Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the revelation that AT&T, in all its corporate wisdom, decided to create one of the most radical right wing news stations. They also dive into the psyche of the anti-vaccine, anti-mask, anti-everything right wing to understand what motivates them.
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A new Reuters investigation based on a review of court records reveals that OANN has flourished thanks to financial support from a surprising mainstream source, AT&T.
The radical Democrats left fingerprints all over the country, providing a trail of evidence that the 2020 election was not only tampered with, but was actually overthrown.
Any American involved in these efforts, from those who ran the voting machines to the very highest government officials, is guilty of treason under U.S.
Code 2381, which carries with it the penalty of death.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton, here with the birthday boy himself, the beloved, the one, the only Nick Halseman.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you, Jared.
I'm stopping counting after this year.
That's the way to do it.
You don't have to answer.
It's like Oliver North.
All you have to do is give your rank and then move forward.
Yeah, right, exactly.
Not my serial number or my social so that no one can steal my identity.
That's right.
You do not recognize the authority of this court, more or less.
I can't handle that truth.
So, everybody, we're going to celebrate Nick's birthday in the only way that we know how, which is to dive in the absolute cesspool of right-wing radicalization for profit and power.
And we have to start with, it feels, Nick, like this story that we're getting ready to jump into.
was sort of tailor-made for the Muckrake podcast.
This feels, it feels like we're in batting practice and they're just lobbing the fastballs in, letting us get our game going, get our confidence up.
This feels like it came out for us.
Well, did you see the guy steal home the other day?
That's like that, right?
The guy's still home.
By the way, did you know in baseball, there's a two-strike stealing a home with two outs?
If the pitcher had just thrown a strike, no run scores, the inning is over.
See, this is where rules matter.
It still is in sports.
Unfortunately, those rules do not apply within the political arena anymore.
They've been smashed to absolute pieces, leaving opportunists left and right to pick up the pieces and run with them.
And so we have to talk today about a Reuters report which has been reported on, people have sort of mingled it about, but it was so horrific And telling that I think people sort of dropped it, haven't discussed it, and obviously haven't given it the proper context.
And of course, that is that the telecommunications giant, one of the largest corporations in the world, AT&T, is responsible for the creation of the One America News Network, OANN.
They gave the idea to the founder.
They have bankrolled it.
They have sent tens of millions of dollars.
It has been revealed that DirecTV, which of course AT&T runs, it is...
It comprises 90% of the income for OANN.
And again, they were the ones who pitched this idea in the first place.
Not shocking to hear that one of the largest corporations in the world created a news network that is not only radicalized, but radicalizes its viewers, but nonetheless telling, I would say.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
It's hard to believe there's a situation where they said, you know, Fox News, it's not conservative enough.
Let's do something better than that.
And that's what they did.
And remember, it's not necessarily that AT&T would have funded this.
It's that it got onto DirecTV, which is distributed across hundreds of millions of, you know, households across the country.
And that was what was interesting about it.
Now, they're under the cover of the fact that OAN sued AT&T or DirecTV to get on to DirecTV.
That's dubious.
We need to look more into that because it could have been one of those things where it's like, oh, hey, they sued us.
Well, I guess we got to put them on then.
You know, it's not anything we need to do.
It's Macho Man Randy Savage stamping his feet as he's punching Hulk Hogan.
We started watching heels.
We'll deal with that at a different time.
I just want to throw it out there.
That's the issue here is that when you get a state-sanctioned or whatever corporate-sanctioned airing on DirecTV, that goes a long way.
Maybe they didn't even realize what would happen, but this is the Frankenstein monster at their feet.
Yeah, so the history of this, we need to dive in a little bit.
Basically, what has happened here is that Reuters was able to uncover a deposition from the founder, Robert Herring Sr.
And for those who aren't familiar, Robert Herring Sr.
is a CEO tech guy, an older fella, who made his money in tech.
And in 2019, in a deposition, it was revealed that AT&T had talked to him back in 2013.
And so for a second, we kind of have to put ourselves in that time period in order to find the context of this.
And in 2013, this would have been right after Barack Obama was inaugurated for the second time.
Fox News, of course, had not only sort of amplified the Tea Party nonsense, which for those keeping track at home was bankrolled by billionaires and millionaires on the right wing who created a movement to push the Republican Party and the conversation for the right. which for those keeping track at home was bankrolled by And so what happened post Tea Party, what happened was it was very obvious that there was money to be made.
There was an opportunity to push further right of Fox News because for a while Fox News wasn't sure what to do with the Tea Party, right?
They would bring on Donald Trump.
They would bring on all these people.
it became very obvious very quickly that there was a large amount of profit and a marketing demographic that was waiting on an alternative to Fox News.
Which, by the way, for the history of this entire situation, Fox News, which premiered on October 7th, 1996, which is my birthday, which is weird to talk about, was created as a marketing demographic solution. was created as a marketing demographic solution.
And, of course, you had Rupert Murdoch who came together with Roger Ailes.
And we'll talk a little bit more about Ailes in a bit when we start talking into the ideology playing here.
They looked at CNN, MSNBC, and realized that there was a spot open that Fox News could fulfill by pushing the news further right.
Now, obviously, that gave an opportunity for ideologues to act, which we'll get into in a second.
