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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman hosted a live show with the Muckrake faithful last night, and the conversation ranged across a broad spectrum of topics, including taking questions on the state of our democracy and our favorite Thanksgiving foods.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Mock Wreck Podcast.
I'm Jerry D. H. Sexton.
I am here with Nick Halseman.
I'm pouring myself a Guinness.
I'm hanging out with dozens of my closest friends, and those people are our patrons over at patreon.com slash mockwreckpodcast.
We always enjoy these things.
If you haven't had an opportunity to hang out with us on the live show, I highly, highly recommend it.
Tonight, we're going to be talking about current events.
We're going to start answering questions from our patrons.
If you aren't already a patron, I don't know what you're doing.
Come aboard, one of us, one of us.
Nick, how you doing?
I'm good.
I'm good.
We have a virgin in the crowd.
By the way, Joe is out there, his first time joining us for a live show.
So, and I'm hanging in there.
I might turn my mic off to cough, but that's okay.
I'm fine.
Well, what I love, Nick, is you've got your cough medicine right next to you.
It's Ricola, right?
Ricola!
Yes, it works pretty well, but you know, mine might sneak in there every now and then.
I loved the Ricola ads so much as a kid.
What a successful ad campaign that was.
Very Eurocentric, very exotic.
I was very won over by the Ricola ads back in the day.
Like, you know, in the same vein as, like, Mento, perhaps.
The Freshmaker.
Very, very much so.
And I have to tell you, as a Hoosier growing up in small-town Indiana, like, it made me feel like I was out in the world.
Right.
Very nice.
Very nice.
But here we are.
You know, we all can't be jet-setters like me, I guess.
That's right.
We can't.
We can't all be movers and shakers like Nick.
We actually have a little bit of good news to report tonight, but before we get to that, you can't have your pudding if you don't eat your meat.
We have to start with the ongoing saga within the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.
We got to talk about where that's at, the absolute madness of it.
Matt Gaetz, who you can't get rid of this guy.
It doesn't matter what he does.
It doesn't matter what controversy he's facing.
He should be in jail at this point.
We'll get to him in a minute.
But we're sort of in a holding pattern with this Rittenhouse trial.
It is Somebody in the comments said, sham trial.
Nick, I can't think of a better way to put it, to be honest with you.
Just an absolute sham of a trial.
You know, I'm going to have to be a little bit of a devil's advocate here because I sense that if you were teaching defense in a law school, you would use this as an example because They did a pretty good job.
Now they had the judge stacked in their favor, who apparently is stacked in the favor of the defendants all the time anyway.
But I mean, let's just be honest, the defense did a much better job in the prosecution anyway.
So it's like if I were in that jury, I would have been, I'd probably be swayed.
Yeah, so we talked about this before with the Rittenhouse thing.
It's a very touchy situation, particularly with how the law works and how this whole thing is being put forth.
I want to talk very quickly.
We were talking about it before we got started.
Judge, in this case.
Just absolutely wacky, beyond belief.
Obviously, we were talking about it before and I think we sort of came to a consensus between the two of us.
He's putting on a show for right-wing media.
He is very, very concerned about becoming a figure in this trial.
I think it's interesting for a few reasons.
One is the fact that our judicial system has been turned into this.
That the way capitalism works is it mines everything for profit and opportunity and spectacle.
And we've seen this obviously not just with court TV, but with like things like the you know, the OJ Simpson trial Every every missing white woman in the world who ends up becoming like this big giant thing that has to be talked about on Court TV cable news headline news there has to be a dateline about it all this stuff It is obvious that this has infected this judge that he is plotting his next move for what happens after it and I'm with you I think
The way what we've seen happen with this trial is predictable, unfortunately.
And on top of that, I think a lot of the problems with the judicial system that maybe some people weren't aware of have definitely reared their heads.
Oh, for sure.
And so the only question is, how close to the end of the trial will the judge appear on Hannity and Tucker?
Because there's no doubt he'll be on that, and that's what he wants.
I mean, the tell is that he bans MSNBC from the courtroom, ostensibly because a freelance producer for NBC ran a red light, and supposedly that was somewhere near where the jury bus was to bring them back.
