Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman dissect the question and answer posed at the Critical Racism Tour hosted by Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk, and how so much of the Republicans' wink-wink, nudge-nudge will end up being a call for violence. Plus, Jared does a deep dive into the propaganda around China's supposed thirst for war as published in the Atlantic.
To support the show and access additional content, including the weekly Weekender episode, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
At this point, we're living under corporate and medical fascism.
This is tyranny.
When do we get to use the guns?
No, and I'm not, that's not a joke.
I'm not saying it like that.
I mean, literally, where's the line?
How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?
We have to be the ones that do not play into the violent aims and ambitions of the other side.
They fear, let me say this very clearly, they fear us Holding the line with self-control and discipline, taking over school board meetings, they're the ones that are willing to use federal force against us.
And I know that people get fired up.
We are living under fascism.
We are living under this tyranny.
But if you think for a second that they're not wanting you to all of a sudden get that next level, where they're going to say, okay, we need Patriot Act 2.0, if you think that, you know, Waco is bad, when do you see what they want to do next?
I refuse to talk about the senator from West Virginia.
I allow it.
I will not do it.
You cannot make me.
I'm not going to do it.
I refuse.
Sam I am.
I don't care.
I don't care if he gives a speech, which he did.
I don't care if he opposes the bill that he created.
I don't care about any of it.
We are not talking about a certain houseboat yacht riding senator from West Virginia.
Are you agreed on that?
Yeah.
I thought you were going to start making it rhyme.
Like, I don't want to care if he gives a speech, if he puts on a, on a, on a beach.
Yeah.
We're not doing it.
Please, let's not do it.
We'll have plenty of time to talk about him later in the future.
Don't do the thing that you do sometimes with a certain senator from Kentucky when you spring his name on me.
Don't do the thing where you suddenly tell me that a certain senator from Utah live-action role played as Ted Lasso and and carried out his weird psychosexual fantasy with another senator from Arizona.
Don't do it.
You know when you tell me not to do something Jared it's very difficult but I will try to follow those directions.
Hey everybody I'm Jared Yates Saxton.
This is the McGregor Podcast.
I'm here with Nick Halsman.
I refuse to talk about the senator from West Virginia.
Fortunately, we have a lot of sunnier topics to talk about, including a new Cold War that a lot of people want to turn into the Third World War.
But first, Nick, happier, happier times.
The thing that gives us energy, the thing that gives us hope.
The Republicans are talking about outright murder.
As one is wont to do.
As one is what to do.
And I want to go ahead.
We're going to start off jumping off from this Charlie Kirk incident.
What was he at?
Do you know what this thing was?
Like, they have so many of these conferences at this point.
It's just a Turning Point USA convention.
Hootenanny, I don't know, like white supremacy power hour.
These things.
And I have to tell you, they have so many of these conferences and meetings and speech fests.
Like, QAnon at this point, I don't know if you heard this, but QAnon ran, like, two concurrent ones for, like, the past, like, month.
Like, people, sickos like us who pay attention to this, have to choose which QAnon conference to go to.
Charlie Kirk is making a bundle from this thing, and he's at, did you find what this was?
Yeah, it's Exposing Critical Racism, sorry, Critical Race Theory Tour.
That's what it's called.
That's not real.
That's what it says in the lower right hand corner of the screen.
Exposing Critical Racism Tour.
And we know why they do this.
It's because they get to charge money at the gate for all these.
Tons of money.
So Charlie Kirk, who is one of the more despicable, like, grifters in this entire universe, was at the Exposing Critical Race Theory Tour.
Forgive me, it was a plot.
Exposing Critical Racism Tour.
Oh, okay, well, I mean, sorry I missed that.
When he was taking questions, and so what ends up happening at this thing is one of the people gets up and grabs a microphone and he says, and I quote, at this point we're living under corporate and medical fascism, which I gotta tell you, medical fascism, that's a bad scene right there.
He says, this is tyranny.
When do we get to use the guns?
And eventually the crowd, some of them like nervously clap, others sort of hoot and holler.
I think a couple of people were laughing because they thought it was a joke and he says, No, and I'm not, that's not a joke.
I'm not saying it like that.
I mean, literally, where's the line?
How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?
Now, we've heard parts of this before.
We've kept our eye on this.
The implication of violence has been there all along.
But I do want to go ahead and say, and I'm not joking here, hats off to this guy for saying the quiet, unsaid thing out loud.
This has been brewing for a long time.
I think we're going to remember this in the near future.
I think that this is going to be one of those Uh, John McCain taking a question from somebody who says that Obama is a secret Muslim moments.
Uh, but I, I'm glad that somebody finally got up, grabbed a microphone and said this thing.
And we'll talk more about why, but what were you, you put me onto this.
I had not seen it.
What, what was your initial reaction when you, when you saw this video?
Well, I mean, there's a lot to unpack with what the questioner said.
My reason why I sent it over to you is because I want to talk about the answer that Charlie Kirk gives.
But to unpack really quickly the notion of medical fascism, which is what you also mentioned.
It's a scary term.
You know, we were talking about The masks and vaccines, right?
Or let's pretend it's not even masks, it's just vaccines.
This sort of medical fascism in the sense that, like, we want you to, you know, in a part of a public pandemic, get a hold of this and try and stop people from dying.
You should get this shot.
You know, that is what their version of medical fascism is.
But obviously the real thing here is the elections, right?
This is their patriotic moment to stand up like our forefathers did in 1776 and so on and fought the British.
It's what they're thinking.
But Charlie Kirk's answer was really measured and was telling him, no, no, no, we can't do that.
We can't get out our guns because they're goading us to do that.
That's what they want you to do.
It's like in the airplane when they're like, hey, should we put the landing lights on?
And the guy's like, that's just what they'd expect us to do.
This is what he does.
So it sounds really reasonable and measured and rational.
But there's all sorts of like wink-winks going on in this whole response that is really where the evil is.
These guys are still condoning this kind of stuff and giving a platform to it.
