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Nov. 16, 2021 - The Muckrake Political Podcast

54:04

Bannon Puts Out The Signal For Potential Violence

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton & Nick Hauselman discuss Steven Bennon turning himself in to the FBI briefly before holding a press conference to threaten Democratic leadership. 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

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	I'm telling you right now, this is going to be the misdemeanor from hell for Merrick Garland, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden.
	Joe Biden ordered Merrick Garland to prosecute me from the White House when he got off Marine One.
	And we're going to go on the offense.
	We're tired of playing defense.
	We're going to go on the offense on this and stand by.
	By the way, by the way, by the way, you should understand Nancy Pelosi is taking on Donald Trump and Steve Bannon.
	She ought to ask Hillary Clinton how that turned out for them, okay?
	We're going on the offense.
	Hey everybody.
	Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
	I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
	I'm here with Nick Halseman.
	We've got a big, important show today.
	Before we get into it, though, we just want to make an announcement.
	This Thursday at 7.30 p.m.
	Eastern, I guess I should add.
	We have people all over.
	We have people all over the world.
	730 Eastern American Time.
	We're gonna have a live show for our patrons, and all you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
	We're gonna be taking questions, we're gonna have a Q&A for this episode of The Weekender, so go over to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
	If you haven't been to one of our live shows, they're a good time.
	They are.
	They are a great time, great community, lots of great questions, lots of great discussions, and it's fun, too.
	Yeah, it's a good time.
	Unfortunately, we've got some serious stuff we've got to talk about tonight and also on Thursday.
	We'll go ahead and get started.
	We've got so many things that are slipping into place.
	I was telling Nick before we started recording, I'm feeling kind of rough about a few things.
	Some of the things that we've warned about, some of the things that we've talked about are escalating and things are Fallen into place for some really bad situations.
	But before we get into all of that, Steve Bannon turned himself over to the authorities.
	He's been found in contempt of Congress.
	He handed himself over to the FBI.
	He is now out and free and has basically thrown down the gauntlet and says that he's going to make life hell for the Democrats for putting him in this situation.
	Yeah, it's strange because it really wasn't him surrendering.
	You know, there was no bail paid.
	There was no formal processing of that.
	So he was just kind of like, hey, what's happening, guys?
	And then, you know, let's let's do a press conference.
	You know, it was funny because I noticed this listening to a very brief section of this press conference where he kept saying the phrase standby.
	And apparently a lot of people noticed this.
	I wasn't the only one.
	Did you?
	Yeah, and this has turned into, of course, if people might remember back during the presidential debates between Trump and Biden, Trump was very specifically asked about the Proud Boys and paramilitary groups in the right wing.
	And he said very specifically, stand by.
	And the Proud Boys and these other right-wing paramilitary groups, they heard him loud and clear.
	They knew exactly what Trump was saying.
	They started using standby as sort of a catchphrase.
	Obviously, Bannon is doing that as well.
	On one hand, and by the way, like immediately he got out and went on a live stream.
	He went and podcasted, has already basically said that this means war, which is his favorite type of thing.
	This feels, along with a lot of other things, like an escalation.
	It feels like Bannon is going to take full advantage of this.
	Obviously, he gains power from being prosecuted.
	He gains power from having to face this thing.
	And he's getting exactly what he wants.
	The right wing is getting exactly what they want with their desire and lust for martyrdom.
	It's the right thing.
	It's what should be happening.
	But it does feel like we're kind of waiting on another shoe to drop at this point.
	You know, he also directly references Nancy Pelosi as a threat that he wants to go after these people, which he.
	So we'd expect to start seeing some sort of rat-fucking going on with them.
	But he also referenced Hillary Clinton.
	So this is what's interesting, because these people are not really the brightest people.
	And is that a tell that he is saying, you remember what happened to Hillary and what we did to her?
	We are now going to do that to Biden and Pelosi, whatever.
	You know, it doesn't take a huge stretch to imagine that what he's saying is like all the things that they made up about Hillary from Pizzagate and all the Russian interference as well could easily be turned as a firehose onto them, which has probably already happened in the past as it is.
	And so this is an interesting tale.
	Is he now sort of almost confirming that they've worked together with Russian misinformation this whole time?
	I don't know, but it was interesting.
	Well, you know, we talked a couple episodes ago.
	It was when the realtor, the MAGA realtor, went to January 6th, obviously, and livestreamed and used it as a way of advertising her business.
	That's not who Bannon is.
	There are a lot of people in the right-wing ecosystem who are, it's part of a grift, right?
	And by the way, don't get me wrong, Bannon is grifting people.
	I mean, he has taken an amazing amount of money from these people all along the way.
	Bannon is an actual ideologue.
	Bannon has contacts all around the world.
	He has worked extensively to build anti-democratic ties in every region of the world.
	He has actually started one anti-democratic, neo-fascistic training school in multiple countries to the point where even right-wing countries have said, you know what, this is a bit too extreme for us.
	You need to go.
	This thing is going to get worse.
	This is exactly the type of thing that Bannon wants.
	I mean, he didn't, he didn't defy the committee, you know, just happenstance.
	It wasn't something that he took lightly.
	He wanted this fight.
	He wanted it to seem like he was going to war in order to marshal resources, in order to radicalize people.
	You're exactly right, I think, which is there is going to be Some sort of escalation whether or not it's misinformation whether or not it's some sort of attack whether or not it's some sort of a call to arms.
	It is almost a certainty at this point that something from this is probably going to.
	A switch is going to get flipped.
	Something somewhere is in motion at this point because this is exactly what Bannon and all of his cronies, this is what they dreamed of.
