Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how the Rittenhouse verdict was decided and the ramifications it has on society going forward, specifically if it's a dot on the timeline from George Zimmerman to something inherently worse and more violent.
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If you want to see the rise of the matriarchy, it's probably a bad day for you.
Well look, I stand by what the jury has concluded.
The jury system works and you have to abide by it.
The system works!
And then John Cooper of Heritage points out 72 minutes later, he changed his tune.
He said this, while the verdict in Kenosha will leave many Americans feeling angry and concerned, myself included, we must acknowledge that the jury has spoken.
I remain steadfast in my commitment to do everything in my power to ensure that every American is treated equally, with fairness and dignity under the law.
So Julian, we went from the process worked to he's angry.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Saxton.
I'm here with Nick Houselman.
Let's just jump right into it.
Nick, over the past couple of weeks, we've been talking about the fact that we expected Kyle Rittenhouse to be acquitted of all charges.
This wasn't surprising, still disappointing, still frustrating.
We have to get into both this verdict, what it means for the future, how, of course, the radicalized right-wing responded to it, and a whole lot more.
But what were your initial reactions?
How do you feel about this?
How do you feel about this as it's played out?
I mean, I'm all over the place.
I went and actually read the transcript of his testimony.
Because I really wanted to go over and be able to come on this show and just criticize the prosecution for not doing a good enough job of connecting.
Okay, he goes to a used car dealership to protect the cars that were being set on fire and destroyed.
And then he ends up kind of wandering around.
And that's the key moment where you want to say, well, he was just asking for trouble by wandering around and going away from the initial focus that he was supposed to do, which is just stay on that car a lot.
They didn't do that, but it kind of feels like everything erupted around the car lot close enough where perhaps it didn't necessarily mean that he was wandering around.
Here's my final take on this, or whatever take it is.
Anybody who does what he did needs to serve some amount of prison time.
Like, if it's nine months, if it's a year, if it's whatever, it's something.
And that's the problem here, is we don't have any kind of prison time for him at all.
And that's where I'm at.
I feel like that's the biggest issue.
And there's still a lot of criticism with what the prosecution did, but the bottom line is, you know, I kudos to the defense.
They did a much better job and I totally understand why he was acquitted.
I think as most of these Man, there's a lot to unpack there.
I'll say that I am angry.
It's clear to me why and so I'm not like angry I guess over the verdict.
If I were in that jury pool, I probably would have done the same thing.
Man, there's a lot to unpack there.
I'll say that I am angry.
I am angry because this is obviously an opening up of future behaviors.
Yes is what it is.
That's This entire situation is so awful and tragic and unfortunate I think one of the things that got lost in all of this and I think the prosecution Didn't do this.
I don't think our conversations in our culture have done this but What leads to a 17-year-old young man to pick up an assault rifle, go across state lines, and go to protect a car lot, right?
And, you know, I thought it was very interesting that you already used the word property because that's what's happening here.
A lot of this is about abstract ideas and philosophies.
In this case, it is the protection of property, which is supposed to be the benchmark of a liberal society.
The idea that you are free to have property and your property is protected by the law and that is what sort of keeps us in an ordered society, so to speak.
So what is it that leads to Kyle Rittenhouse picking up an assault rifle, going across state lines, and killing people while supposedly protecting a used car lot?
Well, this is a kid who was radicalized.
This was a kid Who obviously was subjected to round-the-clock right-wing conservative propaganda, fear-mongering, conspiracy theories, and believed that society was falling apart at the seams, which, by the way, is exactly what the Republican Party is now lauding him for, for being the lone person strong enough to take matters into his own hands, which of course is going to lead to future violence and future radicalization, which we're going to talk about.
In this case, This, I think, is going to go down as a bellwether.
I think we'll look back years from now, as the tragedies mount, as this culture war becomes more and more hot and more and more deadly, and as things start to boil over, we're going to look back at this and say, that is where we started talking about vigilantism.
Where we started talking about radicalized people taking matters into their own hands, quote-unquote protecting property.
The idea of self-defense, by the way, it's almost unprovable.
You know what I mean?
To say that he wasn't self-defense.
He felt like he was being attacked.
Meanwhile, you take a gun into a charged space like this, obviously that makes other people feel like they must protect themselves.
And as a result, all of a sudden now you have a legal system that has to determine who had the legal right to quote-unquote defend themselves.
It is a nightmare of liberalism.
It is a nightmare of a judicial system.
The entire idea of what it's supposed to do, how it's supposed to work, And we're going to look back on this, I want to say years, maybe months from now, we're going to look back at this and say that this was probably a major moment in civic society starting to break down in the United States of America.
So I'm very pissed off.
Well, here's an interesting, here's some context.
And the question for you then is, we've seen this before.
And by the way, it's very reasonable what you're saying.