Well, there's so much happening here, which is why we thought that this would be a good thing to talk about.
And I want to start with the questioner before we get into Kirk's response, because the conversation that's taking place here tells us so much about the right-wing universe right now, where the right wing is in terms of thoughts and where they are in terms of their conversations.
This is not new.
Obviously, we've been on this since we've been a podcast.
I've been doing this since I started publishing on this phenomenon.
They have been talking about this without talking about this out in public for years.
In private, online, stuff like that, it's been very, very obvious that they've wanted to do this.
They've created an environment where literally an apocalypse is coming, right?
Like in the questioner's mind, him and his family are going to be in a concentration camp maybe by the end of the year.
You know what I mean?
Like it's imminent, imminent destruction.
And we were talking about this before we went live.
And we have to do this in order to understand what's happening with the right.
We have to put ourselves into their mindset.
And I said to you, Nick, that if you truly believe this stuff, and this has been spun not by just Charlie Kirk, obviously.
This has been Fox News.
This has been Donald Trump.
This has been the Republican Party.
This is the entire media ecosystem, political class of the Republican Party has spread the message that unless you vote Republican, unless you're ready to pick up weapons and defend your family, you're going to a concentration camp.
That's what's coming.
And by the way, it's not just a concentration camp.
Satan might win and win this godly battle.
Wait, can I add one thing really quickly to that?
Because we're also seeing this with the school board protests.
And we saw the Senators grilled, or sorry, Merrick Garland grilled in the Senate committee, but we saw a guy, it was either Fox News or one of the other ones, OAN, where a guy came on to say, you know, By sicking the FBI on these parents who are, by the way, who are threatening violence.
That's the only thing that the reason why, whatever.
He's like, imagine they'll be at Gitmo pretty soon.
They're already talking about that in the sense of not even just talking about overthrowing the government and all that thing.
They're talking about as if you're going to protest at your school boards and they're going to throw you in Gitmo.
No, and they have, I mean, this is how hyperbolic all this bullshit is.
They have now managed to make equal getting thrown off Twitter for pushing, like, you know, coronavirus conspiracy theories.
They have made getting banned on a social media company the equivalent of the Holocaust.
Like, they've done that.
They've said that in so many words.
So to put ourselves in the mindset of this questioner, and this is the really frightening thing about all of this, He's not wrong in that mindset.
If what the Republican Party and what the right has been saying is true, and it is not for the record, but if it were, if there was a quote-unquote satanic cabal that had taken over the government, right?
And by the way, like all that is just actually a metaphorical explanation for the fact that capitalism has taken over our government, but that's neither here nor... You can't shoot capitalism.
Right, you can try, but you can't shoot capitalism.
But in that worldview, he's right.
If all of this is happening, and if there is imminent danger, then you are within your rights to defend yourself based upon our idea of society as it works.
Exactly.
If you take a shovel and you dig down deep to the base level cortex of reality to these types of people, then yes, all of these things are reasonable.
The John Eastman memo is reasonable.
But what lies at this, and this spreads across the entire platform of the Republican Party, Is that there's the reality is wrong like it's simply not the reality and so the question that becomes The people who are spreading it the most these leaders like Holly and Cruz and everybody in the like that They went to these Ivy League schools.
They're supposedly been trained and live in some sort of reality that we can all agree upon So they don't care, here's the thing, they don't know, they don't care what the effects have by manipulating that kind of reality to their people who follow them.
What they're looking at is, it's just votes.
I gotta win, I must win, I need votes, this is gonna get me votes.
What they don't acknowledge, without the self-reflection or whatever they need, is that this is dangerous and you are going to change hearts and minds forever to an anti-democratic society that's violent.
And they don't want to acknowledge that.
I don't see any Democrats platform, any Democratic senators out there advocating for the kind of things that would eventually lead to violence like this.
This is clearly from one side.
Well, and here's the thing, it's like in the past they at least had, and by the way, everyone you're talking about is a quote-unquote serious person, right?
We'll get to Charlie Kirk here in just a second.
But someone like a Ted Cruz or a Howley, like If they really had any deniability that what they were doing and what they were saying, was dangerous, January 6th, as they were being ushered out of the chambers, should have gone ahead and been the moment where they realized that they were not just playing with fire, they had invited fire into the house.
Well, guess what?
They didn't stop.
Matter of fact, they've just escalated the thing, which is you have to make choices when you're playing with this fire.
And the choice is, I can benefit from this, but I also have to make myself prepared For when it gets loose, because it does.
You look up one day and all of a sudden, you know, the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City is in shambles and hundreds have died.
And that is a direct result.
And do not mistake me.
That bombing was a direct result of fear mongering among the right wing political and media class.
And it was part of this strategy.
So you're exactly right.
They know that what they're saying isn't true.
They also now understand that it's dangerous.
There are some of them.
They just don't give a shit.
They're willing to do it.
They're willing to roll the dice and see what happens.
But, you know, those people, they know better, for sure.
I mean, you're right.
Cruz is willing to, you know, pump up the crowd the day before.
And Holly's really the fist pump, or fist whatever that is called, on the 6th.
It also just shows you, you know, like with President Trump, The Times is reporting some of the timeline stuff on January 6th.
And, you know, it took him over three hours to really say anything to these people to either calm the situation down or stop it, which is just like, If that's not a smoking gun, then I don't know what is.
When Kevin McCarthy is telling you, hey, we should dial this back a little bit, then you know you're way beyond the red line.
You should have done something way early.
So I think all these things are mixed together.
This indicates that the fact that they still have a party and they have enough people to support this just shows you that we're in an intractable situation, which I don't really know.
There's not going to be that moment, that come-to-Jesus moment, where someone's going to finally We're not going to have that.
It's not going to work.
They get enough votes.
It's gerrymandered enough for these campaigns to win with that kind of rhetoric.
did that.
We're not gonna have that.
It's not gonna work.
