This is an abbreviated version of our weekly Patreon show. To access the full-episode and support the pod, head on over to http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss Matt Gaetz's batshit crazy appearance on Steve Bannon's podcast, and break down what Dan Crenshaw was really saying when he torched the Freedom Caucus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey everybody, it's Nick here, and I want to remind you that this is an excerpt of our full Patreon show that happens every Friday. | |
| There are other perks to joining our community, like the live show coming up on December 16th at 7 p.m. | |
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| Check it out. | |
| I think you'll like what you hear. | |
| Nick, you know what that sound means? | |
| Yes. | |
| Satisfaction of the weekend coming up. | |
| The satisfaction of a weekend well-earned. | |
| Hey, everybody. | |
| Welcome to the McCraig Podcast. | |
| I'm Jared Yates Sexton. | |
| I'm here with Nick Halseman. | |
| And we have an absolute chock-full show today. | |
| Nick, you know, there are moments where, like, we're getting ready to start rolling. | |
| And we're talking about what we've been researching, what we want to talk about. | |
| And then every now and then, there's just like a curveball that you'll throw. | |
| Because your antennae are tuned to a very interesting wavelength of right-wing extremism. | |
| How in the world you ever knew what Matt Gaetz and Steve Bannon got into on Bannon's podcast? | |
| The only way that that happened, undoubtedly, is that you are a faithful listener of Steve Bannon's pandemic Trump war room bonanza. | |
| Well, I would like to credit Twitter for that, because Twitter somehow knew that I needed to see that when I saw it, just before we started recording. | |
| But also, interesting story, as a pitcher in high school for one year, I had a natural curb on my fastball anyway. | |
| So, there you go. | |
| Well, well, well. | |
| So, the thing about it is, I actually listen to Steve Bannon's podcast pretty regularly. | |
| So, we don't have to. | |
| No, you see, you don't have to. | |
| And first of all, don't don't do it, listener at home. | |
| Don't don't listen to this podcast, this Steve Bannon bullshit. | |
| But I do have to tell you. | |
| It's an active crime scene, is what it is. | |
| Literally every day for hours at a time, Steve Bannon goes live, talks about his plans to overthrow American liberal democracy with a cast of characters who come on and plot with him for usually about three hours at a clip. | |
| Because he can't help it. | |
| He has to get in front of people. | |
| He has to talk about this stuff. | |
| But again, just to reiterate, we had a special guest, apparently, on the most recent episode, and it is the largest head and head of hair in the United States Congress. | |
| Head-to-head-to-hair ratio. | |
| Oh man, it's all over the place. | |
| It's sort of like, do you remember back in the day, and this is only going to be a segment of our audience who remembers this, Do you remember the McDonald's character, the moon? | |
| The moon head guy? | |
| You mean Mack the Knife? | |
| He wasn't Mack the Knife, was he? | |
| He was singing, they changed the words to Mack the Knife for that. | |
| Yeah, that's the one. | |
| But yes, go on. | |
| If I'm not wrong, and you can correct me, I think that the McDonald's moon head man Was advertising, I think, McDouble or something along those lines. | |
| It was supposed to be an upscale McDonald's, like, after hours fancy burger. | |
| Am I right here? | |
| There you go. | |
| Yeah, it's Moon Man with the glasses singing Mack the Knife, um, advertising a 99 cent Big Mac. | |
| A 99 cent Big Mac, so actually it wasn't supposed to be fancy, it was supposed to be great. | |
| And in this case, if you haven't seen this guy, just go Google McDonald's Moon Man, because it is the only human being that I've ever seen with a head ratio like Matt Gaetz. | |
| And Matt Gaetz, of course, goes on Steve Bannon's podcast, and they... Nick, how would you How would you summarize the conversation for the people? | |
| Well, you know, it's always good to let people out there know if there's a particular job you want and you need to, like, let that out so that maybe people will consider you for that job. | |
| Nothing wrong with that at all, right? | |
| But, I mean, basically, aside from Gates angling to somehow get on the committee to oversee the Department of Justice, which was also scary, because you know what would happen, right? | |
| He would probably somehow try and squash the investigation into him. | |
| But nonetheless, they're having a plan to use 4,000 shock troops to somehow take over the government in the very specific federal offices and tear the whole thing down, which doesn't sound that much different than what Trump was doing the entire four years he was there. | |
| Nick, I want to make sure for the, in the service of accuracy. | |