But that's what's happened here with OANN.
It wasn't a political decision.
It was a profit decision that turned into a political decision.
And it's not been easy to kind of bring this up in the context that like Obama, eight years of Obama, in some twisted way leads to Trump and where we are now.
And four years of Obama basically leads to OANN because, and we have to decide if we want to say OANN or OANN.
It really is OANN.
OANNN.
OANNN.
Yeah, right.
It's like make America great again, again.
Yeah, it's hard.
So, you know, you, Either way, OAN.
I think OAN rolls off the tongue better.
So OAN is founded on the first four years of hatred for Obama.
And now that he's back in power, we have another nexus here to try and capitalize on.
And that's what's frustrating from my point of view, because he was a president who stood for a lot of things.
But what he stood for to the right It became so detestable to them that they needed to be able to create these outlets to let this hatred out.
And as a result, I don't think anyone would have recognized then that it was going to be so... The siren song of hatred for this would be so alluring to people and build such a huge coalition up.
Yeah, but it was the available explanation that could be given to Americans who wanted to oppose Obama.
Which, again, Obama, if you really want to put him on the political spectrum, if you want to give him a lot of credit, you could say that he center-left, but he was very much a centrist president.
I mean, he lived within the consensus that we talk about a lot.
He would go out and talk about how, you know, America was exceptional, that the moral arc of the universe was bending towards justice.
He basically lived and breathed as an example of how America was progressing, right, and sort of trying to heal itself.
And as a result... Wait, why did we have to heal ourselves?
Because there's something to heal.
Yeah, because we had to deal with eight years of push.
I had forgotten, by the way, in 2004, it was closer than I remember.
Like, was it Ohio really pretty much decided the election?
Do you remember?
Between him and Kerry?
It was within a contestation, is what I would say, is that Kerry had a reason to sort of stay in the race and eventually backed out and conceded the race to Bush and move forward without looking much at Ohio.
But Obama comes in and says, you know, we have to fix America's place in the world.
We basically have to look at the war on terror, which he continued, but try to figure out some way to get America back within the world community for unilateral action in Iraq.
Barack Obama, pro-business, pro-markets, all of these things.
But these people, the opponents of Barack Obama, who are so put off by the fact that he is the first African-American president, they have to figure out some reason to dislike him.
You have to start offering them some conspiracy theory to believe, right?
They need to believe that he's a socialist, a communist, a Marxist, that he's the next Hitler, a Muslim, that he is a sleeper agent, that he's, you know, the Antichrist, he's part of the New World Order.
And so what we're talking about here, honest to God, is we're talking about a media environment that one of the major corporations in American history and around the world looked at those conspiracy theories, looked at that hatred that barely concealed racism, and scratched their chins and said, "I think there's money to be made right there."
And so what we're dealing with now, obviously at birth Trumpism, because Trump was able to raise his political fortunes by going on Fox News and spreading all the conspiracy theories we just talked about, this is the continuation of that fear and racism and white supremacist paranoia That's at the heart of it.
But it's not just that that's what the network does.
It's that one of our corporations, and remember that our corporations are not particularly politically ideological, right?
It's not like they're like, yes, we want Democrats to win, we want Republicans to win.
They go where the money is.
They figure out where there's an opportunity to make money and make profit and establish new markets.
They looked at that, the Tea Party, Trumpism, nascent Trumpism, all of these conspiracy theories and racist ideologies, and they said, there's money to be had there, which of course is a precursor to everything that that we have seen in the years after with Facebook, social media, with all these alternatives on the right.
That's what's at the heart of all of this. - I'm curious of your thoughts.
Does that mean that there was no money to be made for McCarthyism in the Red Scare? - There was plenty of money to be made from McCarthyism.
Because he died a drunk all alone whatever like they actually they silenced him and canceled him and we were like spit on his grave like there was a moment where it seemed like enough people in America would have been like that's not the way to do this.
So the problem with McCarthy, well I mean there's plenty of problems with McCarthy.
What McCarthy did is he went too far.
McCarthy went after the military and the military was like Yeah, you're not doing that shit.
You know what I mean?
There's like a third rail that you can't step on McCarthy.
And McCarthy had pushed it and pushed it and pushed it.
The problem was that he hit the military and suddenly the government was like, you're done.
That's it.
But there was money to be made from it.
Careers were made from it.
Richard Milhouse Nixon made his entire career based on his activities on HUAC.
I've heard of him.
Yeah, every now and then you hear about that guy.
Okay, so good answer, but go ahead, you were making another point, I believe.
Yeah, so the whole point here is that...
Unfortunately, we have these mega corporations that have to figure out things to do with their money and ways to open up new markets.
And, you know, I've talked about this in the past with Wajahat Ali.
You know, there is a certain moment where you look at something like a Fox News, which is far right.
And back in 2013, it was far right.
But based on political spectrums, it doesn't matter how far right you are.
There's room to the right.
Now, this other guy, Robert Herring Sr., the CEO, this is a tech guy.
And I want to make this very, very clear.
The money that comes from all of this stuff, you can push it wherever you want, but they're looking for opportunities for an advantage, right?
So, for instance, now you have Bezos, who, of course, is investing in the Washington Post.
You've got these people who are throwing money around, figuring out these different multimedia platforms.