They get enough votes, it's gerrymandered enough for these campaigns to win with that kind of rhetoric.
How's your day going? - Well, I mean, you know, it's all sunny on this podcast, I tell you.
But it's one of those things where, I mean, we're a year out from the midterms.
And, you know, the fact that we're already talking about open violence.
A poll came out today, how appropriate is this, that 30% of Republicans say that violence is needed, or possibly needed, in order to save the United States.
And for the record, when someone calls you up on the phone And says, I'm doing a poll and they say, do you think violence is needed to save the United States of America?
30% is the number of people who felt okay saying yes.
Do you know what I mean?
And instead of a lot of people who in the back of their mind, they're like, I'm not going to say this to somebody.
You might possibly be entrapping me or I don't want this person to think I'm a raving loon.
30% of people saying that and feeling fine with saying that.
I mean, that's enough to keep you up at night.
Yeah, that's plus or minus 10 at least, I would think.
Oh my god, I would say 20.
I really would.
If you told me it was 50% underneath the numbers, I would not be shocked.
Well, especially when you add on top of that the poll that says that 70% of the Republican Party think that the election was stolen.
So why not have a huge section of those people ready to turn to violence?
Because they are, again, if you dig down deep enough to the core of their belief, they're freedom fighters.
It's the equivalent to them of driving down to Alabama and helping black people vote in 1964.
Like, whatever.
And that's what they're doing.
They're riding in the front of the bus.
Well, and to go along with this, I want to go ahead real fast and spotlight Charlie Kirk.
for the Civil Rights Movement.
That's what's so crazy about this whole thing. - Well, and to go along with this, I wanna go ahead real fast and spotlight Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk is a total charlatan.
Like, he has no actual principles.
He's a guy who got thrown in the middle of this and he realizes where his bread is buttered.
He understands that his entire personality is based on breathing fire, gaining a ton of money from followers and supporters, and people who, by the way, want to spend their, I think it was a Thursday, they wanted to spend their Thursday in a room listening to Charlie Kirk talk about whatever shit he's talking about.
When he says, well, you know, that's what they want us to do, there's twofold happening there.
One, he's leaving a door open.
For if we get to the point where all of a sudden people decide, you know, that they want to pick up a bunch of guns and they want to get really, really violent, he wants to be able to say, you know what?
We've reached that point.
All right, here we go.
And let me tell you what, Charlie Kirk will get on that train, and he'll get on that train really fast.
But because he's a grifter, he's not a real revolutionary.
He doesn't want to say it and risk getting in trouble.
The second thing, though, and this goes back to something we've talked about, They want to keep these people as close to the point of violence as they possibly can without having it run over.
They want to be able to control everything without having the blood on their hands.
What we're watching here It shows that this is not really a pot that you're going to keep from boiling over.
It's just a matter of time.
Right.
And they also know.
So it's like they could easily say January 6th, hey, I didn't know we had a little bit of a rally and then look what happened.
But they knew all they needed to do was get them all together in a spot.
And then, by the way, we also find out now, I didn't know this, but there were like a bunch of different melees going on around DC earlier on January 6th, that like the cops were all saying, hey, we're at the Washington Monument and we're all hiding now in there because this crowd is completely unruly.
Hundreds and hundreds.
So they know that once you get them all together, you know, and the moon comes out from behind the clouds, like they get what they want without ever having to like say it and they could be sheepish and shrug and all that bullshit.
But that's the whole thing.
Especially because again, we talked about this before, but we know that the crux of their How they wanted to overthrow the government was getting the people around the Capitol so that we could like stop the vote for a couple days, go back to the local places where they can get some electors to chart, you know, get on the record saying there's some shenanigans, and then they could begin that process that Eastman laid out.
This is all part of the plan.
This is the reason why they do not want to follow subpoenas and release these documents.
Again, if there was nothing wrong and they didn't do anything, they would have no problem being compelled to give up this information.
Why don't they want to do it?
It's the same reason why Trump doesn't want to give up his taxes.
It's all the different reasons that they're illegal activity that they're trying to hide.
It doesn't resonate, obviously, with the right.
You can't give that argument to anybody on the right, right?
They'll just say, well, uh, taxes are complicated or no American should ever have to give up their, their taxes and show them.
And, and, you know, those are private emails, you know, the executive privilege that, you know, doesn't resonate at all.
The notion of, well, if it was nothing wrong in there, then what would be the harm to release these papers?
Well, it's the meltdown of not just norms and institutions, but it's also the meltdown of literal liberal democracy.
In our mindset, when we talk about the Civil War, and this is kind of, and listen, I enjoyed the Ken Burns Civil War as much as anybody.
Like, don't get me wrong, I enjoy that sappy music as they read letters, you know?
But let me tell you something.
They didn't just show up in a field in uniforms.
You know, it didn't just happen.
Like, there was a long, complicated process of legal standards, of cultural standards.
This cultural war that we're in right now precipitates something else.
It reaches the point where, well, I don't trust you to run an election.
You don't trust me to run an election.
Eventually, someone's going to fire a gun.
And we've seen people already fire guns, right?
The question here, like on January 6th, there were people there who wanted to fire guns.
There were people there who wanted to slaughter Congress, like literally, like lock Congress into a hallway and gas them.
Like the question is, what happens after somebody opens fire?
And we've already seen among the Republican Party and the right that I don't know if a certain teenager in Wisconsin guns two people down in a street.
What do they do?
Do they automatically say this has gone too far?
No, they call him a political prisoner.
They say, oh, they go ahead and bring him in and put their arm around him to sell their fascist coffee brand.
Right.
They raise a ton of money.
They fundraise off of him.
The entire point is that we are on the precipice of something really, really weird and really, really deadly.
And to watch this stuff start to bubble up, you and I, when we've been discussing this and we've been, we've had, we've excavated it, right?
We've looked at it and we've said, listen to what these people are saying.
Here's the historical precedent.
Here's the context that this is in.
Here's all this stuff behind the scenes.