Did you?
Did you follow all of that?
I mean I tried to pull it apart and get all the information as much as I could and because I was like wait a minute did the guy just say he was working for MSNBC and he really wasn't and whatever but no apparently NBC acknowledged it and then but apparently it was like he ran a red light but you know here's the thing these outfits cover trials all the time they know the rules they're not gonna be like stupid and like take a picture of a jury you know and get in trouble that way like necessarily I mean I don't it's hard to picture that would be what was happening
Obviously they're going to want to interview the jury after the trial, but I don't know.
I mean, it's really, really, really strange.
And this isn't one of those things where, you know, race isn't really a central issue in this case.
So in my mind... It is and it isn't.
It's the insinuated race of the case, which is that there are, you know, Mongrel hordes out there taking over our cities and burning them down with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, who's paying them, all of that.
So you're right.
It is both a central part of the case, but it's also so far in the background that there's a certain amount of deniability of it.
Right.
I mean, so, but to me, as far as, like, following jurors and, like, taking pictures of them, whatever, that's, like, my mind reserved for, like, the white supremacists who want to intimidate before they make their decision, right?
And that doesn't seem like that applies, like, they're not out there trying to do that for this in theory, although maybe they are, right?
Because there is a tangential notion of that, like, We're gonna find you if you find him guilty and we're gonna let you know what we think about that.
So that to me would be really what they'd be more concerned with, not a producer for a news outlet running a red light near a bus.
So that turned out to be a freelancer.
So MSNBC paid a freelancer to go out there to take pictures that they would undoubtedly run on the website along with some article.
Ended up getting a traffic violation that wasn't a big deal.
But I have to tell you, I was looking at it before we started taping.
The right-wing ecosystem, Nick, I know you're shocked.
The people watching at home, I know you're going to be shocked.
They're already running with it.
They're already running with it.
It was jury intimidation.
It was paparazzi run amok.
It's the left-wing media trying to push something, trying to pull one over.
And it literally was completely as innocuous as something can be.
It was innocuous as innocuous gets.
And this judge ran with it because you're exactly right, Nick.
If he isn't on Sean Hannity the night that the verdict comes down, I'll be shocked.
I'll be absolutely shocked if he isn't on there.
And then, and let's talk about this media ecosystem, which is part of what we're getting into here in a second with Rittenhouse, because Rittenhouse isn't going away just to let everybody know, like, this is not just a person who's going to recede into the background.
This judge isn't either.
This judge is angling to become the, what's the one guy on Fox News, Napolitano?
Napolitano would come on.
Yeah.
I think it's his name, right?
I think that's right.
I think Jeanine, too.
Jeanine Pirro was a judge, too, so... Right!
And so what they want is they want this cast of... Oh, and forgive me, I gave her the French pronunciation.
Pirro.
I don't know how to say it.
But anyway, go ahead.
Yeah, they want this fresh cast of personalities.
And undoubtedly, to understand what's going on with the, not just American politics, but with the American right right now, He's angling to become a personality.
He's performing in the courtroom to try and help his career or to gain money or profit or influence.
And meanwhile, we're in the middle of a trial.
I don't think people have wrapped their heads around what's going to happen with this or what the potential fallout from this is.
Because it could get bad.
And you have a lot of people who are vamping for cameras and trying to get this press coverage or some sort of advantage from it.
Well, I was trying to game that out and figure out, okay, what would the response be if, okay, he gets off?
Which, here's the thing, it's taking a little bit longer for them to deliberate if it was going to be a completely, you know, innocent verdict, in my mind.
But, if he was innocent, like, who is going to all be up in arms and, like, protest and cause mayhem?
I can't see anybody, right?
I don't see that happening.
Well, Nick, real fast, let me check my notes.
Kyle Rittenhouse is a white man in the United States of America.
I'm going to put my money on him getting out and be proven wrong and feel good about it.
Who is going to be upset?
That is a question.
I think that you could see protest.
I'm not guessing that this is going to be something that explodes, but I also, you know, we talked about it.