| When you say shock troops, I assume that you are taking Bannon's words out of context, correct? | |
| He did not actually say shock troops. | |
| Jared, if only they hadn't even referenced Normandy, the storming of Normandy language in the shock troop description where they want to hit the beach with landing teams and the beachhead teams and all that nomenclature they use when President Trump wins in 2024 or before. | |
| Yes, no, this is really shock troops. | |
| This is really stormtrooper kind of things going on here that they're trying to evoke. | |
| And that can mean nothing but violence in my mind. | |
| So he actually does say shock troops, which is just wonderful. | |
| Just a great, great usage of phrase. | |
| And I want to go ahead and I want to point something out here because this is really instructive. | |
| And this is one of the themes of this episode, which is the different spheres of right-wing extremism that's taking place right now. | |
| We have a lot of different actors engaged in activities. | |
| They have different types of relationships, different types of interactions with one another. | |
| So, Matt Gaetz goes on Steve Bannon's podcast, which is, again, a daily plan to overthrow liberal democracy in America. | |
| And Matt Gaetz gets on here. | |
| And I'm going to read you the quote, and then I'm going to read you the Bannon quote, which Nick just went ahead and previewed for us. | |
| Gaetz says, people didn't like that Donald Trump raised his voice, but sometimes you've got to raise your voice to raise a ruckus and to raise an army of patriots who love this country and will fight for her. | |
| Now, before I go forward, that's pretty standard. | |
| Right-wing just bullshit, right? | |
| Okay. | |
| Yeah, it's just things that you say at fundraisers, you know. | |
| Good trouble. | |
| We're getting the good trouble. | |
| Do not say good about this. | |
| He then says, we're going to operationalize the performance to go right after the people who are imposing the vaccine mandates, who are enriching themselves, and who are selling out the country. | |
| Again, this is boilerplate Republican Party Freedom Caucus, who we're going to talk about a little bit today because they are a gaggle of asshole grifters. | |
| It's pretty boilerplate stuff. | |
| Yes, did you see the non-endless cycle of Republican Senators coming out yesterday condemning the vaccine mandates themselves? | |
| I mean, evoking C.S. | |
| Lewis and just sort of, you know, fascism. | |
| It's not, that's not boilerplate stuff, I don't think, but okay. | |
| No, it's not. | |
| So these are some talking points that Matt Gaetz is throwing around. | |
| To which point Steve Bannon, who is basically a human Boyle, he says, understand this is a theory of governing. | |
| And anytime, by the way, somebody says out loud, understand this is a theory of governing, pin your ears back because you're going places. | |
| You are going places. | |
| He says, it's fresh and it's new, which you never want to hear that either. | |
| This is Trumpism in power. | |
| That's when we went to the 4,000 shock troops we have to have that's going to man the government. | |
| Get them ready now, right? | |
| We're going to hit the beach with the landing teams and the beachhead teams and all that nomenclature they use when President Trump wins in 2024. | |
| Or before! | |
| Now, I want to unpack that because that's a hell of a lot of things to say in a paragraph, okay? | |
| Gates is up here using like boilerplate sort of rhetorical tricks. | |
| All of a sudden you have Bannon come in talking in terms of war, shock troops. | |
| A large part of this is a strategy and the mythology on the right wing among Trumpists at this point. | |
| Is that the reason Trump didn't win re-election obviously was that the election was stolen and the reason that he didn't do more is because the deep state had control over the apparatus of power. | |
| So what Bannon is saying here is not only do we need 4,000 people in order to run the government, we need 4,000 people who are more than willing to overthrow democratic measures within the country and overthrow liberal institutions. | |
| This is a hell of a conversation and a hell of a two ships passing in the night that somehow or another converge into one political project. | |
| You know I envision this because this is televised as well. | |
| I'm envisioning Gates talking like you described with the quote as a close-up and you don't see Ben and he's off screen because he's busy with a mask around his face sucking nitrous while Right, and this is the thing. | |
| while Gates is talking, and then finally there's a pause where this guy ripped the mask off and then just lays this shit out there and it gets crazier and crazier. | |
| Almost like not even in response to what Gates is even saying. | |
| It's just his own thing he's gotta start going with. - Right, and this is the thing. | |
| Matt Gates is a useful idiot. | |
| And I mean that in a lot of different ways. | |