Here's all this research you've had to do.
That mask that you talk about all the time?
It's not just being taken off.
They're just like, I'm not going to wear it anymore.
You know what I mean?
Like, I'm just not going to pretend like anything about this is legal and or civil.
Right.
And meanwhile, we have a president who took over.
And the whole notion of him winning the election and we wanted to be happy and excited about the future, but it never really felt like that was going to change.
And certainly nothing has changed with that.
There's no sense of like, is the country going in the right direction?
Certainly his poll numbers are tanking as well, to the tune of like what Trump was.
And probably just for the notion of, well, Trump got those bad numbers because the other people on the left were assholes and just didn't like him.
Well, I'm gonna do the same thing here.
What has Biden done?
Okay, you could actually say that you're not happy with his performance because he hasn't done anything, but it's only been, you know, what, nine months basically since he's been in office, or ten, and all he's faced is complete opposition to two of the most popular bills they're trying to pass that would completely help people.
It's mind-boggling to me that he can get so underwater with his poll ratings now, trying to push an agenda that will simply help people, and when they do those polls, you only have 25% of the country who actually thinks it would do any good, and you have more than that, 32% or so, who are completely against it, as if it wouldn't help them, when that's like, there's no way to objectively say that it wouldn't help most people that they're polling in the U.S.
Well, it doesn't matter.
I mean, because the presidency of the United States of America doesn't really exist anymore.
I mean, let's be frank about it.
Like, there are things they can do.
There are executive actions.
But for the most part, the President of the United States is either someone that you put up on your shoulders and you say, congratulations to us, or it's somebody that you put in the dunk tank at the fair.
I mean, that's it.
I mean, like, who wants this job right now?
It's being absolutely destroyed.
The government is bought and sold.
Gridlock, by the way, is not accidental.
I mean, like that certain senator from Kentucky that I almost went ahead and mentioned without bracing myself, like that's his entire political legacy.
That's all that he's done, is it's created a government that is completely hobbled at the knees.
So at this point, like, I get it.
I, like, things have not gotten dramatically better And on top of that, you have an entire party that a certain senator from West Virginia has made more difficult to operate and move.
At this point, I understand why people are frustrated.
I get it.
But that doesn't, it actually has more to do with what I would say is the impotency of American politics as opposed to any sort of job performance by anybody involved.
Well, I know, but you say, like, who wouldn't want that job?
Well, Trump obviously wanted the job because he got to grift for four years and make a shitload of money.
But he didn't even want the job.
He wanted to be Mr. President.
He wanted to be, like, Mr. McCheese, or Mayor McCheese of McDonald's.
Like, he wanted to be lifted up on the shoulders and lauded.
Like, he didn't want to do the job.
I mean, that showed.
And he certainly wanted to make sure, like, hey, let's figure out a way where I can't get prosecuted for anything I ever do ever again.
Sure.
And he's kind of on the way toward that again with what's happening.
I mean, I've lost track of the Bannon thing.
They had voted to, like, they were going to prosecute him for not upholding the subpoena.
But as far as I could tell, that was stayed and nothing's happening now?
It's up to Merrick Garland, like so many other things.
It's up to Merrick Garland.
Yeah, well, don't hold your breath on that one, I guess.
Yeah, don't hold your breath because they don't want to do any of this.
The best thing for any of the people involved, like you have the Republican Party who has sowed the seeds of this stuff, right?
Who have basically laid the tracks for an authoritarian movement.
Like, I bet if you found most of them, honestly, like, if you just came across them, like, on a Friday night in one of the swanky restaurants, you know, that they eat at, you know, next to liberals, probably with liberals, for that matter.
If you got them off the record, they'd probably be like, no, I don't want an authoritarian rule.
There are some who do.
Do not get me wrong.
But I bet if you got most of them off the record, they'd be like, yeah, actually, our base kind of concerns us too, which actually makes what they do that much worse.
That actually makes it that much more frightening because what Trump did is Trump made apparent what is in many people, right?
He basically gave permission to people to be their worst selves and to basically be up in front of a movement of people who are being their worst selves.
I mean, that has to be awful.
That has to be terrifying.
So you're exactly right.
I think it's very, very complicated and weird, and I don't think we grasp the full extent of it.
I just had a vision of, remember the scene with McCain when he's running against Obama and the woman says he's a Muslim, he's an Arab, and he talks her down and says no?
I bet you a significant part of the Republican D.C.
establishment looked at him at that moment and been like, put their head in their hands, going, what the fuck did he just do?
Parts of them did, yeah.
- Parts of them did, yeah, parts of them did. - Right, and Trump was probably watching that too.
So the difference now is we go from that in '08 to whatever, Trump running, and he's completely willing to spread every other false rumor or lie or innuendo he can to win. - But that's the evolution.
That is the clear evolution of the Republican Party.
In 2008, when John McCain was running, that moment was like a moment where the Republicans could still say, oh, this is our establishment wing.
Then, of course, billionaires funded the Tea Party.
Basically, the people who believed what Fox News was peddling, as opposed to the people who understood that Fox News was a propaganda tool for their own power and profit.
The people who believed Fox News started taking over the Republican Party, and then of course Trump, who believed Fox News, you know, goes and wins the presidency, and now we have the Trumpist part.
So you actually have a few people who understand that Fox News is a lie, you understand that a lot of this fear-mongering is a lie, and that it's, you know, a grift.
But man, there are this new generation of Republicans They are.
They are so grifty and they are so authoritarian in nature because they looked at the Republican Party and said, sign me up for that.
Absolutely.
I need to be part of where this is going.
And it is it's it's escalating in a really predictable and tragic way.
And what we missed, I think, or what a lot of the public missed was that this is all germinated with Cheney as the Vice President and W coming into power in 2000 because coming out of the Nixon administration and what happened there, they felt the presidency was neutered and did not have enough power.
Almost like what you're describing was sort of, I mean, you know, Reagan just sort of sat in the office and when he was awake, he, they, you know, would write, sign a bill or two, but he really didn't.
