitz, 20, was killed by a terrorist bomb in Afghanistan, he posed for a photograph taken by a bunkmate.
In the image, the Marine's brow was furrowed.
He flashed a peace sign.
This is Jared Schmitz, his father Mark Schmitz said, he told President Biden days later at Dover Air Force Base, where the two men had traveled to observe the dignified transfer of the remains of 13 Marines killed last week in the attack on Kabul.
Don't forget his name.
But Mr. Schmitz was confused by what happened next.
The president turned the conversation to his oldest son, Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015.
Referring to him has become a reliable constant of Mr. Biden's presidency.
In speeches, Oval Office discussions, and personal aides, Mr. Biden tends to find a common thread back to his son no matter the topic.
But for Mr. Schmitz, another father consumed by his grief, it was too much to bear.
What the hell is this?
Uh, I don't know.
I don't think... I mean, we can't dismiss Mr. Schmitz's feelings, right, and how he felt in the moment.
He can feel like that doesn't need an article.
Right.
The whole framing of this article from the very beginning is that we have one grieving father and then a grieving father trying to talk to him about grief.
That's not smart politics.
People are getting tired of Joe Biden bringing up his dead son.
It's a bad political strategy.
It is maybe the most cynical, pessimistic bullshit I've read in a long time.
Yeah, I agree.
And by the way, like, because this also gets wrapped into this notion that Jody Ernst was trying to spread how Joe Biden literally, quote unquote, has never said an empathetic word to the troops, which is like the most, it's the only thing he says.
It's probably half the things he said is about how he cares about the troops and how he thanks them for their service.
And of course it does fold into his son's service as well.
But yes, there doesn't seem to be any redeeming value to writing an article like this that sort of exposes this in the first couple of paragraphs.
Yeah, and then we move on to William McGurn, a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
Congratulations, by the way.
I probably wouldn't go around telling people that.
I'd probably hide that in the old resume.
William McGurn, though, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in, by the way, in an article that's so disgusting that we're not going to read from it.
That's how bad it was.
And the actual quote from it that they bring into this article, because let's talk about the framing of this.
It says, Mr. Biden is not a gold star father and should stop playing one on TV.
They are literally saying that Joe Biden's appeal to the American people is too much focused on grief.
And I don't know about you, Nick, but in the middle of a generational pandemic, the decline of American empire, America declining into authoritarianism and cruelty, I would say that grieving and personal loss and mourning is probably what the fuck America needs right now.
Which this article does.
You know, and compared to what we had the last four years.
So, like, listen, you might want to imply that Biden is, you know, his mental faculties are not, you know, 100 percent where they were 10 years ago.
Which this article does.
Which this article does.
Right.
And, you know, and by the way, like, listen, you listen to him talk and it's like, OK, and just like we had heard it with Trump, but worse, the very least, this guy is a human and he has empathy and he knows how to make decisions related to that more so than anything that Trump ever would have done.
And again, I don't want to make this about Trump versus Biden.
This is just Biden as a president.
The guy is competent and can do this job.
That's what we need right now.
Well, listen, we don't even need to talk about Biden's mental acuity like that.
That is like this weird thing.
And you'll notice that the media is starting to talk about that.
Yeah.
Like and they're talking about it as a consequence of the Afghanistan situation.
They're bringing this up because he ended a war that they didn't want him to end.
Because the media, no matter how much people want to talk about how they're left and they're liberal or whatever, they wanted that war.
They want American empire.
They depend on it.
So all of a sudden, it's just a coincidence that he gets out of that war and they start talking about, well, I don't know, Biden might have slipped a little bit.
Maybe his mind's not where it needs to be.
So what do we do?
We start talking about the character.
We start talking about the perception of the character.
Oh, is he winning over the people?
Is his messaging working?
Is he winning?
Is he losing?
Meanwhile, what are we not talking about?
A massive infrastructure bill which can change the United States of America.
We're talking about another bill that is being cooked up that will change our social safety net forever if it gets passed.
We're not talking about the fact that we just ended a war that we didn't need to be in in the first place and wasted tons of lives, treasure, and political capital.
We're not talking about those things.
We're talking about whether or not the President of the United States of America mentions his dead son too much.
Yeah, by the way, we have to stop saying I think we ended a war.
We ended an occupation.
Yeah, right.
That wasn't the war.
