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Dec. 28, 2021 - The Muckrake Political Podcast

01:04:09

Will The Cult Turn On Trump?

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hausleman discuss Trump's hurt feelings after getting booed by his own crowd when discussing the vaccines, as well as analyzing what it means for Manchin to stop the BBB Act in its tracks. 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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	Take credit for it.
	Take credit for it.
	What we've done is historic.
	Don't let them take it away.
	Don't take it away from ourselves.
	You're playing right into their hands when you're sort of like, oh, the vaccine.
	Both the president and I are vaxxed.
	And did you get the booster?
	Yes.
	I got it, too.
	OK, so... Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
	Hey, everybody.
	Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
	I'm J.D.
	Sexton.
	I sound terrible on this episode because I am currently huddled up in an enclosed space trying to have decent audio.
	But thank goodness I have, as always, my wingman Nick Halseman.
	Happy holidays, everybody.
	I assume you're rested, ready to go after our brief little break, ready to hit hard.
	Oh, yeah.
	I'm ready, and not only that, but you sound fine, but I think from this point on in the pod, I'm going to then sweeten the audio.
	People are going to be able to hear how good I am as an engineer on the audio side, so you'll sound even better the next time you speak.
	When it really comes down to it, people do not understand how much of the quality of this show is behind the scenes, Nick.
	Sweeping things, putting stuff down.
	Because I have no idea what's going on, technically.
	At all.
	And it has become part of Muckrake lore, of course, that I bought a really fancy microphone and had it backwards for a really long time.
	That is right.
	That means something somewhere.
	I'm not sure what.
	It does.
	And for what I lack in audio ability and that sort of lack of know-how there, I do have to say, and unfortunately this is one of those where I believe we had it We had talked about as the Biden agenda was getting ready to go through Congress when, of course, the infrastructure bill and the social safety net part of the bill got split.
	Nick, you and I talked about this.
	We predicted pretty dead set on that.
	Once that happened, the Build Back Better part of it, the social safety net part of it, Was probably dead in the water because any sort of leverage to get it done fell to the side.
	I, of course, have been talking with people within the progressive caucus, some of my sources within there.
	They knew at that point that it was a possibility.
	They said that they were going to extend an olive branch, see what happened.
	Of course, that olive branch has now been taken back, slapped in the face.
	They feel betrayed.
	My source says I got a really, you know, pretty cliche sort of a text that said war.
	You know, and I think there were a lot of hurt feelings, but of course, Joe Manchin, I'm sorry that we got to bring him up, as basically the power broker within the Senate has said no, leaving all of this in limbo.
	It is an absolute mess of a situation.
	You know, tragic, also predictable, unfortunately.
	Yeah.
	He can't get there, I believe.
	He just can't get there, Nick.
	Yeah.
	And it's, you know, if you really want to pull apart, like, what it is, where it is he can't get to from his yacht.
	Basic human dignity.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	You know, and then, you know, I love, you know, if you pull apart this bill and how many things directly benefit people in his state.
	It makes you wonder, like, really, was he ever dealing in good faith?
	I mean, he chopped the thing down.
	He got him to really cut the size of the bill down over years, significantly, while they were negotiating, and then decides to go on Fox News of all places to say he's not going to be with it, not tell anybody.
	But it's his feelings that are hurt because of something that the, you know, administration said about him, I suppose, when he wasn't listening.
	I don't know.
	We just need another senator from another state in this coming up election.
	I think that's the solution here.
	Well, first of all, I want to take the Fox News thing.
	Him announcing that he was a no on this on Fox News, I doubt there's anybody listening who doesn't know this.
	That's not a coincidence.
	It didn't just happen.
	It wasn't just, you know, he was like, oh, I guess I'm going on Fox News today.
	Well, let's see if we can make some news.
	I mean, it's a message.
	It is two middle fingers straight up, sit and spin, deal with it.
	I'm a no.
	And him not being able to get there, he was never going to get there because he doesn't care.
	He doesn't want to give money to people.
	He doesn't believe that's the role of the government.
	And on top of that, Nick, he has some very powerful, very wealthy friends who don't want him to do that either.
	And if you start going through the list of people, I mean, it's a who's who.
	It's a murderer's row, Nick.
	We've got Goldman Sachs.
	I know you're as shocked as I am that Goldman Sachs was giving Joe Manchin money to say no on this bill.
	We've got American Express.
	Don't leave home without it.