Well, a think tank would send in a memo that somebody would say, no, Mr. President, that's fine.
You rest.
Right.
We'll take care of this.
We'll need you to sign here in a little bit.
Yeah, yeah.
And so as a result, when they said, we've got to get some more power back in the White House.
We need to be able to unilaterally attack countries if we need to, you know, for security.
And so that's what they did, you know, in a fundamental way.
They probably sat there.
Cheney probably sat in his cave upside down for all those years from 75 until, you know, 2000.
You know, like John Eastman, who's a smart person looking at the Constitution and figuring out, OK, these are the ways we can now Yeah.
And they did.
And that's what happened.
And that's why we got to the point where, you know, it obviously became much too powerful.
Luckily, Obama, in my opinion, certainly didn't necessarily abuse that, you know, those powers.
But they didn't have any desire to, like, go back and say, well, wait a minute, you know, we torture a lot of people.
We probably should, you know, punish some people that did that so it won't happen again.
And, you know, they all moved on, just like this administration's kind of trying to inch along and move on, too, right?
Well, and what you just said, and by the way, you just provided the perfect segue to the second segment of the show for anybody who wants to.
We like to show how the sausage is made.
We like to pull back the curtain on this show.
I will say that part of what's going on here, Is that things like Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, you know, Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, all of these people, they're so disgusting and they have so much authoritarianism in them naturally and they have, they're such grifters and they're very, very dangerous because they are absolutely, it's like the knob on the propane grill.
They are just turning it and turning it and turning it whenever, and by the way, Charlie Kirk, and we talk about this all the time, Charlie Kirk, by saying, now's not the time to pick up your gun, economically, he opened the door for someone to say, you know what?
I think it is time for someone to pick up the gun.
I'm more extreme than Charlie Kirk.
There is an economic opportunity over here.
But what you just brought up with Cheney, with Eastman, with Rumsfeld, we've talked about the Claremont Institute people, some of these think tanks, There is a banality of evil in these people.
And we're talking about people who get invited on to CNN and MSNBC and meet the press to talk about how dangerous Trump is.
But there's like this entire apparatus that has more or less weaponized not just the Constitution, but America's institutions in order to create massive power bases that are engaged in some of the most repulsive and disturbing actions in modern world history.
Whose idea was it for the Internet? - I'm good.
Because, can we go back?
Don't you feel like that's like, you know, when I look at Charlie Kirk, I just think, you know, he never would have been anything without like, you know, social media.
But Nick, you know what the answer is for who's responsible for the internet.
No, the military.
The military.
Well, I mean, I think we can argue like, you know, there's professors on, you know, in the 70s who were like talking to each other on a closed loop.
Who were being paid by the military.
Oh, is that right?
Is this like a gang of function accusation that you're making about what they were doing?
No, this is 100% actual history.
So the origins of the internet, and again, another natural segue into this segment, the origins of the internet was the idea that we needed to have some sort of a communications system in place in case we got in a nuclear war.
And so that's how all of a sudden we have this packet trading system that turns into the Internet.
The Internet was literally supposed to be a part of national defense and pushed by the military.
Oh, OK.
Yeah.
And by the way, speaking of the original Cold War, we wanted to talk for a second about this just amazing article that showed up and for the record,
Everything that we're talking about with radicalization, with people talking about picking up weapons and becoming digital soldiers and overthrowing the government, that radicalization, that point of boiling over, we would not be near the point of boiling over if national security geopolitical goblins, like we're getting ready to read, weren't pushing all of our money
into defense projects, giving all of our money to defense contractors, and engaging in one massive war after another.
So, they want to do it again, Nick.
It's time for Cold War II Electric Boogaloo.
This is an article in The Atlantic called, What Will Drive China to War?
Now, Nick, before we jump into this, and the people who wrote this, and the idea behind this, because what I'm getting ready to talk about with people, you need to know, this is not for you.
This is not for the people listening at home.
This is not written for you.
This is not aimed at you.
This is written to tastemakers in Washington, D.C.
This is written to people in power.
This is written to other think tanks.
This is written to other defense professionals.
Nick, before we dive into it, I'm going to read that title to you one more time, and I want you to tell me what you think about this title.
What will drive China to war?
Well, it's really good SEO.
If you're talking about, and that's all I do on my other side of the mic, which is figuring out good titles for videos and who's going to click on it.
Well, this is a good title.
You got China in there, which is probably a high value.
We got war.
War probably should have been the beginning of the thing, by the way.
The earlier it is, the better.
But either way, it is just one of those, you know, it's what's like the psychological effect.
It's like where it's already sort of, you know, leading us as if it's happening.
It's going to happen.
Nick, I don't know about you, but it's bringing me back to my elementary school days, where all of a sudden an alarm sounds, you gotta get underneath the desk.
You know what's funny about that?
Because obviously, in those days, it was the Soviet Union.
China was probably an equal threat, but like, never really, I mean, okay, during Vietnam, there was that element because they were funding the Vietnamese, North Vietnamese.
But it's weird to me how, at least when you study it, China never bubbles up as high as the Soviet Union does, as far as, you know, bad guy points.
You know what, special shout out to our good friend Richard Milhouse Nixon and Henry Kissinger for that very thing, which is that their idea of triangular diplomacy, which is, by the way, an example of what we're getting ready to talk about, basically made China our ally against the Soviet Union, because you wanted to play major powers off of one another.
So no, we weren't worried about China lobbying nuclear weapons in, we were worried about big bad Russia.
Well, these people want to write it back.
And I want to point out that what will drive China to war goes ahead and rhetorically says who's going to cause the next world war?
President Xi.
Exactly.
China is going to be the one that does it.
And this is written, by the way, by Michael Beckley and Hal Brands.
And I know everybody at home, like, already knows about these two defense sector Think tank sickos.
So you don't need me to tell you about it, but I'm going to go ahead and give you a little bit of background.