It seems like that could happen, but why wouldn't George Zimmerman and his killing have resulted in what you're describing from years ago?
It did.
I mean, it was one of those moments, I think, when you start looking at someone like a Zimmerman mowing down a kid and saying that he was protecting himself.
Uh, that starts to put into the culture.
It starts putting into the idea of gun ownership, standing of ground.
Um, and, and by the way, it personifies a lot of what we're dealing with here, which is something I've talked about and read about before, which is that people of color at all times are, uh, harbingers of potential violence.
Right?
So you literally, in this case, you have a young white man who says, I feared for my life so I had to kill somebody, which is the basis when you really start breaking it down.
Not just vigilantism and not just extra legal killings.
That's the basis of of lynch mobs.
That's the basis of paramilitary groups galloping through the night and setting fire to crosses.
They're doing it to protect themselves.
It's the basis of fascism.
And I think in this case, philosophically, what we're seeing play out are sort of the birth pangs of where this entire situation is going.
I think you also missed the mark on what you're saying that that's the basis of.
It's the basis of the Republican Party.
Amen.
Yeah.
It is the fear-mongering that they are able to gin up on Tucker Carlson every fucking night.
And by the way, the real fear I have rooted out of this is what's going to happen in the Arbery case in Georgia.
Because either you could say, well, there's even more pressure now that they're going to have to have a conviction, and it has to be clear, and it has to be a pretty severe punishment.
Because if not, and if you combine that with Rittenhouse, which Rittenhouse luckily did not spark any kind of...
Trouble or you know public protests that would lead to even worse violence, but that will first without question So I'm worried about this a little bit and again because before the Rittenhouse trial was like well He's going to get time We know we have the one law where he wasn't allowed to have a white or a rifle and of course it ends up being the exact you know measurement that allows him to get off by you know a fraction of an inch and
And so this one though with Arbery though, if they don't get a tough conviction, by the way, they might get a little conviction, that still could cause a lot of violence.
So I'm really worried about how that's gonna be impacted and affected and what's gonna happen 'cause these two things are operating sort of almost together in tandem. - Yeah, all of these different sort of trials and moments, we talked about this a little bit last week, they're flashpoints, right?
We have the Rittenhouse thing, we have the Barbary thing, and soon we're going to have the Steve Bannon situation, which are all sort of playing out in different ways and sort of you know, serving as tests and/or possible flashpoints that could boil over and lead to potential violence.
And I want to point out something to people.
What you just said is exactly right.
That feeling that you have that all of these trials hold the potential for chaos, for repercussions, for consequences.
There was an opportunity, like in this case with Rittenhouse, if he would have been convicted, There was a possibility of violence if he was convicted.
There was a possibility of civil unrest if he was acquitted.
Notice that this is what happens as a culture war heats up.
All of a sudden these questions of legality and justice and open society and civic society All of a sudden they start taking on a completely new sort of air, right?
And one of the things I've found in history is that all of these culture wars have these trials and have these moments.
So like for instance in France, There's this period of time before World War II in which there's a Jewish member of the military who is blamed for being a traitor, right?
And instantaneously, this goes on for years, the left starts saying, you know, this is wrong.
He didn't actually do anything.
The right says, look at what all the Jews are doing.
Look, there's dangers here.
And it leads to clashes.
It leads to radicalization.
All these different groups start spurring up.
But when it comes to moments like this, this Rittenhouse thing, the Barbary thing, the Bannon thing, which is eventually going to take over, like, what you're watching is in the realm of the legal environment.
You're watching our confrontations play out, and those things take on larger ramifications, particularly during a culture war, which is exactly what happened here.
Right, it's kind of layer upon layer and you're sort of adding a quarter of an inch at a time and it builds into this thickness across that sector of people who want to believe in these things.
It's stoked by fear of the other, stoked by immigrants.
I stumbled, I was trying to find, I wanted to watch the Tucker Patriot Purge documentary.
And it's hard to find.
I couldn't get it.
It wouldn't play on Fox News.
It said it was going to and it doesn't.
It just has an error.
But I did happen to stumble across another Tucker Carlson screed from a few weeks ago where he is going off on, you know, every day we see the worst of the Biden administration.
He's setting the whole thing up, how terrible it is, how awful it is, how, you know, demented he is, you know, mentally.
And then he goes into this notion that, you know, the Biden administration is going to give Reparations, basically, to people who are separated at the border and who might not ever get put back together as their families, which is the least we could do for that kind of thing.
And you can hear him just gin up the anger and outrage over something like that, which, you know, the money they're giving is a drop in the bucket for what we could afford to do to help these people try and repair their lives.
And his idea is these are illegal people who have broken the law and now we are paying them to break the law.
And again, when you hear that phrase, which is basically what I think he said word for word that way, this is what inspires people to say, OK, they're not upholding the law.
So now I have to uphold the law.