	Right, and I would by the way take a misinformation campaign any day over inciting the Proud Boys to violence which you know at this point as it's growing as a movement could very well be a really severe thing where they will plan stuff.
	And again, they were emboldened, not scared by January 6th.
	This was a test run and it was very organized.
	We keep finding out more and more information than we will about how the politicians were involved.
	And again, it was all the piece of the puzzle.
	They needed a insurrection, a violent attempt on the Capitol to facilitate the delaying of the counting of votes so that they could then convince, I guess, Mike Pence to not accept the electorate.
	So anyway, the point being that this is all part of a process.
	And yeah, Bannon sounds like the Obi-Wan thing.
	He's like, strike me down.
	I'll be more powerful than you'd ever imagine.
	And And this is sort of what he sounds like he's trying to do.
	And he's not going to accept being arrested as that thing.
	He will continue to be as active as he can, but this is going to be the rallying cry.
	It's really concerning.
	And I think the problem with the Democrats is they're treating this like, you know, everyday politics.
	We're going to follow the exact letter of the law and do everything we've always done in the past to deal with a completely new and other situation that does not apply to what we have had.
	And I think that's my fear is that they're going to get screwed here and taken advantage of.
	It was a no-win situation for Merrick Garland and the Democrats.
	You know, on one hand, if Bannon was going to just, you know, basically throw up both middle fingers to the commission and the subpoena, and they weren't going to do anything, at that point, as Trump has shown us time and time again, if there are no consequences for your actions, well, I'm going to do whatever I want.
	Absolutely nothing will stand in my way.
	But Bannon, like a lot of really good chess players, had multiple moves here.
	On one hand, if he wasn't going to be brought to task, that was going to make him more powerful in a different way, and he'd be able to act with impunity however he wanted.
	In this case, you know, I want to be very clear about this, because we're going to get into some deep water here today.
	Steve Bannon is a revolutionary.
	That's how he patterns himself.
	That's what he believes.
	He really, truly, honestly believes.
	This guy who, by the way, made a ton of money off of Seinfeld syndication money.
	I mean, that's where a lot of Bannon's money comes from, for those who don't know.
	He really fashions himself as some sort of a revolutionary figure.
	In this case, revolutionary figures love the escalation.
	They love whenever a culture war gets hot and all of the ingredients are happening right now to turn this culture war Up a couple of notches.
	And this is happening everywhere from revolutionaries like Bannon, the ideologues on the far right who are calling, of course, for Caesarism and the suspension of democracy, who are writing memos.
	We just found out, by the way, Eastman, I don't know if you saw this, Eastman didn't just write a memo that said how to try and overturn the election in Congress, he wrote a memo to Trump on how to use the military and how to basically bring the country to heel in a military coup.
	Well, we're going to talk more about that.
	For those of you who tuned in to hear us talk about Michael Flynn, don't worry.
	We're going to talk about Michael Flynn in just a minute and how this whole thing plays into it.
	But Bannon absolutely welcomes this.
	And it was a no-win situation for the Democrats.
	There was nothing they could do.
	One way or another, there was going to be a problem that was sown from this.
	I think we said this last week.
	He had to be brought in.
	He had to.
	You had to go ahead and press charges against him and you had to hold him accountable.
	But you also have to understand that this isn't just political theater right now.
	You know what I mean?
	These aren't symbolic actions.
	These are steps right now that at any moment the ice could break through.
	And that's what people at home need to understand, but that's especially what politicians at this point need to understand.
	They're playing with live ammo right now.
	That's where we are.
	Here's my issue, and this connects to another piece of news that came out earlier today about just the way our system is set up, if we don't progressively update the safeguards that are built into these things, you have people like Bannon who will be able to take advantage of the language.
	Now, we saw with Kyle Rittenhouse, I don't know if you saw this today, but If you remember in our last podcast I told you with unequivocal certainty that he was going to be getting nine months because he was a minor with possession of a dangerous firearm.
	And the judge was able to dismiss that charge outright because the length of the barrel of the gun was 16 inches and the law says it has to be less than 16 inches.
	So if it was an eighth of an inch shorter, shorter, then he would have been able to, that would have been a charge or whatever.
	But because it was longer, like it was too big to be considered, you know, some sort of a dangerous weapon, they dismissed that charge.
	This is where we're at here.
	This is insane.
	I told you, man.
	You did.
	When we talked, because that's the thing, is like I was with you, like my logical brain said, They have to, you know, this kid has to be punished under the law.
	And then immediately it was like, no, this is right-wing reactionary white supremacy.
	They'll figure out a way to get around it.
	And lo and behold, and by the way, that judge, whoo.
	He's something.
	And by the way, he tries to throw out, you know, when they zoom in on the video, they actually had an expert come in describe what it was.
	So they understood why that was still acceptable for evidence.
	And he was still in front of the jury trying to taint the value of that, which, by the way, if they can get rid of that part of the evidence, then the case does fall apart.
	So you become an absolute slam dunk.
	This is going to be the easiest prosecution I've had ever for at least one of those counts.
	To now, yeah, he's going to get off on everything, I think.
	I think.
	It is truly frightening because I don't think anybody reasonably would argue, like, okay, even if you want to say it was self-defense all the way across the board, it doesn't necessarily matter in the sense that he should serve some amount of jail time.
	Right?
	If he was supposedly there to protect a used car dealership, okay, whatever, then why is he wandering off of that property and starting to look around and get involved in other fracases, which then lead to him killing people?
	You need to be punished.
	He should be going to jail for some amount of time.
	It's not, okay, let's say he's not a serial killer who's killed two people within five minutes of each other in a rampage.
	Doesn't matter.
	He should go to prison for a year.
	I don't know, something, right?
	And he might not get anything.