First of all, Michael Beckley.
I'm just going to read his bio real fast and then we'll get into an example of his work before this article.
Michael Beckley is an associate professor of political science at Tufts University and a Jean Kirkpatrick Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Sounds like a lovely fellow.
Yeah, lovely, the American Enterprise Institute, making the world safe for democracy.
His research on great power competition has received awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association, and has been featured by numerous media, yada, yada, yada.
He's worked for the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the U.S.
Department of Defense, and the good old Rand Corporation.
So, what do we know about Beckley so far?
We know that he makes his money talking about possible uses of American hegemony.
Right?
That's the entire purpose.
It's to go into other countries, cause conflicts, overthrow democracies, and use their resources.
Well, I want to give you a little peek at something.
This is from Michael Beckley's book.
It's called... Are you ready for this title, Nick?
I'm ready.
Okay, I just want to go ahead and tell you the title, and I want you to get ready for the first paragraph that I'm going to read you from the book.
Because when I found this, I'm going to use a technical term here, it blew my ass off.
Okay.
It did.
Okay, so this is from Michael Beckley's book, Unrivaled, Why America Will Remain the World's Sole Superpower.
Okay, good title.
How's that for a title?
How's that?
How's that feel?
You like that title?
Sure, sure.
It says it all.
Okay, this is from Chapter 1, Nick.
I'm going to read you two paragraphs.
First paragraph, or the name of the first title is, Why America?
By most measures, the United States is a mediocre country.
It ranks 7th in literacy, 11th in infrastructure, 28th in government efficiency, and 57th in primary education.
It spends more on healthcare than any other country, but ranks 43rd in life expectancy, 56th in infant mortality, and 1st in opioid abuse.
More than 100 countries have lower levels of income inequality than the United States, and 12 countries enjoy higher levels of gross national happiness.
What a shithole, am I right?
Oh, amen to all of that.
There's no untruth there.
But Nick, let me ask you something.
What do you think this second paragraph is going to say that our strength is?
Oh, our strength is democracy?
It's absolutely democracy, which is why he says, yet in terms of wealth and military capabilities, the pillars of global power, the United States is in a league of its own with only 5% of the world's population.
The United States accounts for 25% of global wealth, 35% of world innovation, and 40% of global military spending.
Damn it, I should have known it was military.
40%!
And by the way, he's saying this, and it's not ironic.
He really thinks this is an achievement.
He says, it is home to nearly 600 of the world's 2,000 most profitable companies and 50 of the top 100 universities, and it is the only country that can fight major wars beyond its home region and strike targets anywhere on earth within an hour, with 587 bases scattered around 42 countries and a navy and air force stronger than that of the next 10 nations combined.
According to Yale historian Paul Kennedy, nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power.
Nothing.
The United States is, quite simply, the greatest superpower ever.
Yep, that makes sense to some people, I can imagine.
You know, we could kill somebody halfway around the world in an hour.
We're number one.
How about those two paragraphs?
Isn't that amazing?
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Again, if you're listening with this, you know, say along with me, Jared, why do you hate America?
Can you imagine writing this and not...
Like, not understanding what those two paragraphs are saying about each other.
That we've made this country a terrible country because we've given all this money to all these military contractors.
Isn't that amazing?
Oh, yeah.
Well, it's a justification, a rationalization.
I don't even know what the bridge of those two ideas are, but without question, it's like that is the crux of the matter between, like, the left and the right, right?
The left is going to look at all the different things and how bad the conditions are on the ground for most people.
And then the right's going to be like, eh, I can't see it.
I don't see anybody in my myopic view.
So America's the best.
So I'm going to read you.
I'm going to read you the titles of a couple articles by his co-author, Hal Brands.
By the way, what they also say was they can see Russia out their back door.
Yeah, right.
It's right over there.
Nick, before I read you these articles that Hal Brands wrote, I'm going to read you his title and then I'm going to I'm going to get a reaction from you.
Are you ready?
Yeah, lay it on me.
Hal Brands' official title.
Hal Brandt is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Wow.
That's a good double whammy.
Isn't that great?
I don't want to disparage Johns Hopkins, but certainly, you know, Kissinger, putting his name on anything is, I wouldn't want to walk in that building.
You get up in the morning to start your day.
You're grabbing your coffee and you look in the mirror and you say, damn it.
I am the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Fellow.
God bless him.
That's wonderful.
And just real fast to give you an idea of a couple of the articles that he's been writing.
And by the way, Hal is a pretty regular contributor to Bloomberg, which gives you an idea of what he's talking about.
Let's go through a couple of titles here.
For a humiliated superpower, Vietnam shows a path back.
The Afghanistan War was not a cynical misadventure.
To counter China, U.S.
needs to mobilize academia.
And my personal favorite, Nick, Afghanistan debacle aside, U.S.
is not done nation building.
Oh, God.
We aren't?
We're not?
I kind of thought we were.
So, by the way, a title like that is like, what you were saying, it's signaling, like this is trying to influence policy, right?
They're not writing this for anybody like us reading this.
Well, they're reading it for us to laugh at and explain the military-industrial complex, right?
I'm sure they thought of us.
This is going out for politicians and staffers.
Basically, what they want is they want a staffer from every senator or congressperson to read this and then write up a response to their boss.
Now, if you look at this article, and we're not going to look at this drivel, but if you look at this article, it basically says that the United States, in order to win The next Cold War, that the United States needs to go ahead and get aggressive and decide that if China does anything possible, that we need to meet it with the most force possible.
Now, why?
Because these people think they're playing chess.
They think that they're playing a grand geopolitical game, which by the way, Henry Kissinger was very, very fond of playing, and Richard Nixon loved playing geopolitical chess as well.
One thing, they have forgotten literal living human beings.
They have no interest whatsoever in the fate of anybody else.
They don't care about infant mortality, they don't care about education, they don't care about infrastructure, and they sure as shit don't care about radicalization.
Absolutely.