That was just a bunch of people, you know, trying to secure a country for 20 years.
Well, actually, well, no, we'll give them what we'll give them the first year, year and a half of the fight on war on terror.
I mean, my God.
But then the last 17 and a half, 18 years, whatever that is, it was just occupation.
That's all that was.
By the way, when's Iraq?
Iraq was supposed to pull out too.
Do you know that?
They were supposed to pull out and there was reports in June that by the end of the year, we're going to be completely out just like we did that in Afghanistan.
Well, guess what?
You think that's going to happen now?
I mean, my God.
And the whole point of this that people aren't really talking about is Biden's kids served in all of this.
Like, it wasn't necessarily that he's thinking about Bo when he's doing it.
He had a kid who was over there who got to witness this stuff, right?
Yeah, firsthand, like, what happened here?
And so as a result, like, he doesn't believe in this war.
He didn't believe in the wars back when he was in the Obama administration.
It was a major source of tension between him and the military.
In this case, he made a decision he wanted to end it, which was the right decision.
It was ugly.
And now, all of a sudden, because he went against what the media wanted, what neoliberals want, what empire builders want, all of a sudden now we have to talk about whether or not Joe Biden's mental acuity is what it used to be.
We have to start talking about how he's, quote-unquote, making people feel uncomfortable.
It's absolute absurdity, the reality these people are living in.
Well, it also makes me look at the timing of all these different things as well.
Now, they probably couldn't control necessarily the Supreme Court's ruling on this abortion case, but the timing tends to be sometimes a little bit strange to me too, like how they're able to make these things happen right when they need them to happen.
We know that Trump used to hit-pocket different issues.
And then pull them out when he needed to to change the narrative of whatever.
And so, you know, it's clearly a tactic that is used.
And you have to be careful because that's when you start looking at the midterms and then the 2024 election is, you know, they're saving things, too, right?
They're going to save things that are going to use it to attack Biden.
And you have to be ready for those or get ahead of the game.
I can't even imagine what those are gonna be but it's probably gonna be pretty horrible only because we now know why Trump never wanted to run against Biden like Biden doesn't he has a similar quality things don't stick to him too much and he's that older white guy that people can can handle and can can stomach so that that's the big question is how is that gonna affect him going forward but you nailed it you nailed it right there which is going in to 2022 and 2024 and
The media has now signaled to the Republican Party.
And again, it's all these people at cocktail parties, right?
It's all these people.
And this is why it's like after January 6th, after the big lie was propagated.
It's why all the Republicans kept going on all the shows.
They're all friends.
They think this is a game.
They're just part of a political class and none of this has anything to do with them.
They don't have to worry about health care.
They don't have to worry about poverty.
They don't have to worry about being thrown out of their houses.
They're above it, right?
They have class solidarity.
You know what I mean?
They may fight about what happens and what doesn't happen, but at the end of the day, it's just a lark.
It's just a hobby.
It's a way to make money.
Well, that's what the tax thing is.
They actually believe it, right?
Oh, yeah.
That's the one thing that they actually do believe in, right?
And there's a reason that for the most part, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party and the media class have all been in agreement.
It's been a consensus.
And when we move outside of the consensus, right, when all of a sudden you'll notice that when the media actually went after Trump, as opposed to just him being like rude and boorish, they would go after him for like a trade war with China.
Right.
It was when all of a sudden you started fucking around with the economy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
And with Biden, all of a sudden it's because he pulls out of Afghanistan.
So now all of a sudden you're seeing the media is going to be receptive for when the Republican Party starts pushing for the redemption of empire.
Right.
They start talking about Biden dropping the ball with Afghanistan.
And there's at least a segment of the media that is now going to be ready to start dealing with the Republicans being like, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, Joe Biden, old Uncle Joe's not all there.
So what we've actually found with all these people who hang out, compare notes and do all of this, they're in conversation with each other.
And even if the Republican appeal doesn't carry water, the media will help it carry water.
You know what I mean?
They'll amplify it.
They'll give it plenty of time.
They're creating narratives and stories and in this case they are coming together and we're seeing how those two groups are starting to share a reality.
The problem is that is the reality and it's not going to change.
Politicians might change, they might be influenced by polls and by elections.
The media, I don't think, will ever change the way they cover this thing.
In whatever noble pursuit they might think that they're trying to do here or not.
And remember, even though it might feel that way, not everybody watches the same platforms.