That's that.
And it doesn't even have to be they don't have to say you have to go out with your guns and uphold the law.
But it's like it's clear they know that's the result.
And that's what Kyle Rittenhouse did.
Did you see the picture of the 10 year old Kyle Rittenhouse holding an AR-15?
It's like bigger.
It's taller than him.
Did you see the expression on his face, though?
It's like it's startling to me because it's like it's like Christmas morning getting the gift he had wanted his entire life in his hands.
It's like this joy that just, I don't know, it frightens me.
He's holding an object that could kill 30 people in 30 seconds.
And there's no sense of any of that in this picture at all.
He's so happy.
He's got to be 10, maybe 10 to 11.
So this is what we've been doing for decades and decades with all these kids.
And so it all is starting to make sense, right?
This is all coming together and it's only a matter of time until we get here.
And I shudder to think of how this is going to continue.
Yeah, so we're gonna go in waves here as we talk about this going from the trial, but I'm so glad you brought it back to Rittenhouse, and we're gonna have to talk about this Patriot Purge thing with Tucker Carlson and Fox News.
But I want to point out what is at the heart of all of this, which is the right wing relies on this fear mongering in order to hold on to power.
They have to go ahead and radicalize a base of people in order to get them to vote for them.
They say, if you don't vote for us, if you don't put us in power, the apocalypse is coming.
And that's why, by the way, we're not going to help you financially.
We're not going to help you socially.
The only thing we're going to do is stave off absolute disaster.
This, of course, is the entire basis of not just the conservative right wing appeal.
But in modern times, that is Fox News 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
week, 365, 366 days a year.
Roger Ailes created this in order to be an alternate reality in which the Republican Party could hold on to power and push its agenda.
Originally it was created in order, you know, he obviously went through the Nixon situation.
He wanted to make sure that Nixon or a Nixon-like person would never have to resign again.
Which kind of probably did.
He probably achieved that even more than he even imagined that he would.
I just want to make it clear, that's exactly why he started Fox News.
He was part of that and he was watching Nixon sweating his ass off in the debate against Kennedy.
So there's no question that he did that for this, yes.
And so Fox News created an alternate reality.
And within that alternate reality, and this is one of the harder, more esoteric things to sort of start to wrap our heads around.
People who watch this live in that reality, even though logic and rationality says that this is all bullshit and it's all appeals and fear mongering and conspiracy theories.
Somebody like a Kyle Rittenhouse, you're exactly right, got a gun at like 10.
That is a person who was raised in that.
You know what I mean?
That's a person who literally has been told, and we talk about this, the end result of right-wing conspiracy theorying and fear-mongering is, oh my god, the rule of law has broken down.
Because remember, that's what liberalism is.
It's the idea that the rule of law is supposed to make sure that my life and your life, they can coexist together.
Meanwhile, the entire point is to protect my property and to protect your property.
That way we're never going after each other.
Well, you start saying, okay, the rule of law is breaking down.
There are criminals who are breaking this down on purpose.
They're coming for you.
They're coming for your family.
We'll talk about Patriot Purge in a little bit and what Tucker Carlson has now turned the temperature up on.
In this case, somebody needs to pick up a gun.
So all of a sudden, this idea of self-defense starts becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
How many people in the country think that their own protection is endangered?
So what do they do?
We live in the country with the most guns of any other country around the world.
It doesn't hurt, by the way, that we were based on white supremacy, which requires guns for a minority to take on more people than themselves.
Well, all of a sudden now, you have made it possible, and more than likely, almost a certainty, That right-wing people who have grown up within the paranoid conspiracy theory alternate reality of Fox will pick up their assault rifles, go into political hotspots, and wait for someone to make them feel uncomfortable, right?
And what does that say to protesters?
Well, if you go out and protest, you could die.
And, you know, if somebody, if a white dude shows up, if a militia shows up with assault rifles, listen to them.
Because if you don't, you're going to make them feel uncomfortable and endangered and they'll be able to kill you.
And we're going to have a lot of these circumstances until it just becomes the norm.
I mean, it's literally the breakdown of open society.
We mentioned in the last episode of The Weekender, we talked about the sort of movies and the impact it has on culture, and I was just kind of wondering if there's a connection here between what we're talking about, the Rittenhouse, and how he was raised, and like, you know, born on the 4th of July, for instance, where, which is, the book itself was probably even more compelling, although I thought, like the movie, the notion of, you know, generation upon generation of people are expected to serve In the military, go fight wars, and this is like a really honorable thing.
And by the way, we had seen that way back in the day, like all Kauai and their Western Front.
We've had all these movies that I think deeply would impact the psyche when you see, when they realize at one point that this war shit is just bullshit, and we shouldn't be doing any of this stuff, and I don't want to be part of it, and my whole life was a lie until this point.
We don't have those movies anymore, do we?