This guy took a look at the far right, which was violent.
It was talking about coups.
It was talking about civil wars.
I know this all sounds familiar.
And they saw the opportunity to make some money.
And AT&T, which by the way right now on my TV is probably a commercial with AT&T smiling, happy, you've got nice Workers coming and being kind to people, right?
It's this cuddly company on TV and all of its ads.
But what it's actually doing is it's relentlessly pursuing profits.
It doesn't matter if it's on the left.
It doesn't matter if it's centered.
It doesn't matter on its right.
It's more than willing to lead, which by the way, we talked about this.
Pearson Sharp on OAN a couple of months ago got on and said that liberals and Democrats should be executed.
That's what happens when you start looking for these new markets is you open up the opportunity for radicalization.
Yeah and again it's they don't think that far like there's no notion it's only the bottom line so if anything else happens in as collateral damage out of all that which sounds like the military to some degree but it's capitalism too uh it doesn't matter because they made money that quarter and they made more money than the quarter before and that is why I For as long as we have capitalism, we're never going to, like, fix this thing, right?
We can't fix the way the media is going to cover this because they are also under the same kind of guidelines to try and make money versus having it be an NPR thing, which then becomes government propaganda, right?
If it was only that, our only source of news.
I mean, can you imagine that if they literally, the United States had said, you know what?
Because it's so polluted and so polarized, we're just going to get rid of news and we're only going to have this, you know.
And by the way, that's how like tyranny always happens.
Right.
Whenever somebody takes control, the first thing that they do is they look to the newspapers.
Right.
And they say, you're allowed to publish, you're allowed to publish, you're not allowed to publish.
That's exactly how that works.
By the way, if Fox News or OAN ends up featuring something that's like some sort of incitement to a riot that ends up maybe even leading to a more successful version of a coup, Who's to say that the next person in power would then do that?
They would say, well, look what happened.
I happened to a benefit.
That's why I'm in the office, but we're now going to have to end all of this and only have one source of news.
And it's going to be, you know, from my office.
Like this is what they do, right?
The Republicans will create the chaos.
They'll create the problems so that they can come in and pretend that they're the ones who are going to fix it.
And you'll remember that when Donald Trump was going to North Korea and, you know, palling around with dictators, which a reminder was probably part and parcel of the Mooney cult, probably paying and manipulating things behind the scenes, trying to push that.
When Donald Trump was in North Korea, he kept joking about how much he respected the North Korean press and how that's what he wanted.
And immediately once Fox News started reporting, and he would say all the time, which was so demented, He would say, you know Fox News, Fox News is tough on me but they're fair.
Which was nuts, right?
It was always a propaganda arm and it was always meant to be.
When Roger Ailes teamed up with Rupert Murdoch, the entire point was he looked at our friend Nixon and Watergate and he said he never would have resigned and Watergate never would have happened if there was a conservative outlet handling the news.
Which by the way, probably right.
Well, I was going to ask, did you believe that?
I don't know.
I think it's 50-50 because, you know, it wasn't just like the Washington Post and, gosh, Woodward and Bernstein.
You know, there was a congressional hearing.
The congressmen had all the evidence, too.
We're slowly rolling that out.
So, it's interesting, but certainly it would have helped Nixon.
The question there is, Would there have been a conservative media, a right-wing media, that would have saturated the environment, right?
Spiro Agnew, the disgraced VP of Richard Nixon, he was one of the forerunners of this current toxic climate.
You know, he attacked the media, he attacked so-called elites.
You know, if that would have won out at the time, and if there would have been like a Fox News at the time, I don't know that necessarily Nixon would have survived, but it would have been more interesting, is what I would say.
And Roger Ailes, people don't remember this.
Roger Ailes got his start in politics by helping Richard Nixon, by having these big scripted television shows where Nixon would meet with the public, right?
And they would have carefully chosen questions and they would have all of these trappings to make him look more presidential.
And then, of course, he went on to work for every major Republican campaign after Richard Nixon.
He comes in, he works with Rupert Murdoch.
Now, Rupert Murdoch has always been a right-leaning corporate mogul.
But he's not always been as far right-wing as his channels and his outlets have pushed.
Why?
Because he sees a way to profit out of it.
The problem is when an ideologue, like a Roger Ailes, sees use of these outlets.
When a Donald Trump sees use in these outlets.
And you'll remember, when Donald Trump was talking about the election being stolen, he basically foreswore Fox News.
He basically was like, I don't know what happened at Fox News.
Everything's a mess over at Fox News.
And who did he tell people to go watch?
OAN.
And then all of a sudden you have a question there, which is where all of this shit gets weird.
Did Donald Trump have a financial incentive as well as a political incentive to push people to OAN?
And reports were telling me and other reporters that he was looking to either merge with OAN or buy OAN.
And so all of a sudden you have all of these conflicting political and economic incentives.
And that's how you end up with this massive, weird, bullshit, radicalizing environment.
And you can't tell again, and we talk about this all the time, you can't tell where the grift starts and where it ends and how it pushes the environment further and further to the right.
And to finish painting that picture, if I'm not mistaken, Ailes was instrumental in getting Nixon to televise the debate with JFK, which was his undoing because he sweats so damn much that everyone thought he was not fit for office.