So, you know, it's hard to always gauge exactly what people are getting from all the narratives, because they're only going to get a tiny little slice of one narrative, and then the Fox News people are getting, like, who knows, someone ever crazy in the Matrix.
But they do come together.
That's when you start finding out where power lies, right?
So, like, Fox News will sit there and talk all day long about the dangers at the border, or, you know, what black people are doing, and America's being changed.
CNN and MSNBC are not going to talk about that.
But CNN and MSNBC will talk about the decline of American Empire.
They'll talk about losing a war.
They'll talk about, oh, we betrayed people in Afghanistan.
And that happens, by the way, at times of war.
There's a reason why leading up to Afghanistan, leading up to the Iraq War, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News were basically broadcasting the same stuff.
When you start finding where those things conglomerate, you start to realize where actual power and consensus lie.
And in this case, it's moving away from Biden.
And we are moving now towards this idea of how are Republicans going to continue to gain power?
I'm sorry.
There are some in the media who care about a woman's right to choose.
There's some in the media who care about whether, you know, people are being thrown out of their houses.
There are some in the media who care whether or not people are dying of coronavirus.
But I'll tell you what else they care about.
They care about power and they care about money.
And so here's a situation where those things are coming together and amalgamating.
Well, I'm glad that you mentioned that in terms of the domination of America across the world, because I'm watching this 9-11 documentary.
And by the way, a lot of these are just kind of whitewashing.
You know, this is the propaganda part, right?
20 years in after 9-11, we got to make sure that the next generation learns, quote unquote, learns about 9-11.
And I got to tell you, the one I haven't watched yet is the one about, like, in the Situation Room.
I don't know, did you see that one yet?
Oh, where she's in this war room?
Yeah, yeah.
Because you I can already tell from what I can see in the little Preview that it's yeah, it's all propaganda, but they did cut to in the one I was watching which is you know a very cursory overview of the events in four parts they have Colin Powell out there saying Colin Powell saying You don't attack America like this and get away with it.
I And I wanted to have like an echo, get away with it, because like, cut to now, and the Taliban are completely back in power.
And I don't care if you want to say that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are not the same.
They are already making the connection in this documentary, when the Taliban first take over, and how they were so chummy with Al-Qaeda, and that's why they're able to train and give them a safe haven.
So, they're trying to have it kind of both ways here, but it's like, I gotta tell you, like, they got away with it, if you look at it, you know, 20 years later.
They got what they wanted.
They got what they wanted.
And here we are.
We're still 20 years later dealing with the exact same things.
Which, I mean, is the fever dream desire of Al Qaeda and the people who carried it out.
It really truly is.
Like, we have reached a point where they They continue to spend all of our money.
They continue to spend lives.
They continue to push America towards militarism and jingoism and white supremacy.
I mean, they got everything that they wanted in this regard.
And meanwhile, we're still sleepwalking through this shit.
Oh, by the way, we didn't even mention climate change until right now.
Climate change isn't even coming up to these people.
It flooded their apartments.
It killed their neighbors.
The people who are writing this stuff.
The people who are going on the news.
Their neighbors downstairs in the basement, right, where they can't afford anything above it, those people drowned.
And they've already moved on from that and now they're talking about personality politics and quote-unquote hardball.
Oh, well let me ask you this.
Let's get back to the al-Qaeda thing for one thing.
I have a question I've been meaning to ask you for a while.
Do you believe That Al-Qaeda, their only concern about attacking America was because of the quote-unquote infidels in their region, i.e.
if the infidels leave, then they're not interested in attacking the U.S.
anymore.
Do you believe that really is the ideology they would adhere to, let's just say, if America pulled out of Saudi Arabia?
Well, I think that probably would have taken some of the pressure off, but it goes along with the same idea that we're talking about with the radicalization of the right in this country.
They'll say it's because they're afraid of what's going to happen in the future, but the people who would do this stuff, the people who would carry out terrorist attacks, the people who would overthrow the ability for people to control their bodies or even be able to vote in elections, it's not always about that.
It's about a desire for power.
Right.
And I think that you saw with people like Al Qaeda, with people like ISIS, they've taken advantage of these situations, these ideological conflicts and moments of crisis, and they've used it to their advantage to try and build something right and try and take control of things.
And I think in many ways, that is the link between what's happening in this country and what we've been fighting now for 20 years.