Well, I'll tell you what we do have, and this is chilling.
It really truly is.
This is part of the reason why the Republican Party and the right-wing are now talking about the quote-unquote woke military, right?
Oh, look, they're out there recruiting trans people.
Oh, look, they're out there doing this that, you know, we have these generals that are studying critical race theory or whatever.
They don't want people to go into the military, these people who have authoritarian impulses and vigilantism.
They want them in the streets.
They want them to be part of the right-wing military here where the war has come home.
I would go ahead, and for anybody who's interested in this, I think this has more to do with the movie Death Wish than anything else.
Which is the idea that eventually, if people are not going to uphold the law, somebody, some hero, like a Charles Bronson, is gonna have to pick up a gun and blow away a few people.
And that's the only way that we can start to bring about any sort of a thing.
And this goes back to the 1970s with all these reactionary films.
Like, Death Wish, Dirty Harry, this idea that society and liberal society aren't upholding their end of the justice bargain, somebody has to go in and do that.
And that leads, unfortunately, to people like Paul Goezer.
I know this is going to be shocking that Goezer was saying some crazy bullshit.
Immediately after this acquittal, he tweeted, That heroicization is what is going to lead more people to do this.
Medal of Honor for selflessly protecting the lives and property of the people from an armed mob of arsonists and criminals.
That heroization is what is going to lead more people to do this.
It's the war come home.
Can we isn't there a thing to get rid of Gosar now?
Can't they just get him out of Congress?
Like, I guess it's impeachment or something, right?
I mean, this is, on top of what he just did with the AOC thing in this anime, it's like, but he's doing it on purpose.
He knows, right?
He knows that there isn't going to be any repercussions, and he probably knows, but By this time next year, the Republicans will be in power, and they'll be busy impeaching Biden at this point.
But I do want to just put a button on the movie thing, because what's also interesting is that you'll see the right wing misappropriate movies and take the completely wrong and opposite message of what the movie is.
So in my mind, I'm like, you know what?
We need more of these films.
They're going to really impress upon us what's right and what's wrong.
And it turns out that's probably ridiculous because from that side, they're going to misinterpret it anyway.
Uh, somebody on Twitter actually the other day was talking about how The Searchers with John Wayne, they're like heralding this is a heroic thing when it really is about, you know, murdering Native Americans.
And it's actually against that in telling us we are this troubled history, but they were trying to make this into a heroic opposite movie.
It's a little bit like, there's another movie that I love, I think it's Barcelona, where a guy loses his memory and he ends up watching The Graduate again, and as he's watching he's complaining about this terrible guy who's interrupting this nice wedding between these two nice-looking people, and he's banging on the glass and just making a fool of himself.
So that's what the Republican Party does too, so it almost doesn't matter.
I guess my wishful thinking about Norma Rae impacting how unions are going to be viewed going into the future, It's probably just ridiculous at this point because, again, yes, they're going to be able to take whatever they want out of this and just reframe the argument as they're so good at doing.
And it's disarming.
It's hard to sort of, you know, stand up to something like that.
Well, and this is, not to get too deep in the weeds, but this is sort of calling for it at this point.
What we're kind of dealing with right now is this idea of subjective reality.
Which, by the way, subjective reality is supposed to end when you go into a courtroom.
Right.
This is one of the reasons why we have the law.
It's one of the reasons why we're supposed to have police and judges and juries is because we have multiple people who are living in a society and we're supposed to make society peaceful by going into these courtrooms and having subjective realities.
You know.
taken care of in this case like even moving beyond Rittenhouse we're starting to talk about living in these separate realities and You know when we talk about it when we talk about the fact that you and I live in obviously a separate reality from Gozer or Lauren Boebert or Madison Cawthorn by the way who was so excited about this and and
And don't forget, by the way, that Madison Cawthorn, his idea of a good time vacation was to go to like the chateau where Hitler hung out and is obviously like a fascist in training.
Madison Cawthorn reacted to the acquittal by telling his supporters to, quote unquote, be armed.
Be dangerous, right?
These people, they seriously see the divide in the realities as something that has to be rectified based in force.
Somebody has to pick up a gun.
Somebody has to use violence.
Somebody has to get rid of elections.
Somebody has to, you know, take over where that subjectivity is.
When you and I talk about it, I don't know about you, Nick.
I don't want to speak for you.
I don't think that we should have death squads wandering around the streets.
I don't think that we need terror in order to bring people back.
I think you probably need to go ahead and deconstruct Fox News brick by brick.
You need better education, you need appeals that are going to start to de-radicalize, and we need to have the ability to start fundamentally re-merging realities until we move away from this rupture.
These people are literally saying we are going to win the wars of reality outside of courtroom, outside of a Congress, outside of all these liberal democratic structures.
We're going to bring a gun and you either agree with us or you get the gun.