I think if he gets off, if he gets acquitted here and the right is going to make him The right is going to make him a poster child, and he'll be on Fox News, undoubtedly, probably the night he gets acquitted, and maybe he'll become a justice correspondent for them.
You know what I mean?
But he's going to become this sort of model thing.
You have a ton of right-wingers right now who are looking for an opportunity to go out there with their guns and bring in justice.
Right.
I'm sorry, you're talking about the judge or Rittenhouse himself?
Oh, both of them!
They'll probably be on the same segment.
Right.
No.
Well, interesting, yes.
I mean, yeah.
Now, again, but Rittenhouse, you know, it's the second oldest profession in the world or in history, right, is figuring out how to use these 15 minutes of whatever we're going to call this to benefit financially from.
And there's no question, you know, because I don't know if Kyle Rittenhouse himself has a lot of things going for him.
I mean, he even had a lie.
He stooped to lie about nursing school that he really isn't going to.
He did one online survey, basically, to see if maybe he would end up going to a nursing school.
But he couched it like he was actually there.
I'm going to be a nurse, help people, whatever.
Whatever he could do to make himself look better.
But as a result, I don't know if he's got a lot going for him.
So he's clearly going to try and leverage this into something.
Well, according to Matt Gaetz, they're looking into inviting him in to work with his office.
And this all goes full circle to what we're talking about.
And if I have to underline or highlight or let people know, like one of the things that we're always talking about, the through line, so much of this is about economic opportunity.
So much of it is about grifting.
And nobody griffs harder or more transparently than Matt Gaetz.
And so in this case, you have Matt Gaetz, who again should probably be rung up on God knows how many charges at this point.
He recognizes, and this is one of those things, right?
Trump is like this too.
Trump knows.
Trump is so good instinctually at knowing where to go.
On the culture war issues.
You know what I mean?
Like whenever all of a sudden people were talking about the Braves tomahawk chop, immediately his Trump sense went off.
And he's like, I've got to go and get recorded doing this chop and being part of it.
In this case, Gates is exactly like Trump in that regard.
He knows that bringing this Rittenhouse kid is going to help him politically.
It'll help him fundraise.
And undoubtedly, Rittenhouse is going to have a ton of offers like these.
It's not just going to be Matt Gaetz.
He's going to have endorsements.
He's going to possibly have media opportunities.
He'll probably end up in God's Not Dead Part 4 or whatever the hell episode we're in.
But the whole point is that he's going to find an opportunity despite the fact that he killed two people and has been part of this.
Whatever happens from it, this entire ecosystem of grifting is going to give him something.
Right?
There's going to be an economic opportunity which, while we're on the subject, just ensures other people are going to do it.
Right?
Because if you live in a country where the only way that you can get ahead is to possibly act on some of these levers or whatever, and no one's making it, they're having trouble with money, they're having trouble with their lives, why not go out and take an opportunity like this?
There aren't repercussions, there aren't consequences.
Get on Fox News!
Go out there and get a fascist coffee endorsement.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, make t-shirts, you know, sell coffee mugs, do all that stuff.
I mean, this isn't, like, nefarious.
This is capitalism, in a way.
This is what the system demands.
And so, it's just really troubling.
I'm worried about Nestor, and I hope that Nestor will be okay if Matt Gaetz brings him in as his, you know, as his new... Can we talk about the fact that the Nestor thing just kind of went away?
Like, it happened... He's in college, Jared.
He's busy studying college.
You don't want to bother him, right?
I don't know.
I don't know, man.
The whole thing with Matt Gaetz gives me hives.
It really does.
It gives me the willies, man.
Matt Gaetz gives me the willies.
Because you look at him, you know what I mean?
You look in the eyes, and there's nothing looking back.
No.
No.
And then the head.
Listen, I'm not a proud man.
I'm not proud about how derogatorily I'll speak about Matt Gaetz.
It doesn't make me feel good.
But, here we are.
Every time somebody brings up Nestor, I'm just like, how do you look back on last year, and that's only the second weirdest and problematic story to come out about a politician?
And now you're going to bring in this guy.