	That is a system that's broken.
	Oh, and it's beyond broken.
	It's completely rigged in one direction.
	I had a moment, you know, it was after we talked.
	It was for the weekend or last week.
	And I had to do some traveling, take care of some family business.
	And I just spent a lot of time thinking about this judicial system and the fact that it's just when you really look at what it is.
	And I'm really glad that this judge has been focused on the way that he has.
	I'm glad people are getting a glimpse at it because this is what the judiciary is.
	This is who these people are and how these things work.
	And you know, for some people who haven't been paying attention, and listen, I'm not really going to blame people who haven't been paying attention.
	America tells you not to pay attention.
	America tells you don't worry, live your life, consume, have fun, do what you're doing, everything's under control.
	Obey.
	Obey, I promise you, people have this under control.
	And you look up one day and you're like, oh my God, Law enforcement, the judicial system, the military, all of these things and high capitalism, all these things are riddled through with white supremacy.
	And you suddenly look at it and you're like, Oh my God, like all of the deck is completely stacked.
	And then you start moving into where we are now with this culture war.
	And everything that we're talking about today are flashpoints, right?
	The Bannon thing.
	this is going to be something that radicalizes people.
	It's going to, and because people who think that Bannon is a hero or Trump is a hero, and I gotta tell you, by the way, I spent a lot of time in gas stations all around the country over the past couple of days.
	Everywhere you go, Nick, let's go, Brandon.
	Trump.
	Fuck Joe Biden.
	I mean, it's everywhere.
	It's everywhere.
	And it's like taking a walk through the unconscious.
	You know what I mean?
	The dark, ugly places of the American mind.
	You drive around.
	It's one billboard after another.
	I can't tell you how many people I overheard talking about conspiracy theories over the past two weeks.
	Just constant stuff.
	The temperature is being turned up.
	When flashpoints like Bannon happen, they look at him and they say, he's a political prisoner.
	They're going after him because he has a political point.
	Kyle Rittenhouse, and we talked about this when this thing originally happened, they're turning him into a hero, Nick.
	They're turn- they basically, and I can't tell you how many right-wing voices I've heard say, That 17-year-old, that 18-year-old, he went and did what nobody else would do.
	He saw law breaking down.
	He saw property being attacked.
	He went out and he took matters into his own hands.
	The only thing he's guilty of is being too naive to understand that, you know, there's a conspiracy against him.
	Nick, it is turning How did you omit education in that list of things that are now becoming radicalized?
	Because here's the thing, we're all ringing the bell and warning people about fascism and what's going to happen when these people take over and what they're trying to do.
	Well, they're doing the same exact thing.
	So when they say that Bannon is a political prisoner, they're also saying this is going to be fascism.
	Look out.
	They're going to warp your kids' minds.
	They're going to, you know, anybody who wants to, you know, speak out against the government is going to be arrested.
	Like, this is what they think.
	It's a powerful argument.
	It's very frustrating because it should be very clear.
	And in the past, we'd say, OK, get the Build Back Better bill passed.
	People will feel a little bit better about their situation no matter what they live, where they lie politically, and then those radicals will just, you know, they'll stay home because it feels okay to them right now in the ether.
	But what we are now seeing is that radicalization means that they're not quiet anymore because we, you know, for a long time you think we're living in a certain country because those people are quiet.
	They're not quiet anymore.
	Trump has allowed that to be out in the open.
	Proud Boys on down.
	And not only that, but they are now radicalized to vote.
	That is the scary thing, right?
	We can't ignore the fact that Trump broke the record for number of votes in a presidential election.
	We were lucky that so did Biden, but that's 74 million people have voted for him?
	74 million!
	And that number is growing based on what's happening with what their radicalization is doing here.
	Especially because the sweet siren song of the education system, which we need to talk about, because that can definitely pick off a whole other fringe group of parents that probably would have been rational and maybe, you know, somewhat normal people with a good sense of reality.
	That's a gateway to a whole other group of people, a whole other bunch of votes for them.
	That's what scares me the most.
	Yeah, and I want to talk about the structure that we're getting at here without even being intentional about it.
	You have someone like a Bannon.
	And, you know, Trump, to try and put this into context, Trump is just like a complete dumbass.
	Like, it's not like he understands.
	We've said this before.
	It's not like he understands theory.
	It's not like Trump sits at home and like, you know, is reading Marx and thinking about this.
	Well, you might be reading Mike Knopf.
	That seems to be some evidence to that.
	That's the one book supposedly that he's really read.
	Steve Bannon's studying theory.
	Yeah.
	Steve Bannon is at home studying all of this stuff.
	People like Steve Bannon are sitting at home.
	Right now, I mean, Bannon probably went home and after broadcasting, he sat down and sat down with leftist theory in order to figure out how to go after it.
	Meanwhile, we keep talking about these organs.
	You have your Bannons, you have these think tanks who put these operations into plan.
	It starts seeping up, right?
	And it starts seeping up into people who are going into their school board meetings, who are threatening their city councillors.
	We have now, there's a story that came out today, and this, I have to tell you, if it wasn't so predictable, it would be shocking.
	They're now going after school counselors who want to talk about anxiety, and mental illness, and depression, and suicide.
	And they're starting to go ahead and say, this is brainwashing.
	And they even come out and say that this is a matter of liberal brainwashing.
	Trying to control kids.
	Now, all of a sudden, they're going to go into the educational system and wipe out anybody who will even talk to people and even have conversations with people.
	On the other side of it, and you have Mike Flynn out saying we need one God who, a one God nation, right?
	Which is a theocratic state in which we, under the threat of violence or sanction or ostracization, you have to worship Christ.
	Right?