| He is a useful idiot. | |
| This is an idiot that a lot of people use for different reasons, right? | |
| He goes on TV, he says the things Sean Hannity wants, he says the things that Tucker Carlson wants. | |
| He'll go out there, he'll vote the right way, he'll say what he's going to say. | |
| He's not an ideologue. | |
| He's a fail son, is what he is, right? | |
| And by the way, Nick, can you tell the people at home, maybe do a little research, is there still a pending investigation against one Matt Gaetz? | |
| There is. | |
| Oh, okay. | |
| Well, that's interesting because Gaetz replies, yes. | |
| Which, dynamite drop in, Donnie. | |
| And he says, and we're going to go after this administrative state and we're going to start at the Department of Justice and the FBI. | |
| That's the job I want. | |
| You know, send me over to the Judiciary Committee and their sphincters will tighten because they have been doing a lot of corrupt things over there. | |
| What are those corrupt things, do you think, that Matt Gaetz thinks that they're up to? | |
| Oh, you know, just your everyday, you know, investigation into sex trafficking of minors. | |
| Yeah, sex trafficking of minors, which last time I checked, he's being investigated for. | |
| But of course, Bannon, Bannon's not worried about Matt Gaetz being on a judiciary committee. | |
| He literally wants to knock some walls down, right? | |
| He wants to go ahead and Donald Trump, for the record, is another useful idiot, much in the same vein. | |
| As Matt Gaetz. | |
| They're part of the same, is it species, genus? | |
| You're more scientific than me. | |
| Phylum, perhaps? | |
| Phylum? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Not family. | |
| Phylum, universe, whatever. | |
| I used to know all that stuff. | |
| There's somebody driving right now listening to this screaming. | |
| They just rolled down the window to scream out into the ether. | |
| They are part of the same useful idiot family, Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump. | |
| Steve Bannon has told anybody who listened that Trump doesn't understand what he's doing, but he's a battering ram. | |
| He's a useful idiot to get in there and knock out some walls. | |
| That's how he sees Gates as well. | |
| They're talking two different languages, but they're traveling the same path, and that same path is the destruction of liberal democracy as we know it. | |
| Well, you know, we might not get too deep into the Mark Meadows situation today, but, you know, what we saw after the election in November, how they were still putting in, like, political appointees into various positions in the government, is exactly what they're talking about here with these 4,000 shock troops. | |
| But they just want to do it right away. | |
| I think they realized, oh my God, we weren't organized enough early enough. | |
| Had we had done this in 2018, then we would have been all set to go and ready to go. | |
| But like we didn't realize that, you know, because all the fraudulent voting from, you know, sending your mail, your ballots in that we wouldn't be able to control it well enough. | |
| But now they will. | |
| So he's just basically reiterating like what the game plan had been anyway from a couple of years ago. | |
| But it's sort of revealing that they this is they're getting better. | |
| Remember the first coup never works this is like the second version of it and it's gonna be better and smarter and You know Nobody is on top of this. | |
| That's the other thing that's kind of scary about it Again, we need to discern these different types of actors that are on the right wing, right? | |
| Matt Gaetz, he's a suit. | |
| He's, again, a useful idiot. | |
| But there are a ton of people that Donald Trump sort of cracked open a situation, right? | |
| There are like a lot of moments in history where people can't imagine a certain outcome and then something shifts or a person emerges. | |
| Right? | |
| It's not like Donald Trump, like, got in front of a bunch of people and spoke about national conservatism or a new idea. | |
| He got into power or he came to power in a way that was so haphazard, so selfish, and so dangerous that people went, ooh, that's pretty useful and telling, right? | |
| Our institutions aren't as strong as we thought they were. | |
| And we've covered this before. | |
| Steve Bannon is at the front of it. | |
| He is an ideologue. | |
| His entire point is to overthrow liberal democracy and institute something along the lines of a right-wing reactionary state. | |
| That's what he's into. | |
| That's what his entire life has been dedicated to. | |
| But there are other people. | |
| We've talked about the Claremont Institute. | |
| Right? | |
| We've talked about a bunch of academics, we've talked about a bunch of legal scholars, a bunch of really educated people who have in their heart and in their desires this idea of rolling back liberalism, which has always been the focus of conservativism since it originally started. | |