Undoubtedly, I mean, there's a real opportunity that Kyle Renton House is going to be in the office of a representative.
And for those who aren't aware of this, I assume that instinctually you've seen this, the House of Representatives, particularly on the right side of the aisle, they are profoundly weird.
They are profoundly strange, and we're going to talk about good old Lauren Guntoad and Bobert here in just a second, and we're going to talk about Gozert, and we're going to talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I mean, the hits keep coming, but this, I mean, that is the kind of thing, and it should be a bellwether for where we're going, that you already have a congressman who, okay, I don't want to get sued, Nick, even though we're on a weekend or episode.
We got to be careful.
How do you refer to Nestor?
How do we say that without getting sued?
It's his son.
Okay.
It's his son. - So Matt...
So Matt Gates, Matt Gates' son Nestor, And on top of that, Matt Gaetz got caught dead to right.
Making me cough now.
It's so awful!
If you didn't laugh, you would cry.
And maybe you cry a little bit after you laugh.
I don't know.
On top of that, he got caught dead to rights paying underage women for sex.
I don't even know how to sit there and actually say what happened with Gates again properly.
And he is one of the most high-profile Republican members of Congress.
That's how deep this shit runs.
That's how bad the grift is.
That's how bad the corruption is.
That's how radicalized these people are.
It's that Kyle Rittenhouse has already, like, he's wasting people.
He wanted to get ahead of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
He wanted to get ahead of Boebert to be the first person to offer Rittenhouse a job if he's acquitted.
Like, that's really what it's come to.
I mean, listen, these are not serious people.
They've shit on the...
They'd shit on the office, on the, whatever air it used to have of like the hallowed halls of Congress.
It's gone.
It's not there anymore.
And it's all from one party.
That's the thing, you know, because they're trying to both sides this stuff.
And let's get into the gate, you know, to the Keymaster.
I haven't been this embarrassed for so much since the Keymaster landed in New York City.
But this Paul Gozar thing, Gozar, you know, did you see AOC in her response?
What did she say?
I didn't catch that, actually.
I mean, she was basically like, what the fuck are we doing if the leader of the Republican Party in the Congress can't even say that posting this video of me being murdered is wrong?
She's like, they can't even say that.
And, and, you know, and she just lit it on fire.
And it was really, I mean, I, I like AOC.
I don't know what other people feel about her, but you know, she, what she should have probably really done who would have made it even more powerful is share the The threats that she gets that I'm sure she got out of that video too because it's they're they're disgusting and heinous things that you know all rooted in misogyny and white supremacy and It's dangerous.
It's a dangerous game that they're playing and they want to you know, shrug it off like it's a joke You know all he had to do to avoid censure was to be like, hey, man, I'm really sorry He deleted it because he was like, well, some people might have been offended, but he can't.
He's like fucking Fonzie.
They won't say they're sorry.
They won't even play the game, which is what used to be the thing.
Hey, I'm really sorry.
I'm going to go to rehab.
I'll come back.
Everybody will forget about it, right?
That doesn't exist anymore.
You don't have to apologize.
You don't need to deal.
You don't rehab your image at all.
You don't need to resign.
Just keep going and get worse, basically.
Get worse and act worse so that whatever you had done six months ago doesn't seem so bad when you do something even worse.
That's how horrible this is.
Well, and I mean, that is obviously the path that has been put out there by Trump, which is, oh, you have a problem with the controversy that I'm part of right now?
Just wait until you see the next one.
Right?
And at that point, there's not a whole lot else to talk about.
Just move on and on and on until you can't, like, pin a tail on them.
This, I mean, listen, I talked about this on my sub stack.
There is a direct line between fantasizing about that violence and creating that violence.
Because it says no we are in a battle and guess what I might and Nick we didn't even we were just talking about the videos if it's like Just a video.
It shows an edited version of him beheading a colleague in Congress.
On top of that, we're also, like, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who obviously stood up for him, like, do you remember when all of a sudden it started coming out that she was liking posts about assassinating Nancy Pelosi?
Like, they are literally fantasizing about murdering their political opposition.
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