I mean, that's that's literally what we're talking about.
Oh, well I'm all for armed left-wing insurgents going out in the streets, holding the right-wingers down, and giving them health care.
Forcing the health care into their bodies by gunpoint.
I'm all for it.
That was a term of force, waiting on that to end up.
I didn't know where that was going.
And then we got there.
Then we got there.
Yes.
That's what I'm for.
Gosh, now I forgot what the other thing I wanted to say.
Oh yeah, Madison Cawthorn.
So again, to connect the picture of little Kyle Rittenhouse holding this gun, we then see Madison Cawthorn rigging his wheelchair up to some sort of Howitzer kind of machine gun and firing into the dirt in front of him and getting such a big kick out we then see Madison Cawthorn rigging his wheelchair up to some sort Even the people, there must be people all around him who are like cheering when he shoots 50 rounds in like half a second into the dirt.
I don't get it.
It's like, this is cosplay, you know, like little kids playing with toy guns kind of thing.
And I suspect that must be part of the root of this.
Like, it isn't real, it isn't violent, it isn't like call to arms for them, but it is.
Like, it's only, you know, these things either accidentally or intentionally happen where they have these guns and they're out in the world and they start shooting.
If that's not an argument for better gun control, then I have no idea where we're at.
of Congress sharing these kind of videos, that's not an argument for better gun control?
Then I have no idea where we're at.
I mean, listen, we weren't able to get it after Sandy Hook.
Then we're never going to get any kind of gun control, I guess.
But I pride myself on walking in other people's shoes and trying to get that perspective and understanding and following it.
I don't understand anything short of terror watching people shoot guns like that and smiling and laughing and getting a thrill out of it.
Yeah, but the problem there is it's all cosplaying.
I mean, even, I've written about this, masculinity is cosplaying.
It's just pretending that you're something you're not until you are.
And there's so many, we talk about this all the time, there's so many differing degrees.
And I think the reaction to this, this decision shows them.
I mean, Donald Trump immediately praised it and then fundraised off of it.
That's what he does, right?
He's a grifter.
He used it in order, and by the way, the amount of money that Trump is pulling in based on emails, fundraising calls, all of it. - He wrote a book, he wrote a book. - Well, he wrote a book, right, quote unquote.
It's spectacular.
Then of course, you know, you have Cawthorn, who is cosplaying a fascist until he becomes a fascist.
We have Gab, which is the right wing social media.
They send out almost immediately an appeal saying, "We need to buy firearms and form Christian militias, as the Bible and our constitution allows." Then you've got even further right-wing extremist, VDARE, who came out, and I'm going to read this, and as I'm reading it, I want to point out the difference between everything that we've seen.
That was just trying to get retweets and likes in order to gain clout from the people who support Rittenhouse, right?
Madison Cawthorn has this character that he has to play.
Trump is fundraising off of this because that's all he cares about.
This is what VDare says.
This much is true.
Kyle Rittenhouse is the hero we've been waiting for throughout the turbulent summer of 2020.
Where a Black Lives Matter slash Antifa slash Bolshevik revolution has our country on the brink of total chaos.
Well, Nick, what happens if there's a Bolshevik revolution that's trying to take over the country and will inevitably lead to widespread violence and terror?
What do you do?
Oh, you have to put it down.
You have to put it down.
Otherwise, you're gonna get communism.
Yeah, so how do you put that down, Nick?
You go out in the streets and you shoot people.
Yeah.
We've talked about this before for years.
I'm afraid to go out and protest.
At least in Los Angeles, it's like they really don't have too many of those incidents.
But if I were in Georgia, I would not go out and protest.
I wouldn't even feel safe because the bigger the crowd, the less safe I'd almost feel.
You know what I mean?
That's how crazy this is.
And that's the point, right?
That is what we're trying to do here.
In Mississippi, during the Civil Rights Movement, when they killed the four people who had come down from the North to help register voters, that was one of the big reasons why.
It was like, we're going to do this so that no one would come back and register voters anymore.
This is the point of all this stuff.
Now, by the way, Kyle Rittenhouse, you know, again, was that his point?
Like, no, they're going to bastardize this thing and then make it into the thing.
You know, it's funny, and again, this is not a full-baked thought, but like, a guy like Rodney King has, you know, after that incident, has kind of gone into, we don't know where, we don't hear from him at all.
Zimmerman, too, has been sort of, you know, marginalized.
We don't really hear from him too much, although he had some issues coming even after that.
But it wasn't like he was propped up as a hero like they are doing now.
No, he wasn't, but he would be now.
Right, right.
I can guarantee you that Kyle Rittenhouse ain't going away.
We just saw him hanging out in Florida at this diner wearing a nice suit, ready to go on Tucker Carlson, for instance.
This is the thing.
We know that Matt Gaetz and Cawthorn want to hire him as an intern.