	Which is what a lot of these people have been pushing for forever.
	And while he says that on one hand, he's also throwing out QAnon concepts on the other hand.
	All of these things coalesce.
	They all work together.
	This is how you reach a point of civil war.
	The conspiracy theories prepare the base for violence and repression.
	And whenever you make people prepared for that, people like Steve Bannon, who have designs on power, these people like the Claremont Institute, these think tanks, these anti-democratic, neo-fascistic conservatives, they get together and they figure out how to turn these knobs up.
	And do you know what helps them?
	Flashpoints.
	Flashpoints like Kyle Rittenhouse.
	Flashpoints like Bannon.
	Flashpoints.
	Abortion.
	You name it.
	They figure out how to move these things around.
	And maybe they're not at home thinking about how to create a slaughter.
	But I have to tell you, Nick, we don't do this as a lark.
	We don't do this as a grift.
	We talk about this because we're a couple of guys who met one another.
	We were concerned about this country.
	We had enough information to understand it was getting bad.
	We don't do this to hear ourselves talk.
	We enjoy our community quite a bit, but we do it mainly because we saw the writing on the wall and we didn't, I don't want to be having this conversation.
	I don't want this to be going on.
	I don't, I'm not, I'm not excited about this, but right now with all of these pieces in motion, I'm going to talk a little bit here and a little bit about what I was learning over the past few days that kind of Shocked me and made me walk around in a daze, to be honest with you.
	But the only way I look at what's happening right now, if people don't get serious, man, there's only a few things that are going to happen.
	We're either going to get to a point where Republicans sweep into office and then they gerrymander themselves and they take over the judiciary like they already have, and they create a soft, repressive state in which people are terrified to speak their minds, Or they're going to figure out a way to say, and this is something that history tells us, all of the liberals and leftists and Marxists and anybody who doesn't agree with us, they're mentally ill and they need to be reprogrammed or they need to be treated.
	And guess what?
	If they can't treat you, you're gone.
	Well, let's pretend that that part doesn't happen, but if they take over, and remember, they're railing against being censored and cancelled and all the things they want to be able to say, which are horrible, horrific, incendiary things that would just cause a lot of strife and bullying and all these things.
	So they unleash that across the country.
	Now that is a really interesting thing because now, You would inflame racial tensions, you would inflame class tensions, you'd have a truly horrible country.
	I mean, listen, I remember in the 90s the pushback against being politically correct, and this is ridiculous, and I should be able to... But again, when you think about what they're arguing, they're like, I want to be an asshole, and you have to allow me to be as much of an asshole as I want to be.
	That's the nicest way of putting it, by the way.
	What they're really saying is, yeah, I want to be a racist.
	I want to be able to be a racist and have no self-reflection and no consideration for anyone else's feelings at all.
	And it's like, you know, and if you want to talk about that, like in the schools, and we want to discuss how we can get along better with each other, that is radicalization.
	And I have it all bold, all caps, and from our last episode, my notes, explore the parents' fear of kids learning, which is what you brought up at the very end, and this is where we're at now.
	That is a powerful thing when you have parents who obviously were raised a certain way, they were taught this certain thing.
	I don't know if we've talked about it enough, the threat that parents could have that their kids would come back with more knowledge, more, I guess, a progressive knowledge of what our state of our country is in and how truly threatening that is.
	As a parent, I can get it.
	If my kid came home and started saying, you know what, And just, you know, using every kind of derogatory term for every kind of, you know, person in our culture.
	Like, I would be the same kind of upset, right?
	How dare you learn to say these things and bully people or whatever you're doing?
	That's what they're feeling on the reverse when they're trying to simply be kind to each other.
	You know what I'm saying?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And, you know, I wrote about this when I was doing the book on masculinity.
	A lot of it has to do with socialization.
	And one of the things that we don't really look at, and this is terrible, but it's true.
	You have a lot of Americans who were abused by their parents.
	They were abused by people in their community, and I'm not even just talking about overt abuse, but my God, there's a lot of that.
	I'm talking about people who were emotionally abused, people who were physically abused, and they were made traumatized, right?
	And what happens as they get older?
	They become sort of detached from their feelings.
	They feel like they have to be hard, right, in order to make it through the world.
	And what happens when they have kids?
	The cycle continues over and over and over again.
	Think about some of these people.
	And I come, man, I just spent some time with my family.
	I love them to death.
	But I have to tell you that some people in my family have no idea, like, how to be in touch with their emotions at all.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, they just shove it away.
	We're not going to talk about it.
	We're never going to actually get into it.
	Yeah, by the way, and what happens a lot of times in those situations, all of a sudden the kid dies in overdose, for instance.
	And they're like, we had no idea because we didn't talk about anything.
	We shoved everything down.
	Like, suicide.
	This kid kills himself because we didn't talk.
	We said, no, you can't have those feelings.
	You're not allowed to have those feelings.
	I'm sorry I interrupted you, but like, that is what I'm gleaning from this stuff, right?
	That's what they're pressing and pushing down, these tragedies.
	We have a real mental Health crisis in this country.
	That's what's happening.
	And so this new front where all of a sudden they're like, we don't want counselors asking our kids if they're depressed or anxious or how they feel.
	That is the antithesis of how a lot of Americans live their lives because they, this is like Trump.
	And let's be very clear for a second.
	Trump is a damaged person.
	Trump is a really unwell person, right?
	Like he was abused by his family.
	And he's continued that abuse.
	We've seen him abuse his kids in public.
	We can tell that there's something wrong with this person.
	And what do they do?
	They say, no, I'm not a racist.
	I'm not a sexist.
	I'm not greedy.
	I'm a realist.
	I live in the real world.