I don't know exactly what that meant.
So that was the lesson Ailes learned about the power of video.
And so that is a big part of it.
And then certainly we know that Trump, up until the minute he was elected, felt like he was going to actually just launch his own cable news network, right?
So that was what they were doing.
They were having auditions.
They were building the whole thing up.
So clearly this is all part of the game plan as it was until the shocking moment of the results of 2016.
Yeah, that was the original movement.
When I was covering the campaign back in 2016, there was not a staffer or insider that I talked to who believed that Trump was going to win the election or that he wasn't going to immediately pivot to some sort of Fox News alternative.
There were even talks that Roger Ailes was going to jump ship, particularly as, you know, the rumors of improprieties and harassment were starting to surface.
I mean, Trump would have brought him in, you know, quick as hell, but this whole thing You have to look at it and realize AT&T, one of the biggest corporations on the face of the earth, came up with the idea of creating a conspiratorial far-right radicalizing network.
And it wasn't to spread propaganda.
It wasn't because they wanted to push some sort of an idea.
It was because Yeah, that's the way to make money.
And meanwhile, the lies keep coming thick and furious.
He's having these rallies out there and he's clearly running again.
And again, he's grifting the whole thing because if he delays the announcement, he gets to keep more money.
Although it's not that rare.
We've seen this happen before.
I don't want to make it seem like Trump invented that notion of delaying the announcement.
But nonetheless, it's a real problem that doesn't seem to be without some major fixes in a lot of different areas like the Constitution and just laws in general.
I don't know how we fix these things.
I mean, it goes as far as the Emoluments Clause.
You mentioned Trump meeting with Kim Jong Un.
And, like, all the gifts that were given, like, you remember that West Wing episode, right?
Where the guy in the basement of the White House is freaking out over a gift he got from, like, Hong Kong, whatever?
And that opened all our eyes.
I don't think anybody in America ever really understood what the rules were about receiving gifts and giving them back, whatever.
But, like, there's reports now that, like, millions of dollars were sort of bilked out of this whole thing because they didn't report the gifts correctly.
They just ran out of the building when the election was over with them.
Pompeo's wife is embroiled in this thing, you know, another name we need to probably hear more from because that guy needs to be, you know, indicted on something and his wife too.
So nonetheless, you know, the whole thing has just become exposed inside out.
It's how rotten it is and all rooted to capitalism and then greed.
Well, and the thing about this is, you know, I don't even know that you have to change something in the Constitution.
You have to dismantle these giant monopolies.
There's no reason why something like AT&T should have control over all of these properties and be able to basically decide to create a cable network out of thin air on a whim!
That's nuts!
Just suddenly be like, yeah, I don't know, sure.
Rupert Murdoch should not have telecommunication monopolies around the world.
And if you actually go back in time and look at how something like Fox News was put together, it was basically just like after you got all these restrictions and legislation pulled out, and regulations, All of a sudden he was just like, oh, I'll grab this station over here.
I'll grab this station over here.
Oh, I'm allowed to get that now?
Okay, now I have this.
Now I have this newspaper.
And they brought it together under this major umbrella that wouldn't have existed in the past.
And I want to point out really quickly, there's a reason why all of this always trends towards the right.
And, of course, you have your CNN, you have your MSNBC, which both have a corporate mindset, right?
They will tend to fall what we would call towards the left or whatever.
But they're actually pushing corporate made news that basically either pushes a status quo or possibly a little bit of progress.
But you don't see AT&T, you don't see Facebook, you don't see these major corporations saying, hey, you know who's an audience that isn't getting served right now?
The socialists left.
Right?
Like, we should really throw up Che Guevara TV.
Let's get CNN-Castro News Network going.
And they have no interest in that because they're always going to trend towards the right, which is about, quote-unquote, shrinking government, or at least the idea of shrinking government, pushing free markets, and prioritizing corporations, which they have done for decades.
Well, when there's a market opening, that's when you want to seize it, and they realized that there was less programming for the right.
So, like, in theory, if this keeps progressing, and another OAN pops up, whatever, then eventually, then the left will be underserved, and, like, there will be an opportunity there, in theory.
Now, the other thing I'm curious about, and this might just be wholly generalist and mean or whatever, but, like, it definitely feels like people on the right, Or maybe it's just the fact that they can raise so much money, grassroots money, from people who, when you read these stories, it seems like they're poor, they don't have any money, yet they're going to send their last $50 that they have to Trump to like stop this deal.
It doesn't feel like we see the same kind of stories on the left.
And there's got to be a reason why a lot of people who are either disaffected and angry and are on the right, who are giving all this money, even though they can't really afford it, that they do it anyway.
And I feel like that was another exploitation, right, that they're doing, both politically because they're taking the money that way, but then also viewership.
There's an exploitation there of a A body of people that seem much more willing and it could very well be like education when we certainly we've seen how those other education levels break down amongst political groups.
But there's something there that really is troubling to me that seems to be a much different bigger difference in terms of the money stuff left versus right.
Well, Trump has created an express pipeline, is what I would say.
And it doesn't actually mirror political movements.
It mirrors religious movements.
It mirrors televangelism, is what it does.
News came out that Pat Robertson was finally retiring from the 7-Eleven club.