| And, you know, you have a bunch of people who are laying down legal framework. | |
| You know, it's not a coincidence that when they were thinking about overthrowing the election on January 6th, that a lawyer from the Claremont Institute showed up and was like, I got some thoughts for you on how to do that. | |
| Hey, you could do this, that, and this, and that. | |
| It just so happened that Trump didn't want to get his hands dirty with it, and Mike Pence was like, I don't know about all that, right? | |
| But now they've got those apparatuses going full bore because Trump and people like him made it very, very clear there's an opening. | |
| So when we're talking about shock troops, when we're talking about doing it right this time, what we're talking about is exploiting weaknesses that have been revealed, right? | |
| It's basically like getting into a time machine, going back to 2015 and being ready for Trump. | |
| as opposed to watching Trump and then reacting to Trump. - But if you play the telephone game with this to the constituents on the right's wing, what they're gonna hear and feel is that, hey, we've got to do this stuff before the liberals put in fascism. - Exactly. - So that is why this is all justified to them because again, this is what they're trying, they've been trying to impose their values on us for all these years. | |
| We need to be ready to stop this because otherwise, guess what? | |
| It's going to be the fall of democracy. | |
| This is what they're thinking. | |
| This is why we will never be able to reconcile very easily, because this is going to have to be like a revolution that's been put down. | |
| And when I say put down, put down like, you know, with a huge majority in voting across the board, both in local and in federal elections, because that's what's going to kind of quiet them and put them back where they used to go in this whole process. | |
| But that's what's so scary about this thing, is that they truly feel like they are freedom fighters, just like Rosa Parks was getting on that bus. | |
| Oh, man, they use Rosa Parks as an example. | |
| That's the gross part about this, is this weird neo-fascistic authoritarian movement, much like capitalism has done and hyper capitalism has done, it takes its opponents And it absorbs them and perverts them and then gushes them back out, right? | |
| That's why, you know, it was like during the Floyd protests, they were like, Martin Luther King said this. | |
| Really? | |
| Are you going to do this now? | |
| And it's like, no, Martin Luther King at times is like, you know, some things need to be torn down. | |
| Occasionally you need to go out in the street. | |
| I believe one of the quotes was, the riot is the last language, right? | |
| Of the frustrated. | |
| And I just butchered that quote, but it stands still. | |
| In this case, it is very, very much about this idea that they are victims. | |
| Even as they are abusing systems, even as they have an anti-democratic aim, even as they're trying to thwart the will of the people, and we'll talk more about that. | |
| As they're doing that, they are saying there's an apocalypse waiting. | |
| If we don't do this, we have to do it. | |
| And we're actually saving people. | |
| And we're going to be saving a lot of people against their will, right? | |
| And in this case, Bannon is one of the chief speakers of this. | |
| But I have to tell you, Matt Gaetz has no idea what the hell is going on. | |
| He gets on, he'll say things, he'll do whatever. | |
| He is a grifter in the line of Donald Trump. | |
| That new generation of grifters that basically sprung forth from him like he was Zeus is what it was. | |
| It's a bunch of useful idiots that these ideologues really want to use and know that they have to use. | |
| You know, this has entered into my head. | |
| Why does Trump want to run again anyway? | |
| Doesn't it feel like he's going to get away with whatever he did as president and before that as it is? | |
| Because remember, my whole thing with the motivation for him wanting to run and win again in 2020 was so he wouldn't get prosecuted for obstruction of justice, which I ain't holding my breath for that one. | |
| Nine fucking counts or ten counts of obstruction, not one of them is going to be filed against him. | |
| So, to me, it would be like, why would I even bother looking around and getting back in this thing? | |
| Which, by the way, that might be the argument for why Trump won't run again. | |
| But that's the interesting thing about all this, because again, what is Matt Gaetz getting out of all this? | |
| To me, it sounds like he's trying to angle a way to find a way to make this case against him go away. | |
| And if he can get enough power and they can take control of Congress, he probably feels like, yes, legitimately they can make it go away without needing a pardon or anything. | |
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