	And if you want anything else, then you're absurd.
	And think about all these kids.
	And this is a direct line to this.
	Kids who come out as gay.
	Kids who come out as trans.
	And their parents send them off to be reconditioned.
	And they're abused, right?
	That socialization continues.
	So we're at a point right now where, and this is the frightening thing, man.
	This is why this is such a rough moment.
	We have generational differences that are happening right now.
	We have demographic differences that are happening in this country.
	We have economic and political differences that are all coming to a head and America is in decline.
	When you start putting all of those things together, you look up and it's so combustible that all of these things that you mentioned the 1990s with like the PC battles, right?
	Well, in the 1990s, we were living high on the hog.
	The American dream was alive and well.
	Everybody could get rich.
	The economy was thriving.
	We weren't in major wars or whatever.
	Well, now all of a sudden, those wars in the past that were used by Republicans to win elections, now all of a sudden, it's all these people have.
	There's no such thing as political power representation for them.
	They want people who will fight.
	They want someone who's willing to go out and knock skulls around and is willing to fight these battles and leave people bloody.
	Things have shifted to the point where all of these things are live.
	All of these things have now coalesced and we're watching them combust is what's happening.
	Yeah, I mean, a few weeks ago we had talked a little bit about, you know, the notion of MAGA, and obviously they want to go back to the 50s, it's one of those eras they like, and I had mentioned that, like, that's an era where, yeah, you couldn't go see a shrink, you know, there was no self-reflection allowed, the whole, it was so taboo to even, you couldn't even talk about it, and as a result, this tragedy upon tragedy that could have been avoided because we could have, you know, gotten somewhere with that, and that was what the 60s did.
	I feel like When we were all upset about Trump coming in in 2015 for a lot of reasons, but I don't know if he really fully processed what it meant mentally for the country and where this could go on that end and how they could continue to ostracize people for this.
	And again, like you said earlier, this is all about the hot point issues like abortion or like trans rights or LGBTQ.
	All of those things are just like these watchwords which connect to religion.
	And you have the people who want to continue to make, you know, the government needs to act like a religion.
	Like, that's what they want.
	They want it fused together in a very specific religion.
	I'm not going to, you know, say this is a blanket.
	We just want to take all the best parts of all the religions.
	No, no, no.
	This is one religion, one kind of person, and mix it together.
	And again, this is what's so troubling about all of this.
	Everything that we say about the other side, they are putting it right back and accusing us.
	And so it's like, when you hear People like Mike Flynn advocating for, like, we need to have one religion in this country and that's going to govern how we run our government.
	That's the same thing as extremist Muslim terrorist people.
	That's the same.
	There's no difference between that and how they want to establish Sharia law and oppress people that way.
	That's what's so crazy that that's not more apparent to more people in this country.
	What got me about the Flynn thing?
	It isn't just the theocratic state.
	I've been hearing that for decades.
	I grew up in that, right?
	It was the idea that America and the world was doomed unless we embraced a one Christian nation.
	And then eventually that was going to happen.
	Which by the way, I'm not going to sit here and give myself a victory laugh, but this entire speech was about the shining city on the hill.
	That's what this is.
	It's the cult of the shining city that I've been warning about for a while.
	What scared the shit out of me, Nick, was it's a general.
	And this is the piece that isn't quite there yet, which is neo-fascism, which of course is an ancestor of fascism, it needs the military element.
	And certainly there are people within the military who have designs on this.
	Obviously there are parts of the military who are part of Atomwaffen, they're part of the base, they're part of all these extremist right-wing groups.
	When we start moving towards the theocratic military element, and I gotta tell you, I spent this weekend reading about Francisco Franco and the Spanish Civil War.
	Nick, you have in Franco, and for those who don't know, Franco killed tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, depending upon how you want to count them.
	Of course, was an absolute fascistic dictator who started the Spanish Civil War.
	Are you ready for this?
	This is fun.
	So, Franco, who didn't really pay that close attention to politics, he got turned on to a bunch of magazines and newsletters that were, like, anti-Jewish, anti-Freemason, anti-socialist, right?
	And there was a big, giant conspiracy between all of those elements, and they were coming after governments.
	So he kept reading these magazines and kept reading these newsletters that like his subordinates would give him.
	And he became totally red-pilled.
	He became totally radicalized because he came to believe that all this was happening.
	All of a sudden you have leftists win an election.
	And Nick, what happens?
	They try and take over the government because they believe that it's the right thing to do.
	And what do they need to do?
	They need to come in.
	They need to get rid of all the leftists.
	But also they need to go ahead and put in power a theocratic, Catholic state.
	Because Catholicism is in trouble.
	The numbers are dwindling.
	It doesn't have the power that it used to.
	It's the way in order to enforce discipline.
	The entire point is when you have a country that is dedicated Mostly, and principled, based on these sort of religious ideas, like the evangelical white Christian group is, they believe that they have every right to not only do it, but they have a divine mission to do it.
	When you bring all the elements that we've been talking about, that conspiracy theory, the mental illness, all of those things, when you bring that together with that orthodox type thinking, and you bring in the military element, That's a recipe for disaster.
	That's bad, bad territory, and that's where we're heading.
	Well, I keep criticizing people who are over 70-something because if they're in favor of what Trump is doing, they should be ashamed because they've already lived through this with Nixon.
	They know what the perils of this could be to our democracy.
	Well, it's even worse when you want to look at what's happening with, like, theocratic states.
	We know the perils for centuries of what happens from the Crusades on up, of what happens when you militarize a religion like that to take over different countries.
	But this is why, but it makes sense.
	They don't want to have critical race theory.
	They don't want to have the real truth of what the history is for fear that it might make somebody feel bad about themselves for a minute, I suppose.