The 700 Club.
Might as well be.
And by the way, best of luck to Pat Robertson, friend of the show, friend of the Muckrake Podcast.
Absolutely, every week.
We should have him on now that he's retired and quit blaming hurricanes on gays.
Well now that he's retired he has time to listen to our Patreon episodes every week.
We need to get him on a live show at some point is what we need to do.
There you go.
See, it doesn't necessarily come so easily off the tongue, does it?
But so we have this situation here where Trump has continued to bilk these people.
And a large part of it has to do with the exact same thing that televangelism is doing, which is the egregiousness of it, which says, yeah, you have $10 left to your name.
How about you send us $9, right?
And you send us $9, and God is going to shine down on you, and he's going to smite your enemies, and I promise it'll be returned.
It's because there's a shamelessness to it.
That I don't think other politicians do.
And do not get me wrong, there are other politicians who are pulling their own grips and they are absolutely exploiting their donor base.
But I have to tell you, I'm doing work on an article right now.
Herschel Walker, who is running for the Georgia Senate down here in the primary, he's not campaigning.
He has no platform whatsoever.
He basically hasn't uttered a word outside of appearing at one Trump rally.
In one quarter, he drew in $3.7 million.
Three point seven million dollars.
And why?
Because Trump pointed at him and said, that's my guy.
And the entire point is that he has this network that is going to send money to a supposed billionaire, by the way, which is the incredible part about it.
And it has to do with Trump's shamelessness.
And you and I were talking about this before we started recording.
He recorded this birthday message for Ashley Babbitt, who of course was a 35-year-old woman who was killed at the January 6th coup attempt at the Capitol.
She was trying to break into a sealed off part of the Capitol and got shot and died.
It was her birthday.
It should have been her 36th birthday.
But instead, she got radicalized by these same things, by all these conspiracy theories.
She gets shot.
Trump publishes a video or sends a video to the birthday party.
And I have to tell you, it looks like somebody probably paid him to do it.
And that's the only way you get Donald Trump to do it.
But what does it do?
It goes ahead and again, it points at somebody and says, that's my person.
And in this case, that's my martyr.
Right?
That's someone who's willing to not just send me money.
That's someone who's willing to die for me.
And so it just perpetuates this really ugly, awful cycle.
But it's based, once more, on greed.
You know, I was developing an idea over the weekend that when you watch the fervor that people have, and like Donny O'Sullivan on CNN is great.
He interviews people at the Trump rallies.
And you can see what it means to them, how excited it gets them to be anti-left, right?
Anti-vax.
They're frothing over the possibility of fighting a civil war, by the way.
They are pumped about the idea.
So, I think that there must be some sort of chemical that's released in the brain that, like, that is exciting, that, like, makes them feel like they are fighting, like the Ewoks on Endor fighting the Empire, although the Empire in this case would be the Left.
and vaccines and masks, right?
There must be something internally gratifying in the brain that happens that gets them, that satisfies whatever that is, that melatonin, that serotonin, whatever that thing is that gets released because there's no other way to explain what it is.
It's not just like, yeah, I don't like the vax.
I want to do some research.
It is like top of their lungs screaming like they're on something.
I want to eat the hearts of my enemies.
Right, it's like what's the movie where the guy gets drawn a quarter at the end, Mel Gibson movie.
Braveheart.
Yeah, like Braveheart.
Thank you.
No masks.
Right.
Well, I do have to say, and the research I've been doing lately has shined a light on this, which is – You know, when industrialization comes along and capitalism, right?
And all of a sudden you start moving people into roles like, oh, congratulations, your role is now you are line worker number six.
You make sure that the rubber is around this.
You know what I mean?
Like the assistant general manager.
Right.
Your job is repetitive.
largely mindless because you've been programmed to do it and it's been broken down into its simplistic fashions.
You don't even know what product you make anymore.
You know what I mean?
It's so far down the line and so many different people that you have nothing left to do.
You go home.
You cash your check, which isn't enough money.
You and the people you love are suffering.
You never get ahead.
The so-called American dream isn't paying off.
Well, what happened was in that process and this goes back to the corporations that we're talking about It took the meaning out of lives You know what?
I mean like people looked up at one day and they were like, why the hell am I doing all this shit?
and when you say why the hell am I doing all this shit you look for an answer and And sometimes the people who give you an answer are not great people.
Sometimes they're Steve Bannon.
Sometimes they're a Donald Trump.
Somebody, sometimes they're like, you are a digital warrior, Nick, and you are gonna get on and you're gonna post and you're gonna destroy the satanic cabal and you're gonna, you're gonna win America back and you're gonna fight a civil war.
You might even die like an Ashley Babbitt.
You know what I mean?
And your name?
Oh my god, Trump, the hero, will send a birthday message to your family.
And eventually over time, people looking for meaning get drawn into these larger movements that are all about grifting, they're all about using people for their own purposes, and that's how you get fascism.
You know, I say it before, put on the armband, put on the uniform, goose step, all of a sudden you have meaning.
It gives the world, you know, the meaning that you've been missing.
But I know I'm one of the elite West Coasters out there, whatever, but, like, does my life have meaning?
Do I, am I sitting around thinking, like, I don't have meaning and I need to find something that will, you know, get me going, whatever?