	We've got United Health, Blue Cross Blue Shield.
	We've got Lockheed Martin.
	It is a who's who of the people who control the American political system.
	who are shoveling money like so much coal into a furnace into Joe Manchin's coffers.
	He doesn't want the government to help people.
	And he kept saying, there's even reports coming out that he's like, what are they going to do with it, Nick?
	They're going to spend it on money.
	Or money, my God, drugs.
	They're going to spend it on drugs if you give it to them.
	Because he is down at his deep, deep heart a neoliberal conservative.
	That's who Joe Manchin is.
	But it's more specific than that because he wasn't saying they're going to spend it on drugs.
	They were going to spend the child tax credit on drugs.
	So if you really think about what that's saying...
	It's the welfare queen shit from the 80s that we'd heard Reagan scare everybody about.
	And again, OK, is this a perfect system?
	Does every bit of money ever get spent exactly the way it's supposed to be spent?
	No.
	But are you aware of how much the poverty line for children was cut from the last child tax credit from just a little bit of money?
	It's incredible.
	It's a little bit of money, Jared.
	This is not like they're going to end up having so much money they can splurge on coke and whatever all over and meth and whatever they want to buy.
	This is a few hundred bucks a month, really, when you're talking about it, which is so vital to so many people that if you're going to find... By the way, this is a lot like the ballots.
	Here's my connection to this.
	When Republicans will see that 25 ballots were illegally cast in a state, Look, clearly that means that the whole voting system is polluted.
	Well, just like the same thing here, where if you're going to find, of the millions of people in West Virginia that get a child tax credit, if you're going to find 25 of them who ultimately didn't spend it on their kid, for instance, and then use it for drugs because they are in a terrible situation where they are addicted, okay, I think it's worth it.
	To allow everybody else who isn't going to spend it on drugs to actually lift their children out of poverty, if that's where they are, or lift themselves out of the situation and give themselves a break for even a few months.
	It's insane how he is able to point to that specifically, and that seems to be the reporting that's well-sourced, that that's what he said, that's what he meant, and I guarantee you that was a huge reason why he decided to cancel the whole thing.
	I'm glad you brought up the idea of some of these funds being misappropriated, because there's this really interesting little finding that came out in the last few days, which is that nearly a hundred billion, with a B for boy, a hundred billion dollars in COVID relief loans and funds were misappropriated or stolen.
	Do you see Joe Manchin standing up in the Senate screaming about this, saying, we're never going to help businesses anymore.
	We're never going to give corporations handouts anymore.
	My God, they're just going to misappropriate it and use it and steal it.
	No, you don't.
	Because this is about the individual.
	It's believing that humans, humans, the individuals, are not capable of taking care of themselves.
	They're not to be trusted.
	In fact, the entire purpose of government Is to protect businesses from those people, right?
	Because they're dangerous if they pick up pitchforks and torches.
	They're just gonna steal.
	They're just gonna use it on drugs.
	They're just gonna spend it on candy or soda or whatever in the hell it is that day.
	The entire point of his philosophy is to never give these people anything and to always hide it behind exactly what you are saying.
	Which is this dog whistling bullshit, right?
	And it's always like, oh, you know the kinds of people, wink, wink, nod, nod, there's a woman in Chicago, right?
	There's a woman in Chicago, which everybody knows what you mean when you say that.
	It's this dog-whistling bullshit that says, oh, we can't possibly help anybody because there are people, quote-unquote, out there who are going to take advantage.
	Right.
	These people, it does a lot of work when you're using those phrases.
	These people.
	And again, if you want to know why it's important to understand the true history of this country, it's because you're describing the exact way they framed the Constitution.
	Exactly!
	These people don't deserve to have rights.
	We can't trust them to have any kind of power and have any kind of agency in this.
	So we will write it down in the Constitution, of which these Republicans will hold up in our face to say, this is what we're fighting for.
	You know, the only reason why they don't want CRT or whatever they want, the real truth in the schools, is because you realize the whole thing is propped up by these people and having these people oppressed.
	And as someone who's not oppressed, it's disgusting for me that we can't get the rest of the children who are in this country out of poverty because some asshole who relies exclusively on coal and keeping climate change from actually helping the country or helping the world.
	So here's the thing, Jared.
	I don't wish ill on any fellow human.
	We are all part of this world.
	But is it really too much to hope that, like, he... I don't know.
	I wish maybe to sit on attack or something like that.