Well, here's the thing that makes me really concerned is that, like, are we really going to have to get sucked into a war if China decides to take over Taiwan, for instance?
Oh yeah, for sure.
And by the way, Trump would have probably said out loud, like, no, I don't care about that little island.
I'm not going to go to war for that.
And it's like, part of me would agree with that only because, I mean, we have to decide, are we still like the police for democracy across the world where we have to step in whenever that happens and the aggression?
You know, I mean, I think we have to, right?
You can't let, but then again, you would have said you couldn't let Russia go into Ukraine.
So, and we did, and you know, we sanctioned them or whatever.
I would hope that would probably be what happens with China, right?
As they get sanctions and then their economy starts to fall apart and then they, you know, whatever.
But let me ask you this.
Would they ever, in the face of crippling sanctions, retreat and leave Taiwan alone again and get out of Taiwan?
Well, and by the way, like, the answer is to not play a game.
Quit brinksmanshiping it up.
You know what I mean?
We'll figure it out some other way.
These people are talking about arranging subs.
These people are talking about tactical nukes.
And by the way, the entire reason that they want that is so that we can go ahead and keep that engine of redistribution of wealth going.
So we can keep sending money up to the top so the defense contractors can get paid.
By the way, the defense contractors, guess who that they're funding?
These people!
They're giving these people a part of the cut, and that's the way this entire system has worked from the beginning.
At this point, and this is terrible, but it's true, and by the way, this has roots in authoritarianism and fascism, war is a hell of an economic plan.
Oh yeah.
Well, you know, it's just funny because, you know, for the Trump administration, if you wanted to get a policy to Trump, you'd go on Fox News, right?
This is an old school, right?
I'm going to write a think piece in the Atlantic and it's going to go through the old chain or whatever.
It almost feels like, you know, three days of the Condor when he discovers like secret meetings in these books and whatever.
It's kind of fascinating to me that that actually exists.
You could still do that and still have, you know, in these publications, that chain still is around.
Like, can that possibly continue going forward?
Like, I guess so, but like, how is this possible?
How are we living in this stillness in this age where, you know, these assholes can write this shit and like it will actually get covered at the top?
Well, and a large part of the thing is, it used to be you would write up policy papers, right?
And your policy papers would either be delivered to the actual politicians, or you would put it in some sort of a report.
You'd have a conference, or you'd publish it in one of the major academic foreign policy journals.
Well now, now you want to put it on the Atlantic so that these people who are paying attention, that they will go ahead and bring it back like a dog with a pair of slippers.
And I want to be very clear about something.
Democrats as well as Republicans are pushing for a Cold War.
They absolutely are, because it is incredibly beneficial for people with power to be engaged in a Cold War, to be involved in brinksmanship.
Because guess what?
Suddenly you're not asking about getting health care.
Suddenly you're not asking about having houses built.
You're not talking about investments in social policies.
All of a sudden it's like, oh, my God.
Like if we're facing imminent apocalypse, like if China is launching hypersonic missiles, right?
All of a sudden then, yeah, absolutely.
Take my money.
Just make me safe.
Oh, by the way, Johnny came home today and he had to get underneath his desk at school.
This type of fear-mongering that they're creating here is actually a bipartisan affair.
I mean, people on both sides want this.
What's fascinating about that is that the Make America Great movement, if you want to take the 50s for instance, well that was the height of the Cold War.
If you want to go to the 80s it was also the height of the Cold War and then even probably scarier at that moment so you're right like we've now had the period where there hasn't been that sort of Cold War and the fear of politicians are is that yes we're gonna start looking around being like oh shit like yeah look at this infrastructure look at my you know health care those are the things that you start to think about yeah when you're not submitted every day to like getting under the desk and being afraid of a nuclear missile being shot from another country
So that makes a lot of sense that all of a sudden like they're trying to fill a vacuum here by like, well, but by the way, why wouldn't North Korea be the one that everyone's mongering about then?
Because they're the ones who are, you know, it's mongering, I guess, fear mongering.
I'm not sure if I read that phrase right.
But, you know, that would be even a more logical choice to like gin up the fear of God and everybody.
Trump, Trump got rid of that.
Yeah, it's true.
Trump went over, he shook hands with the guy, he reset it.
And on top of it, I think it's because of the added economic part of it.
China's overtaking us.
And I want to be very clear, by the way, we want to make sure that we state these types of things when we talk about stuff.
I'm not a China apologist.
The shit that they've done to their Uyghur population is disgusting.
They have a techno-fascistic state going, and we should all be terrified of the fact that our countries, including the United States of America, are looking at what China is doing with their restrictions and with their surveillance, and they're like, kind of dig that.
I also want to point out that for the next few years, if this Cold War that these people are just slobbering over, if they get it, every time that you or I or one of our listeners talks about the need to invest in education or healthcare or anything, you're going to get called a communist.
Or a China lover or a trader.
And for the record, China's not actually communist.
They actually have a weird hybrid of capitalism and communism.
There are two types of capitalism now that are fighting against one another.
There's state-controlled capitalism, which is what China has, and then you have an America where capitalism just controls a representative government.
But you're going to basically be told every time you're asking for something that alleviates suffering or makes people's lives better, you're basically going to be called a China sympathizer or a Red.
I mean, we're going to play back the old hits.
It's amazing.
You know what?
Hey, a whole generation hasn't experienced it yet.
Might as well let them have at it.
I mean, we're not old enough, really.
I mean, the Red Scare was before us, so we didn't even really, we only read about it one generation removed.
But gosh, that would be simply amazing if they were able to recreate the Red Scare again and use China.
You know, unbelievable.
Well, and I want to point out, too, that there's a long, rich history of this.
Geopolitics, which Henry Kissinger was really fond of, by the way.
Like, that was his jam, right?
And, by the way, we've gone way too long talking about Henry Kissinger without pointing out the fact that he is a war criminal.
Oh, yeah.