It's weird to me to be able to put myself in a situation where you get to the point where you don't have, or It's not even like you don't have meaning, because I understand how your life could be really difficult and without a future or whatever, all those different things.
But I don't know, living the way I live, I just don't feel like there's that much more meaning of life to me either.
Well, okay, so this is a really interesting little side thing that I think we should explore.
So, here we are.
We have a successful podcast.
Thank you, everybody.
We appreciate you.
Couldn't do it without you.
For myself, I'm doing pretty well professionally, right?
I'm doing well at the university, in the academy.
I'm doing well with my books.
I feel like I'm doing better than I have ever done.
I'm trying to be good.
There are still moments where existential dread creeps in.
Do you know what I mean?
Listen, you are on this podcast.
We're doing incredibly well.
On top of that, you're one of the most respected basketball analysts out there.
There have to be times, because of capitalism, You can always do better, Nick.
You can always level up.
There's somebody out there doing better than you.
And in your mind, and this is how social media affects us, we see our adversaries.
We see our competitors.
Oh my God, look at their pictures.
They're loving life, Nick.
They're on beautiful vacations.
They're going on TV.
Why can't that be me?
And what does that do?
That makes us question our worth, but it also makes sure that we clock in the next day.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, we gotta get more numbers, we gotta increase, we gotta do this.
That's the Western problem.
Western society is plagued by the motives of capitalism, and they literally, like, chip away at contentedness, mental well-being, emotional stability.
And, I mean, I'm sorry, but Donald Trump should be at home with his family.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, he shouldn't be out doing this shit.
He shouldn't be out threatening American democracy.
He doesn't want to actually be president.
He wants to be called president.
He wants people to... The big strong man cried and blah blah blah.
Like, he should be home with his family.
He should be enjoying the spoils of all of his crimes.
You know what I mean?
But...
There's something inside of these people that can't be filled and they're taking advantage of all the people who don't know where to gain happiness or meaning from.
We're in the middle of a giant existential crisis on top of the political crisis.
Gosh, I feel seen for maybe the first time now.
So thank you for that.
Happy birthday, Nick.
Yeah, thank you.
As I reflect on, does everybody know how many years it's been that I've been in the life?
Have I told anybody?
Do I want to tell anybody?
You said you were 40.
Yeah, I turned 40.
I'm a man.
Alright, I'm going to say it.
And I'm going to stop counting after this.
That's it.
49.
But who cares?
You're happy.
You're healthy.
Why does a birthday represent an existential crisis?
That's what I'm saying.
If there is a Western problem at play here that plagues us, that's the issue.
That's fascinating.
I mean, obviously we're one step closer to death in theory, but we've known that forever, right?
Everybody knows at some point.
Yeah, so you know that anyway, but like it you know Yeah, you're right.
I mean listen.
I wish I didn't my back didn't hurt so much And then we might do my wrist either hurts too and sometimes you know my finger will never straighten, but you know Whatever you're right, but then it gets like it, but there is just I don't have this burning It's not just money.
yearn and need for some sort of messiah person to come down and lead me somewhere and I guess maybe it's because I yeah we have we're doing okay like I guess you is your point that if you aren't making a lot of money and life is a really big struggle that way and it's all about money it sounds like that's what it feels it's not just money so like okay let's look at a Donald Trump jr.
right Who I think is endlessly fascinating.
I think he's like the Rosetta Stone, the God on Earth, and makes all this very clear.
Okay, Donald Trump Jr.
has millions of dollars, right, in inherited wealth.
He is, among right-wing circles, he's beloved.
He's like an iconic figure to these people.
It doesn't matter how buffoonish he is and how pathetic he is.
Like, he's a hero to these people.
He'll release a book and it's an instant bestseller in right-wing circles, right?
I mean, my God, I don't know how many Instagram followers he's got, how many Twitter followers he's got.
On January 6th, Nick, on the day that his dad tried to overthrow the presidency of the United States of America, Donald Trump Jr.
got on the stage at the rally, and he talked about how there was a shadow ban against him on Instagram and Twitter that kept him from getting as many likes and views and retweets.
Why?
Because what is social media but a reflection of that?
These people who have everything, and that includes Trump Jr., that includes all the small business owners, the burgers that you have in the United States of America who support Donald Trump, who flew their private planes to Washington D.C.
on January 6th, They think that the world owes them something, right?
So that's one group of people.
And then you have the poor shit Americans who feel like they've been betrayed and they don't have an answer.
But all they want is someone to scream at the people they don't like and hold those people down and hurt them.
And so we have a giant existential psychological crisis.
I mean even Mary Trump was calling that when we interviewed her.
And like it is eating at the heart of us and what is the main common denominator in all of this is that capitalism requires us to feel this way.
Capitalism plays against our own self-worth and our own sort of stability in order to push us forward to keep us clocking in.
And I'll argue that this situation becomes exacerbated to the point of no return because the distance between the upper class and the middle and lower classes has become so great.
And why?
Well, that's your friend and mine, Ronald Reagan, and trickle-down economics in the 80s is what began that process, which is now leading straight to where we are here.
So it's another interesting thing.
Now, that might have happened anyway.
But certainly the acceleration of that distance, it's probably even more between the upper class and lower class.