He's probably going to run for office.
I told you last week that that was going to happen.
That they are trying and this is how it works.
They're they're both jostling within this right wing system to who gets clout.
And now they look at this kid.
It's a lot like, do you know what it's like?
It's like the Elian Gonzalez thing.
When Elian Gonzalez got sent back to Cuba.
Do you know who the first person to welcome to Cuba was?
Fidel Castro.
Fidel Castro was like, come over here, and just constantly he appeared with this kid.
He became a symbol of something.
There was a power to it.
In this case, these right-wing grifter fascist wannabe cosplayers They see this kid and they're like, oh there's money to be made here, there's power to be had here, there's clout to be here.
They've already offered him positions in their offices to try and get closer to this kid who is now being seen as a right-wing celebrity.
Yeah, and he will run.
I bet you he will run.
What else has he got going for his life these days?
I don't know, but he is, he's not gonna have to pick up a dinner check for the rest of his life.
Yeah.
Because he killed people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, does he seem smart to you?
Man, it's so hard to say.
The thing about it is when I hear him talk, when I see him with these people, and by the way, he'll be on Tucker Carlson tonight.
That's happening tonight.
I believe we had that.
Yeah.
He'll be on Tucker Carlson night, who we got to talk about a little bit more in just a second.
When I see him talk, what scares me, Nick, is, and this is sort of like the mental cognitive dissonance that you have to go through.
Like, he killed two people.
You know what I mean?
Like, he killed two people in the street.
He has had to convince himself that he did this a heroic purpose.
I think he believed that before.
I think this is a kid who is a true believer who grew up in these conspiracy theories and with this propaganda and the fear-mongering.
And I think this is a person who more than likely truly believes in the bullshit that he peddles.
Well, okay, because let's look at this another way, where if you looked at it the way we're looking at it and how this all unfolded, what the reality seems to be based on the video, and we have evidence, a guy like that probably should have a little bit more sense of, shame isn't the right word, but perhaps... I think shame is the right word.
I think shame is the right word.
And would be like, you know what?
This was a horrible thing.
I'm really awfully sorry that these people died.
I shouldn't have been there.
This is the things we should hear him saying.
And I realize now what a mistake that was.
And I'm certainly not going to go on the national news every night of the week here to celebrate this verdict.
I'm just very thankful.
Thank God I had a good defense attorney.
And I'm going to spend some time away from everybody and reflecting or whatever.
That's probably what should happen.
Am I far off here?
No, that's exactly what should happen.
He should recede from public life, go and figure out the rest of his life, try and make amends for this thing.
Instead, he's going to become a cause celebrant.
He's going to become, well, he's already a hero.
And Zimmerman is pissed.
I'm sure Zimmerman's pissed he did it a few years too early.
You know, and again, this is what we've been saying, when we piece these things together over a number of years and decades, you can see the clear path, and that's why we can kind of predict the future, because these things are all fitting together.
And it goes from, you know, Zimmerman to, there's gotta be some other people like that I'm missing from the years before, but, you know, Zimmerman all through to Rittenhouse, and then to, God, it's gonna be, the next one is gonna be, it's gonna be worse, all right?
There's no other way to put that, and that's gonna be, One of those flashpoints I you know, I don't know what to make of this.
It's it's not even it's not even gonna be the next one It's the next few Because that that is where this is going and part of the reason it's going in this direction You know, we we've been talking obviously we've kept a pretty keen eye on Tucker Carlson for a few months now you know because he We talked about this.
Who was Tucker and what did he really, truly believe, right?
And how much of it is grift, how much of it is opportunity, and how much of it is true believer.
At this point, Tucker Carlson is a true believer.
At this point, he has gone completely over.
He's embraced urbanism with Hungary, illiberal democracy, white replacement theory.
Now we have what was called the Patriot Purge, which was his, I shudder to say documentary.
I'll call it a special, which claimed among many, many different things that January 6th was a left-wing deep state
Conspiracy by God knows I mean he probably tried to say Jews and they had to pull it back In order to entrap quote-unquote patriots into storming the capital So that a new war on terror could be instituted and the left wing could purge Patriots including he says in the future.
There's going to be torture.
There will be camps there Of course will be violence This is now the message that is being portrayed on Fox.
It is just an extension and an escalation of what they've been saying for a very long time.
But this ensures, again, that if there are quote-unquote patriots, or there are people who care about their families, Nick, what should they do to protect themselves and their families?
Arm themselves more and more, right?
Arm themselves.
And I want to point something out before we go forward, because the thing that's making hullabaloo today with all of this, and I want to point out that this is really becoming a popular thing for our media to talk about, because our media does not want to admit they're part of the problem, but they also want to just laud these people who leave the ranks of the quote-unquote Republican Party or Fox News.
Of course, they did this for Bill Kristol.
They did this for the Lincoln Project.
Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, who are Fox News contributors, after watching the Patriot Purge, have announced their resignations from Fox News.
First of all, what took you so long?
Yeah.
There's my first question.
You were watching Fox News for this long and you just now?
Bridge too far, Jared.
It was a bridge too far.
And I think what's fun here, a couple of things are happening.
Those who don't remember, Jonah Goldberg, of course, in 2008 authored the book Liberal Fascism, which you might remember seeing out in bookstores with a happy smiley face with a Hitler mustache on it.
And you might remember that this was coming out around Obama's Ascent, which was a warning that of course someday we might end up in cages and camps and re-education, all of that good stuff.
Stephen Hayes, of course, is one of the people who pushed the conspiracy theory that Al-Qaeda was working with Saddam Hussein, which got us such hits as the Iraq War.
And they came out, said that they could no longer stand by, did not take any blame whatsoever in their part in radicalizing the right.
And Jonah Goldberg, and this is fun, came out and said that he had been given assurances by Fox News that post-Trump they were going to quote-unquote right the ship and back away from this type of conspiracy theory and fear-mongering which I think tells the entire story front to bottom side to back tells us everything that we need to know about this situation.
Yeah.
I mean, if you want a little bit of an overview of, like, you know, if you go to PolitiFact, they actually, you know, break down this documentary and what's wrong with it, what Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Hayes found, you know, so detestable about it, I suppose.
But, you know, I'll just read this because it's quicker.
The series floated several conspiracy theories about January 6th, including that the violence was instigated by left-wing activists.
That sounds familiar.
We've heard them say that quite a bit.
Uh, that it may have been.
Oh, by the way, here's the thing.
We, these are the things that were like early on trying to get floated on before all the information was in, all the evidence in.
So you might want to give a pass to them saying, well, we didn't quite know then when they were saying that, that it was not true, but we certainly know now.
And then here comes this documentary anyway, but anyway, so, um, also that it may have been an FBI led false flag.
That's another big one.
And we have to talk about, you know, Today of all days.
This is this is the anniversary of JFK being assassinated.
So we're talking about false flag operations.
There's a good one for you.
And the government is using it to strip millions of Trump voters, millions of their constitutional rights.
So that this is that's a good double whammy because they're going to try and fold in the fear of like, you know, voter reform that we need to get in there before they steal these elections with like January 6th.
Like this is a you know, they're trying to open this whole thing up into a bigger, you know, you know, statement on their case for democracy.
So this is a real, real problem here.
These rioters that went to the Capitol are political prisoners who are not being let out, which is not the case.
90% of them actually have been let out until their trials.
It's just one big pile of shit is really what it is.
Well, I want to get deep in the weeds in this for a second, but I just want to point out, there's a great irony to a guy who wrote a book called Liberal Fascism about how the liberals winning the presidency was going to lead to camp suddenly throwing up his hands and saying, this, I can't, no.
How, who, what?
We're all trying to figure out who did this.
Is there any other way to frame that notion of liberal fascism on the eve of Obama taking over?
Is there any other way to read that than racism, right?
No, absolutely.
This was one of my favorite things from that time period.
And, you know, Jonah Goldberg, of course, gave the intellectual heft to things like the Tea Party, which would have these big meetings with pictures of Obama next to Stalin and Karl Marx and, you know, marching white Americans into concentration camps.
Well, I want to talk real fast about this idea of purge and what is that and what are we actually talking about?
And this goes back to what we started with, with the court being sort of the arbitrator of a liberal society, right?
Where you and I live, the law is there to protect you from me and so forth and so on.
So in the past, and this is what we're talking about when there's a reason why they use the word purge.
There's a reason why Tucker Carlson floated this thing.
His purpose is to say that the left wing is consolidating power, which by the way is news to me because the Democrats can't pass shit.
Right.
Like, no, they're tyrannical, but they can't pass shit.
It's a weird, interesting idea.
But what they do is they always project this idea.
So let's do a little bit of a thought experiment, Nick.
All right.
So, like, let's say that you and I, we are just tyrannical revolutionaries, right?
Okay, exactly.
So you and I take over a small, unnamed nation that looks a lot like the United States of America, right?
We take over the government, we take over the media, we take over all this stuff.
Congratulations, comrade.
Freedom.
Yes, everyone will change their underwear every six hours, and we'll wear it on the outside to prove it.
I love it.
So, here's the thing.
As you're consolidating power, Nick, what do you do with all the people who don't agree with you?
You gotta lock them up.
You gotta silence them.
You got options.
One, you can intimidate them into silence.
Okay.
Right?
As you're hanging people, as you're shooting people, as you're killing people, people say, I don't want to end up like that guy.
Yeah, so early Nazism, basically.
Right, which is one of the reasons why you make a big spectacle out of it, right?