	And as a result, they're going to be doomed to repeat the same bullshit again.
	That's what's so, you know, I keep imagining like either aliens or coming to visit us or people from the way distant future coming to visit us and looking at us going.
	The progression should be at some point, like we probably won't even have different genders at some point.
	Everybody will have evolved to the point where we don't have genders.
	We don't have religion.
	We all live in harmony and peace.
	We all are very smart.
	Are you having your communist moment?
	Is that what just happened?
	Yes!
	I mean but I'm thinking of like you know aliens who are looking strange but like who are glowing and who have have this incredible perspective on like what humanity can really be right that's what I'm picturing versus like you know any kind of you know communist who wants to call me comrade so either way it just seems like
	It's just a delay of getting to that point, but the bottom line is it seems like there's no other rational future if it's allowed to progress properly than to get to that point I just described, and yet we have these assholes and these idiots who are like, it's like a circle of hell.
	They're reaching up and grabbing anybody they can to pull down with them as they, you know, descend into this madness.
	It's insane.
	I had a moment, God, Nick, I bet it was 2007.
	And I went, I had a girlfriend at the time, and I went with her and her family.
	They took us to this, uh, Airbnb.
	I'll never forget this for the rest of my life.
	Or not Airbnb.
	My God, that was before Airbnb.
	There's a B and breakfast.
	Bed and breakfast, yeah.
	A bed and breakfast.
	Alright.
	So sitting down there, having dinner, having a nice glass of wine or whatever.
	Really nice older couple, because you know, that's what they want to do.
	They want to sit and they want to talk and they want to ask where you've been or whatever.
	And they started telling me about a trip that they took.
	They went to Europe, and they went to England, they went to France, and then they went to Spain, Nick.
	Yeah.
	Do you know what they said to me?
	I can't wait to hear.
	They said, and by the way, this was a sweet old couple.
	And they said, that's when Franco was still in charge.
	And I'll tell you, people say things about him that it was clean, there was no crime, and everybody was so nice and we felt so comfortable and so safe.
	He was a dictator who killed everybody who stood up to him.
	There is an authoritarian spirit in people.
	And a lot of them.
	And this thing isn't new.
	This has been in America for a long time.
	This thing has been brewing here for a long time.
	It just so happens that these same people had control over politics, had control of the economy, had control over education, they had control over everything.
	Now that that generation is starting to lose part of their stranglehold on power, now that those authoritarians feel like they recognize that something is shifting, Guess what they would welcome?
	A Franco.
	They would love a Franco right now.
	Somebody who, by the way, Franco eventually, after he killed off all the people, put them in camps, re-educated them.
	Nick, this was great, by the way.
	They took away children.
	Tens of thousands of children.
	If you were a Republican, which meant that you wanted representative government, if you were a leftist, if you were an intellectual, if you were a teacher, They would take your kids because you weren't a fit parent.
	Because you were, it was a dangerous environment.
	And what'd they do?
	They hand them over to orphanages, the church, they handed them over to their own party members or whatever.
	After they did all that, Nick, he was like, ah, we're open for business.
	And do you know who came in and worked with him?
	Corporations.
	They came in, they were thrilled.
	Why?
	Because there weren't any labor strikes, there weren't any unions, there wasn't any, nobody complained because you'd be killed at that point.
	They love this shit.
	They need this shit.
	They don't believe in representative government.
	They don't believe in liberty or equality.
	They just want things to be the way they want them under any conditions.
	And they'll look the other way.
	They don't care if you get killed, kids get taken, people get raped, as long as things turn out the way they want them to be.
	And also, if you want to, you know, get a feeling of this viscerally, you can watch Pan's Labyrinth, which is in that era, and really, really brings out the terror of that government regime in a way that few filmmakers can do, so that's a worthy thing.
	I will also say that, like, I'm glad that you touched upon opening for business after they purged everybody and got everybody in order, because there are people here who are not necessarily, like, have that gene of needing authoritarianism, They're authoritarian-curious or authoritarian-adjacent or whatever, but it's because they're greedy.
	They recognize that there's an opportunity once that happens where they can just make a lot of money, particularly if you're a white guy.
	You know, that's gonna be your opportunity.
	So I don't give a shit if we're going to tear down everyone's rights and make everything completely inequitable and not fair because I know that in that situation I'm going to make a lot more money.
	And that's fine.
	That's okay.
	That's also scary because you can peel off a whole section of people that would normally be rational, sane, people who believe in democracy.
	You can peel them off because they know there's a promise of a lot of extra money there.
	And that's – again, when you mix capitalism with democracy, it's a normal outcropping – I don't know why I, or I don't know why you perhaps, have a different version of what money means and what our values are.
	It's interesting how that all evolves.
	But there's a huge, huge section of our country that simply would give away a lot of rights knowing that they can make a little more money.
	Oh, a ton of them.
	And by the way, for the record, it wasn't just corporations.
	Do you know who swept into Spain almost immediately after all these killings?
	America.
	In Britain.
	They immediately just were like, yeah, absolutely.
	Arms wide open.
	Let's do it.
	And that is because of exactly what you're talking about.
	It is a system that prioritizes having power concentrated in a few hands.
	There is an inherent contradiction of capitalism.
	When you fix this contradiction, by the way, when you have an FDR, when you have these investments that go ahead and make sure that people have enough money and they can live decent lives and they have a social safety net, when you have that, those contradictions can be fudged a little bit.
	They can be moved around.
	You can try and make the system stay the way that it is.
	But eventually, every time, capitalism heats up to the point where only a few people have money, and suddenly, people don't want to work because they're not able to even afford their lives anymore.
	They don't have enough money to buy a house.