A war criminal who should have been in the Hague
Long time ago that idea of geopolitics that Henry Kissinger played and that these freaks are playing This is literally it has its roots literally in Nazi Germany It is a methodology and an ideology that the world is a constant struggle for space That we are caught there is no way around just constantly butting heads and going to war and that war gives us purpose and war gives us meaning and that if we're not in one war
We gotta be in the next one, right?
We gotta move on to the next one.
Like, this is like some real totalitarian bullshit.
I mean, it is, uh, it's really awful.
And for anybody who grew up with the Red Scare who's listening to this, you have to understand it permeates society.
Like it really it changes everything about what life feels like and what culture is like.
I mean, for those of you who are around post 9-11, you've got a taste of it.
Like that was a that was like a little bit of that real, real hard shit.
Oh, yeah, it's I don't want to go back there.
I would pass.
Thank you.
That was not fun.
And even, yeah, 9-11, even that, like, I'm trying to think of, like, how long that ended up lasting.
I mean, certainly we were afraid to go on planes, and you were wondering, you know, the next thing, but it doesn't really compare to every day, you know, when you hear the sirens being tested, or is it once a week at least, and all those things.
That notion, I remember in grade school, of being afraid of actually nuclear war.
That does weigh on you, and even without that threat in the last whatever we had in the 90s, there's those moments, it's like those are forgotten.
I don't remember what those are like anymore. - Yeah, and I think the 90s, I think that's one of the reasons we romanticized the 1990s is because it was that, well, I think culture does.
It feels like it's a very sort of, it feels like it's a very sort of fancy free kind of a time.
You know, between the Berlin Wall falling to 9-11, that little period there is like that period where it was triumphant America.
Like, America's on the march, we're not gonna have any opposition anymore.
I mean, for an enemy, we had to go over to Iraq.
You know, and take out a guy that we put in power in the first place.
And I don't think that people really understand, like, how dangerous these things are and what these people are pushing for.
And Nick, I hate to say it, they're probably going to get it.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, we're basically going to have both sides calling each other like Chinese plants before this is all over.
Well, we're going to have to watch Dr. Strangelove for the Patreon show.
These freaks would be in that bunker.
They would be discussing that.
The big board!
We can't just let it sit there.
We have to have more.
What else is this room here for?
And by the way, a large part of Dr. Strangelove, for people who have seen it, is based on the Rand Corporation.
And the Rand Corporations were a bunch of freaks who sat around and they'd be like, okay, so let's say there's going to be a nuclear war.
What percentage more, like 2% more chance of surviving or winning if we launch the first missile, right?
Game theory.
Well, Russia is obviously going to launch a missile, which, Nick, can you check your facts?
Did Russia launch a missile?
Did they ever attack us?
That would be no.
Oh, they didn't.
Okay.
Oh, okay.
That's weird because they kept saying that it was going to happen and we should go ahead and launch our missiles first.
But these people, like Herman Kahn, I mean, they would sit around and they'd be like, you know, we could survive a nuclear war.
It would wipe out 95% of the population, and yeah, it would take like four generations before we were able to see the sky again if it didn't lead to total eradication of the human species, but I like those odds.
Oh yeah, but you remember Dr. Shainstall describing, you know, rebuilding the population and how disgustingly lurid he was with who they wanted to bring down there to make sure they can populate properly.
Ah, anyway, that's what I'm sure that's what they were talking about.
Thank God for Daniel Ellsberg.
Yeah, and that's the thing, it's almost like we got out of a cave, and we got out and now they're just like, you're going back in the cave.
We're gonna go that route, and everything that we've talked about from radicalism to radicalization, authoritarianism, this stuff is like, It's like super, you know, manure and fertilizer.
Like it just, you pitch that on and it is, it's a whole different ballgame at that point.
And by the way, there's a sprinkle of like the Matrix and the third Matrix too, when you, you know, realize they've been reliving the same history over and over again.
It's like, yes.
So we need something.
I don't know.
We need somebody.
We need help.
Somebody's got to come in here and change the whole narrative somehow.
Somebody has to give some sort of a solution that is new.
Somebody has to come in and say, this is a direction we can go in.
And by the way, I don't know how you feel about it, I think I do, but it involves investing in people and giving some sort of a positive direction as opposed to going back to Charlie Kirk and this weirdo who asked him about killing people, like, oh, they're coming for us.
And if we don't do something right now, they'll come to your home.
They're going to take you.
It's going to be, what is the one with Red Dawn?
You know, it's like you're going to look out your window one day and Soviet paratroopers mixed with Cuban legions are going to suddenly land on your football field.
That, over time, has real consequences.
It really messes with a society.
It just seems like someone needs to come in and say, listen, we're going to save the planet and the environment and it's going to make a shit ton of money for us.
A ton of money!
That's all.
That's all I have to sell.
And then we'd be on our way.
A hundred percent.
And I have to tell you, like the scenes that are coming out of this summit about climate change.
You know, I don't know if you saw this picture.
It's like all the world's major leaders, they're in front of a fountain and they're all flipping coins into a fountain and wishing that they could solve climate change.
And I have to say two things.
One, that's pretty much all they're doing is that they're wishing for climate change to get solved.
Because they are in charge of the biggest countries in the world.
And if something's going to be done, it's not you or me recycling our cans.
Right.
It's going to be a state.
And by the way, what I just read from this guy saying, yeah, we might be a shithole country, but we have all these people, that military is a big part of the problem.
But I will say too, just to be technical about this, if you tell people what you wished for, it will not come true.
So what the hell are we doing here?
I don't know.
How's your day?
Alright, on that note, party people, we hit all the best notes today.
That's wonderful.
We are going to be back on Friday with our Weekender Edition in order to gain access to that and some of our best shows.
I truly believe that.
And support the show.
You keep it editorial-free and oversight-free and ad-free.
Go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Again, we'll be back on Friday.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me SMH.
You'll find me at J.Y.
Saxton.
Still not going to mention that Senator from West Virginia.