But middle class has kind of been eviscerated as well.
Destroyed.
Yeah.
That is when it feels like that is our biggest issue with capitalism, is when it becomes that way.
And that's when we've seen revolutions in the past in other countries, in the distant past, and why it sounds like we're heading to that now.
Well, and you know, I talked about this on the weekend, or I want to say a couple weeks ago at this point, that's patreon.com slash mcgreggpodcast, right?
Because you gotta compete in this environment, you gotta keep this show going.
I talked about neoliberalism.
When Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, the Democratic ideal, the Democratic Party's main pursuit Was getting rid of industrialization, basically moving our factories into Mexico and other countries like that, and then turning it into a conveyor belt.
And you would raise the working class up into the middle class.
And basically, America, as the main superpower in the world, could have a wealth class, right?
And could have a middle class.
Those would be, and then everybody under here that didn't exist anymore.
We would just move in.
Well, guess what?
That didn't work.
because you have to exploit people and there always has to be a quote-unquote mudsill at the bottom that tells people you know like we talked about down the street from you you have to see homeless people so you keep going right to know what could possibly happen well meanwhile that that distance you're talking about grew and grew and grew and continues to grow and one of the things that we want to talk about very very quickly is that corporations have outgrown nations.
They have turned into the main sort of bodies that determine how the world moves forward.
They've captured our legislative body.
They've captured the political affairs.
Meanwhile, just recently, the major nations of the world decided to pass a 15% corporate tax.
And that is meant to try and rebalance the relationship between nations And corporations, which, by the way, if you notice from AT&T just starting a radicalizing propaganda network, you need to rein them in.
Well, the problem here is that that's only going to maybe start taking care of the problem.
We also know they're going to hide assets.
We also know that they're going to figure out some country who's not going to tax them.
And meanwhile, Joe Biden came out and this was frustrating.
He said this will finally even the playing field.
It's not going to even the playing field.
We have four decades worth of this bullshit thanks to our good friend Ronald Wilson Reagan and all the think tanks and billionaires behind him.
It's not going to level the playing field.
Maybe it's a start and it is the opportunity for nation states to start taking back a little bit of power, but this is not a done deal and it's not the end by any means of the imagination.
Right.
Well, it's also the way everything has to be framed.
It's like, this is the solution.
This is going to solve everything.
I mean, it's almost like with the debt ceiling as well.
The funny thing is, Republicans hated the fact that they actually got a deal done, which is not even a deal.
But when you're looking at like, The way that they're describing it, like the Republicans folded or there was capitulation.
This is Republicans describing Republicans.
It's fascinating how that all becomes a thing, too, because in reality, at least for the debt ceiling, which is really an important thing that will keep the country going, why can't it simply be like they just agreed?
They came together on an agreement.
We finally shook hands on something.
Why can't it be that?
And instead, it's like, oh, in this joint war between each other, you know, somebody really lost and screwed up and it's going to be worse.
And a month from now, we have to fucking do the whole thing again.
It's a zero-sum game.
I mean, and that's...
That's what Trump made clear.
He didn't invent the zero-sum game.
I mean, that's game theory, is what it was.
It was the way that, like, in an increasingly complicated world, people could start looking at politics, economics, society, and meanwhile, by the way, see that there's something somebody can gain and somebody can lose.
Trump personified that, but the Republicans, they have no ability whatsoever to compromise anymore because of exactly what we've talked about.
They keep getting outflanked on their right, and then they move right.
And then they get outflanked on their right, and then they move right.
There's no ability whatsoever for them to ever move towards the center.
That bird has flown.
That's gone, and everything that you're talking about, and going back to AT&T making these moves, to them embracing Ashley Babbitt, who was, I'm sorry to say, was a criminal who was trespassing in the Capitol and was attempting to break in where there were legislatures.
Right, and was warned.
Like, the embrace of them and martyrdom and the embrace of totalitarianism and authoritarianism Much of it isn't ideological.
There are ideologues in all of this.
You're Steve Bannon, of course.
You're Claremont Institute, which we've talked about.
These are people who believe these things.
The others are just making choices where they're like, that's where the money is, right?
That's where the power is.
We have to make that move.
Don't think about it too long because then all of a sudden you have your own existential crisis.
Right.
I mean, I think the people in the room that would have normally been like, well, if you want to start another network like that, you might radicalize a lot of people like that doesn't get said anymore.
Where people start talking about civil war Right I mean I think the people in the room That would have normally been like well if you want To start another network like that You might radicalize a lot of people like that Doesn't get said anymore you know No one's even going to bring it up because again Either they're too afraid as underlings to like you know Rain on someone's parade Or or they all smell the money Too uh And that's really, that's another really too bad thing.
Like, like again, but if you were to look at the numbers and the research and whatever, you can see how much profit you could do off of this.
I don't know if anybody in a corporate boardroom would ever say, yeah, maybe we should look at this again and think about what it could happen, you know, the issue with the country that it could have.
Certainly nothing in our past 50, 60 years indicates that that would ever happen in any kind of self-reflective manner.
Yeah, and all you have to do is take a look at something like the tobacco companies.
They get in a room and they're like, we have this product that has people addicted to it, naturally.
We've got people smoking left and right.
We know that it causes cancer.
Well, how do we increase our profit?