	They don't have enough money to provide for their kids.
	Sooner or later, you can't even have kids because you can't afford them.
	Right?
	You can't afford education.
	You can't jump through any of the hoops.
	And all of a sudden, people say, you know what?
	Screw this.
	I don't want to do this.
	And then you have a problem.
	They can't buy your stuff.
	They can't circulate the money anymore.
	Well, why are they going to work?
	You need someone to come in and bust skulls.
	You need to have someone come in and put the fear of God into people and suddenly start to believe that there's a religious element toward going to work.
	Which, all of these elements are in play right now.
	That's where we are economically.
	That's where we are politically.
	That's where we are socially.
	So the question at this point And I know that this is heavy stuff, and this is a warning tonight.
	It really, truly is.
	The question at this point is, will any of these flashpoints be the thing that will set this thing in motion or push us further ahead?
	We haven't even talked about it.
	The infrastructure bill got signed into law today.
	A $1.2 trillion investment in infrastructure.
	A big win for Joe Biden.
	The question at this point is if he wins, if there's some sort of momentum here.
	Beto O'Rourke, by the way, announced he's running for governor of Texas today.
	I don't know if he can win, but if you start looking at some of this stuff, if there's a possibility of some momentum gathering on one side, they are not going to hesitate to turn the temperature up.
	Like we are constantly on the precipice of this moment of some sort of a flashpoint that will take this cold cultural war with a few deaths here and there and a few some blood spilled over here.
	We are constantly right now on the precipice of this thing just jumping over the edge.
	I mean that that's truly where we're at.
	Yeah, it feels worse every day, unfortunately.
	And I'm glad you brought up the notion of not going to work, and we probably need to explore that in another episode even more deeply, because to me it's like, well, I'm still not clear to me where all the service people go.
	Like, I've now been out and about a bit in the last month, and it's clear that there are completely understaffing situations.
	They don't have people to work in the service industry.
	I'm going to run an Uber, I'm going to run Grubhub, I'm going to run DoorDash, I'm going to gig economy.
	Like in the past, I've been like, I want to be an actor.
	I need a flexible schedule.
	But instead, they're like, well, screw this.
	I'm just going to take a job in a cubicle and give up that dream.
	I don't know what the answer to that is.
	I'm going to run an Uber.
	I'm going to run Grubhub.
	I'm going to run DoorDash.
	I'm going to gig economy.
	Or I'm going to sit at home and I'm going to – Click unemployment, I guess, right?
	Unemployment.
	I'm going to mine Bitcoin, all of that.
	Now, I will say, I saw a sign, Nick, I appreciated this.
	It was a Wendy's sign.
	Because, and again, I drove cross-country over the past couple of days.
	Every sign on every fast food place, now hiring.
	I mean, it's everywhere.
	Everywhere says, now hiring right now.
	There was a Wendy's sign.
	And I actually appreciated this.
	Are you ready?
	Yeah.
	It was pretty shocking.
	It said, we pay more and we treat you better.
	That was the sign.
	And that to me, because that's a franchise, right?
	That's somebody owns a franchise and they decided they're like putting this up.
	That's somebody who gets it.
	You know what I mean?
	That's like somebody who looked at this situation and they were like, I need to stop calling people lazy.
	I need to stop treating people like shit.
	If I'm going to get anybody to work at my place, it's going to be through this.
	That shows you out of this entire conversation that we're having, there's only one solution to all of the stuff that we're talking about.
	Solidarity.
	Yeah.
	Oh no.
	No, Jesus.
	You're gonna go to the union round, huh?
	Solidarity forever?
	Solidarity!
	That's it.
	It's solidarity.
	That's the only answer to any of this.
	Trusting one another, having faith in one another, taking care of one another.
	That's the only solution in all of this.
	You know what the parents are going to tell you when you use those those terms in school when you have these you know these counselors because I meant to bring it up earlier because I grabbed a little quote from I went on the website by the way the website of these people in Indiana who want to get rid of you know CRT but You've got to hear this because I just want to throw this out there because I grabbed it before we get too long in the tooth here.
	At an event at a church in Whiteland, Indiana.
	Do you know where Whiteland is?
	Yep.
	Whiteland?
	By the way, it's an interesting name for a town, huh?
	Well, I find it interesting that a lot of this is coming from Whiteland and a lot of it is coming from Carmel.
	Not impoverished areas, I'll just say.
	So last month, hosted by the activist group Purple for Parents Indiana, and I don't even know why purple is a thing, but oh, is it purple the state of color or something like that?
	I don't know.
	I feel like Evansville is the purple somethings, right?
	No?
	Purple Aces?
	Right?
	So what does that mean?
	Is there some significance to the purple?
	No?
	That has nothing to do with it.
	Alright.
	It is Purple Aces, right?
	It is the Purple Aces.
	It's a great, great mascot.
	Anyway, so the... Rhonda Miller, who's the Purple for Parents Indiana's group's president, said, Grade school lessons centered on emotions are meant to prepare children for... Are you sitting down?
	They're meant to prepare children for sex trafficking by teaching them to be accepting of LGBTQ identities and introducing them to books about sex, gender, and sexuality.
	Sex trafficking is what happens when you teach about sexuality and LGBTQ identities.
	This is what they're up against, right?
	This is scary stuff, and I can't think that it... I help to think that this is some sort of weird closeted reaction to some of this stuff, too.
	I don't know, but, like, I'm thinking of, like, even American Beauty Stuff like that where this is just you know that that could be a symbol of like where we're at in this in this country It's it's the worst thing that they can think of and as a result if if the left is doing this if the left is some sort of Pedophile cabal and by the way for the record there are people doing this like I mean it's not a coincidence that Epstein got discovered and
	As all of this is coming to a head, right?