Here's a more interesting link, perhaps.
The mindset that you described earlier, we talked about as far as religion, this is God's will.
He's just going to take me if he will, or he'll protect me from the COVID virus.
Is that that much different than the ideology of these terrorists?
No, it's really, truly not.
And this goes back to a lot of what I talk about, which is the difference between empirical knowledge, which is you have science, you have facts that base things and make you make decisions.
Like looking around America and seeing how many people are impoverished or getting ready to get thrown out of their houses or dying of coronavirus, right?
You look at it and you say, oh my God, here's a problem.
We need to take care of it.
And then you have revealed knowledge, which is, no, I heard from somebody that I trusted, you know, he may not be a scientist, but he told me to take horse paste or God told me in a vision or my pastor told me, you know what I mean?
Like it's just this, it's the constant battle between the two and the problem with revealed knowledge, particularly through religious faith,
is it's quote-unquote infallible you hear it you believe it everybody either has to adhere to it or you kill them or you oppress them it's it's really the decision that comes from it yeah and that's why it's so damn damning what's the word devastating when Fox News and those kind of places will impart lies it's as soon as it gets into the brain it's solidified and that's it's it almost will never get it to change yeah but that's winning politics am i right
That's how you win elections.
That's how you gain control.
So you would sit there and you would say that that's tragic and awful, and a politico sitting around at a DC cocktail hour would be like, no, that's smart.
That's a good way to gain actual material power, right?
Is to make sure that hundreds of thousands of people die.
Well, you know, the slogan used to be changing hearts, changing minds.
Well, they predisposed the minds already to be accepting of it, so there isn't any changing or anything.
It's just solidifying it more and more.
And it just makes the system more and more broken.
Yeah.
And it's really too bad.
I'd never in my lifetime would have thought I would have seen, like, the denial of science along such clear lines between right and left.
And yet, here we are.
And that was intentional, too.
You want to talk about winning politics, shoveling billions of dollars into undermining climate scientists and experts, all to make sure that you can continue selling oil at the highest prices imaginable.
I mean, that's what it is.
And meanwhile, if you're skeptical, if you're cynical, if you have no ethics and you have no morals, you look at that and you're like, hey, hats off.
Congratulations, everybody.
Winning politics.
Right.
But it's also a willingness to just put your head in the sand and ignore stuff, which is goes to like policing across the country, too, where it's a solidified where the blue are the blue and we cannot, you know, if you had if they were willing to look at the facts of how often police are, you know, don't behave properly, they would they would realize more what playing field we're on.
But they don't.
They don't want to see it.
They can't let that affect how they believe that, you know, The police are the to serve and protect and nothing else.
And so, you know, there's so many levels to this.
And it's that's, you know, again, every year that goes by, there's this more it gets deeper and deeper.
And there's another issue they're going to add on to that.
And yeah.
But like with coronavirus, it's the exact same thing with what you're talking about in terms of violence.
By by adhering to these ideas that are, quote unquote, winning politics, you win, quote unquote, short term, right?
Then long term, you're just screwing yourself and everybody else by saying, oh, it's winning politics to undermine belief in climate change.
Well, you're also damning your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren to an earth that might not function.
If all of a sudden you're talking about violence and shootings among law enforcement, I'm sorry, but that breeds, like, unlawful activity.
It breeds vigilantism.
It breeds violence and militarism, right?
Meanwhile, your kids, your grandkids, your great-grandkids have to live in that environment, going out and fighting in these wars for oil and minerals and resources.
Look what happens.
It boomerangs back.
If you start all of a sudden messing around with all this stuff, it always has a long-term effect.
It's not winning.
It might win the day, but it does not actually quote-unquote win because that doesn't exist.
Yes, and for those of you listening, I mean really listening, Jared is just speaking code for capitalism.
Well, I mean, you're not wrong.
You're not wrong.
All right, everybody, we're gonna come back.
Like I said, we're gonna have a live episode this Thursday, September 9th at 7 p.m.
Eastern.
If you want to be a part of that and gain additional content from us, all you gotta do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
We will post a link with that live show.
We're looking forward to seeing everybody.
We appreciate your support like you wouldn't believe.
We'll be talking more about this.
We'll be nearing the 20th anniversary of 9-11, so undoubtedly we'll be talking more about that and anything else that rears its ugly head.
If you need us until then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me, SMH.