And the answer is that you make them more addictive.
The answer is that you start reaching out to children, right?
And that's not a conversation.
That's not a debate.
It's the obvious route forward, right?
Is that you have to do it.
And in this case... By the way, you know about the whole camel logo, right?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Everyone knows that?
And on top of that, the fact that it was like angled at children and it was weirdly foul.
Oh, it's so strange.
But you got to take that mentality, right?
And these people, they had market studies and they had some scientists.
I want you to bring that into the modern era.
This is what's happening at Facebook.
Facebook has conversations where they're like, ah, I think we caused this genocide.
I think we're breaking democracy.
Oh, we're being used for foreign influence and misinformation.
Well, how's that look for the bottom line?
I mean, it's great for the bottom line.
Okay, so what's this conversation?
Meanwhile, and to go ahead and talk about where this might be going, of course, you have a corporation like AT&T creating this radicalizing network.
You now have entertainment companies like Warner Brothers that are bringing in Algorithms.
And the algorithms are going to start deciding what movies are we releasing, what TV shows, what, you know, telecommunications ideas are we going to spring on the earth.
Well guess what Facebook has shown us?
These algorithms do not take into consideration the harm that they might visit on people, the harm they could have on society, how they could destabilize and how they could lead to violence.
Why?
Because your main pursuit Is profit.
That's all that matters.
It doesn't matter the human element of it at all.
Look at the NFL.
Not only do they know about the effects of CTE, they buried the information for years.
It sounds a little bit like, I don't know, BP perhaps?
And like the oil companies that also buried all the climate change information that they had in the 70s.
So, yeah, at some point, and after X amount of years of all this knowledge, knowing and bearing it, that was bad for everybody.
And by the way, like, I don't know who would ever want to play football.
Catastrophic injuries aside, you got the CTE anyway, where you can have brain damage from playing high school football.
It's like people are willing to do it.
It's been played up, and then you have the media.
You know, Friday Night Lights makes football look like this amazing thing that you want to compete with, and, you know, it'll make you a hero, and you'll be part of something bigger than yourselves, and the team, and the whole thing.
And, like, they built this thing up.
And, again, it's that there must be some sort of chemical that's released in the brain that satisfies people, that wants to put themselves on the line and bankrupt them, their lives, and stand up in the face of science that will ultimately get them killed if they get COVID.
That, like, It satisfies whatever that need is, you know, chemically in their brain and it's all tied together in a corporate mesh.
And the funny part about all this is it has its basis in psychological appeals.
Listen, I played football and I still, you want to talk about aches and pains, I've still got leftover pain from my high school football days.
Like, I'm still messed up from that.
And why did I do it?
Because I wanted to prove that I was tough enough to play football.
Right?
I mean, it's everything from masculine appeals to social appeals.
You wanna talk about something like OANN?
O-A-N?
O-A-N-N-N?
OAN, it's not just a right-wing alternative.
You're not just broadcasting that because it's a news network.
You're broadcasting it because it fulfills a bunch of character traits, a bunch of psychological appeals, right?
You have older people who look and they say, oh, look how weak the next generation is.
I dislike them.
I wish I had something that told it like it is, which also is what Fox News does.
When you look at fascism and authoritarianism, it's all about saying, no, you're a strong man.
You are not weak.
The rest of society is weak.
Don't listen to the voice in the back of your head.
Like, you're a killer.
Put on the black uniform with the death's head and you're able to do whatever there is while you're playing a character out in the world.
These corporate and capitalistic appeals are based on unconscious ideas that we don't even know about.
That's what Facebook is.
That's what algorithms are.
They know us better than we know ourselves.
And the problem is that these corporations and these major businesses, they have control over technology that overrides us.
It overwhelms us.
We, you know, we were talking on the weekend about sugar.
You know, like, sugar is a drug.
There are things that happen.
Like, the reason that I am addicted to sugar is not just because I like the taste, right?
It has all kinds of different things that are happening in the background that I don't even know how to explain.
That's what's happening in politics.
That's what's happening in economics.
And so what we're talking about are unconscious appeals that we couldn't even explain if we had to, right?
We think that we have free choice and that we do everything simply because we choose to.
Meanwhile, there's so many things happening in the background that we're completely unaware of.
And I cannot wait for the Matrix 3 to come out or 4, whatever it is now.
Yeah, it's number 4.
Yeah, so that's exactly what.
But yeah, I mean, that's where we're at.
And man, this is an interesting way to get to the end of our pod.
I have to agree.
I just, man, when I heard this AT&T OANN thing, I was just like, this is, obviously that's what happened.
And obviously that's how we've arrived at this moment.
Yeah.
Alright, well on that note, we're going to wish Nick a happy birthday.
Hopefully you can leave here, find a little bit of a semblance of peace and some of that existential fulfillment that we're talking about.
If you need your own existential fulfillment, I have to tell you, it's over at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
It helps the show, it keeps us editorially independent.
By the way, these are not conversations that are going to be on CNN, MSNBC, or in our newspapers.
Why?
Because people don't want to talk about it, they don't want to go deep enough.
But again, that's patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
We'll have an extra episode on Friday, the weekender, which becoming a patron entitles you to, and we thank you for your support.
In the meantime, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me, SMH.