	Like, there are people out there who abuse kids.
	There are wealthy elites, powerful people who do awful things.
	Do not get me wrong.
	This is just a continuation of something that has happened throughout the ages.
	I found it, I think I've said this before, I found it in ancient Rome.
	I found it in Ancient Rome.
	It was abusing kids back then.
	That was the reason why you needed to kill your enemies.
	It was the reason why you need to do this.
	And you find it one place after another.
	Everyone's enemies abuses kids.
	Everyone's enemies abuses kids in order to gain some sort of magical power from them.
	The Adrenochrome bullshit.
	That is the purpose.
	If your enemy is out there abusing kids, why wouldn't you kill them, Nick?
	Why wouldn't you?
	You need to kill them.
	They need to go to jail.
	They need to be executed.
	They need to be thwarted.
	They need to be neutralized.
	This entire thing is about setting up a legitimization of violence.
	That's all this is.
	Well, well said.
	Yeah.
	And that's that is the reason we're not here to doctrinate or to try and scare people into being a certain way or be progressive or left or whatever.
	We're here because we we're worried about violence.
	That's really, I think, what we're saying, what you're saying, what I'm saying.
	And that that is true.
	And it's not alarmist.
	We keep seeing it.
	Like how many different incidents of people dying and being injured and hurt from these inspiration of these leaders do we have to have?
	Do you want five?
	Do you want 10?
	Do you want 12?
	Do you want mass shootings every month, every week?
	This is what's happening.
	And that's the thing is we can't have people bury their heads in the sand anymore.
	We want those people to do that, right?
	We need to have those people not be part of the process anymore like they used to be, I feel like.
	But yeah, this is where we're at is we're trying to avoid violence.
	That's it.
	Yeah, and you know, it's – I don't know, man.
	We talked – God, let me see.
	We would have talked probably right after that Trump rally that I got some notoriety from.
	So it would have been the summer of 2016.
	And I remember we talked, and you were one of the few guys that I talked to who seemed to get it.
	You know, a lot of people, they were like, yeah, I think, you know, that's interesting that you heard people say this, and you heard people say they were wanting to go out and execute people, and they were wanting to arrest people, and throw them in, you know, jails, or throw them in pits or whatever.
	And, like, we talked about it, and the problem is that it hasn't stopped.
	Do you know what I mean?
	Like, it's not even cooled down.
	It has gotten progressively worse, to the point where you can predict it at this point.
	Like, none of this is hidden.
	None of this is even obscured.
	Like, the point is that all of these things that people are maneuvering in, people like Steve Bannon, all of the things that they're trying to do, all the things they're putting in motion, make it more likely every single day that there's going to be more and more violence.
	January 6th didn't happen by accident.
	It was a bunch of people who were prepared to carry out January 6th.
	The problem and I'm putting that in quotes, obviously, because I'm glad that they didn't succeed.
	The reason they didn't succeed on January 6th is nobody stood up and said, I'm going to put my life on the line here, and we're taking over the government.
	We're there now.
	Like if January 6th happened tomorrow, which you'll be hearing this on November 16th, on November 16th, there are people who are ready to go.
	There are people who are ready to do this thing.
	So we are watching this escalate.
	We are watching this grow.
	And that's why we're doing this is because somebody needs to.
	And I'll be damned if our media or politicians or people with larger platforms, I'll be damned.
	They're not interested in talking about it.
	They're just not.
	It's happening, and they just look at it, and they sigh, and they shake their head.
	But they're totally living in delusion on this.
	And treating it like business as usual.
	We're going to treat this like we would normally treat any other kind of political issue and cover it the same way.
	That's the other problem that we haven't been able to wrap our heads around as well.
	The mainstream media, you know, you've been as critical as anybody of them for not doing their job properly.
	And again, in the same way that the right would do it, you know, have the same kind of criticisms, but it's like for the opposite reasons.
	I'll just be straightforward.
	My father-in-law would say something like, we can't let, and he's a Trumper, we can't let politics get in the way of family.
	That would be the reaction you would have back in the 80s when we had a different political scenario.
	This is not that anymore.
	You cannot treat it like that anymore.
	And that's where I feel like we're at for sure.
	No, you go back into the 1980s.
	It was about laying the foundations for where we are now.
	We're in the consequences of that now, is what it is.
	We're watching every, man, I was listening to this book as I was traveling today.
	It was written in 2005, and it's a history of the Cold War.
	So it was right before the 2008 housing crash.
	It was as people were still pretending like the Iraq War was a good idea.
	It was before Trump, all this stuff.
	And this historian was talking about the triumph of America and how it was never going to be questioned again or whatever.
	It was a bunch of people high on their own supply.
	And now here we are when that supply is out.
	You know what I mean?
	And it's just it's crashing.
	It's all coming down.
	The consequences of all those actions are taking place.
	No, it's it's it's getting it's getting real.
	It's getting real.
	All right.
	We're going to come back.
	We do this again.
	We do the Weekender on Fridays for those of you who haven't tuned in before.
	That's patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast to gain access to that.
	This Thursday at 7 30 p.m.
	Eastern American Time, we're going to welcome you to a live episode.
	We're going to send out a call for questions.
	We're going to do a live Q&A, hang out with the community.
	We're going to go over all of this stuff, but I want to point out again, it's good to be around each other.
	It's good to remind each other that we've got each other's backs and we take care of one another.
	We have a beautiful community.
	We really, really appreciate you.
	We hope to see you this Thursday at 7.30 p.m.
	Eastern American Time.
	If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
	SMH.
	You can find me at J.Y.
	Sexton.

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