You basically hurt a lot of people, intimidate a lot of people, and hopefully people won't rise up.
But I tell you what, Nick, there's some of those people that they're not going to be intimidated into not speaking.
They're not going to change their minds.
So one option is to lock them up.
Well, guess what?
You need big camps in order to do that.
And when you get them in the big camps, the fun thing is what we were talking about, about reality and subjectivity, while they're in those camps, you can try and re-educate them.
You can try and bring them over to your point of view.
And a lot of them, by the way, like a Winston Smith in 1984 will say, sure, sure, two plus two equals five.
That's fine.
Let's do it.
So you can re-educate them.
Other ones, Nick, you just gotta, you gotta disappear.
And you just gotta get rid of them so that they won't affect your country anymore.
For people who are keeping track at home, let's bring it full circle, that's what they call a purge.
So if you tell people that the left right now is attempting a purge, Which, by the way, the left ain't attempting a fucking purge.
There is no left right now.
There is no consolidated left.
Socialists and communists have no power right now.
They're over here.
They're not even on the political spectrum that holds power within the Democratic and the Republican Party.
That's not happening.
Okay?
So if the other side is planning all of this, doesn't that legitimize the other side purging?
Because it's an ideological battle.
For survival, right?
That's literally what we're talking about here.
Right.
That's literally the discussion at this point.
It's do or die, kill or be killed.
That's what Tucker Carlson is saying.
Yeah, or you can just assume that the movie The Purge is his favorite movie that he uses as his fetish fantasy stuff in the middle of the night and that's what he wants too.
Because you can imagine they're watching that movie and going, God damn is this a good idea.
Let's declare a day where we could just kill people who want to and we'll get more organized on the left because they're not organized.
We'll make sure that's their opening.
Either way, yeah, it's nefarious.
You don't have to go that far.
A place like Argentina, which is an open society and democratic now, you don't have to go very far back in our lifetimes to see what you were describing of people disappearing daily
For being you know having independent thought it is not that far of a realm of this, you know, by the way We kind of saw that right we saw these unmarked vans in Portland pulling up and just grabbing people off the streets Remarkable that like that reporting kind of never bubbled up after that, right?
I don't know if we ever saw full explanations on the extra judicial judicial, you know These these cops who are not cops are from other states coming in and trying to enforce you know, martial law, whatever that was during these protests.
You know, did I miss the Pulitzer Prize winning articles on this? - No, that just kind of went away.
And all these, by the way, are features of counter-revolutions.
It's the idea, and counter-revolutions don't always need a revolution to fight off of.
Like, there's no leftist revolution happening in this country.
What we actually have is a blossoming or burgeoning of democracy.
We have growing numbers and changing demographics and changing ideas of what the country should do.
But what ends up happening with these counter-revolutions?
Nick, you gotta go in, you gotta change education.
You've got to make sure that you teach weaponized mythological education that helps your cause.
It helps, by the way, to attack teachers and professors and intellectuals.
You've got to make sure that they're scared and that they fall in line.
After you take care of that, you've got to take over culture, which means that you've got to change the way movies are shown.
You've got to change TV shows.
All of a sudden, you've got to change everything that's sort of out there.
This helps, by the way, to go ahead and say, oh, they're showing trans propaganda to our kids.
So you gotta, you know, you gotta tamp that down and get rid of it.
And then you take over the governmental and the judicial aspects, which, oh, sorry, already done.
Never mind.
Oh, by the way, all these things are sort of been checked, but that's neither here nor there.
And eventually what ends up happening is you say, you know what, there are some people we simply can't reform.
There are some people who, and you call them terrorists and you call them outliers or you call them mentally ill, which is a thing that is definitely going on at this point.
They're playing out of a really tried and true playbook.
What we're talking about here, the reason we've been able to predict this stuff, the reason why we've been able to tell you what's coming, is because all of this follows a pattern.
And listen, good on Goldberg and good on Hayes for leaving Fox News.
It took them long enough, is what I'll say.
On top of that, they helped get us here.
But listen, What we're looking at right now is the laying of a foundation that unless we change something and unless there are major societal revisions at this point, we're on a pretty rough road.
And I think that's what this trial proved and what the moment is proving.
All right, so we're going to be back following this.
I promise this is what we're dedicated to.
Diagnosing this, explaining it, and hopefully fighting against it.
We thank you so much for being here and being supportive.
You give us hope.
I think I speak for Nick here.
I still have hope.
I think we're gonna beat this thing, but it is ugly.
A reminder, we'll be back on Friday with our Weekender Edition that is available to patrons.
All you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
In order to get that extra episode, we did a live show last week that I thought was a lot of fun and really, really good.
You should take advantage of that over at patreon.com slash MonkRigPodcast.
In the meantime, happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
Be healthy, be safe, appreciate those around you, appreciate what we have, gain a little bit of energy and reassurance in these times.