	I don't know.
	That doesn't work either.
	You know?
	Isn't there a line there?
	Sit on attack that's facing up.
	I don't know.
	Something painful happens.
	Now all of a sudden your mind has been taken over by violence.
	I don't know.
	Sitting on attack is not violence.
	Is it?
	It's just a little pain, you know?
	So I don't really, I don't wish ill on anybody.
	I don't want anyone to ever have to suffer or anything like that.
	But like, I understand to some degree why Manchin could be a target of people who would like him to, you know, run into a door or something.
	I don't know, feel some sort of pain for what he's doing in retaliation for his positions on this bill.
	Yeah, and again, we're not going to spend all this time on Manchin because he is who we thought that he was.
	And he's always been that person.
	And on top of that, he represents a lot of different people.
	I mean, there are a lot of Democrats who undoubtedly don't want to vote for this bill or aren't interested in this.
	And neoliberalism is at the heart of all of it.
	And I want to point out that a lot of these conversations And I want to go to a guy who has an incredible platform, incredible platform, so much sway, so much power.
	Of course, this is a person who has been involved with everything from Obamacare to any sort of, you know, democratic legislation that's out there.
	And this is Ezra Klein, who, of course, is a columnist with The New York Times.
	He's a bestselling author.
	He has one of the biggest podcasts in the world.
	And I want to go through a couple things that Ezra Klein has said in the past couple days, which show, and again, moving away from Manchin, it shows how little some of these people understand exactly what's happening because they are part of the problem.
	Ezra Klein, when Manchin comes out and says he's a no on Build Back Better, I'm going to read this tweet.
	And this is one of the dumb-ass tweets of the year.
	I know, we got to December without one of the dumbest tweets, which is incredible.
	Ezra Klein immediately, and this is after Joe Manchin goes on Fox News, he says, Instead of giving confusing comments on Fox News, Manchin should just publish his plan on Medium.
	Which, by the way, he doesn't have a plan.
	Right?
	Second of all, what a tech dork.
	Publish it on me.
	Come on.
	And he says, it'd be much better to have a conversation that's clear about what he will support than what he won't.
	He's not going to support anything.
	He doesn't have a plan.
	He's in the Senate to say no.
	And you keep having these people talking about this situation as if, oh, this is a bargaining chip, right?
	He's just trying to get the numbers in place.
	He's just trying to do this.
	No, there is a main political ideology of neoliberalism which says, do not give money to people.
	You give money to businesses.
	You make markets free.
	If you give money to people, you're going to mess up the market.
	They're going to steal it.
	They're not worth it.
	It's austerity, austerity, austerity.
	And people like Ezra Klein, a lot of our political pundit class, a lot of our political class, They don't understand that the ideology that they have, and Ezra Klein is a neoliberal.
	He believes in free markets and means testing and all this stuff.
	They don't understand that Joe Manchin is a creature of their own design.
	This is the system that they have created.
	They don't want government to solve problems.
	They want government to facilitate money and wealth and markets for corporations.
	That's how we get to Joe Manchin.
	That's who Joe Manchin is.
	He's not like... It's not like he's a guy who's out there making decisions.
	He's checking his political action committee, you know?
	He's checking his word chest.
	He's getting paid by your Goldman Sachs, by your Lehman Brothers, all of those.
	They can't wrap their heads around the idea that, oh, he's just trying to balance budgets.
	No, this is the entire purpose, and it can't keep working like this.
	Sure.
	I mean, one of the big reasons why we still have fraternities, for instance, and Hell Week, is because the people that are in the brothers in the fraternity now had it happen to them.
	So they're like, well, we now need to have it happen to somebody else, because I did it.
	They need to do it.
	I have to imagine that Mansion is in the same boat as a lot of people thinking that, well, I grew up, but I didn't have anything given to me.
	So I now need to make sure that no one else has it given to me, because look how well it did for me.
	Right?
	Like, sort of us with the ideology.
	And I got to tell you, there are some very serious people that have studied this for a long time that have that kind of take on what government should be.
	And I don't want to necessarily say, like, they're completely illegitimate, but When you look at the results, if we're talking about, I mean, there's always process-based, there's always results-based looking at things, but when we're talking about, like, children starving, or people starving, or people having to live on the streets because of this, and what good it can do, aside from the fact that there's probably going to be waste all over the place, I get it, that is what becomes inhuman.
	For a country as wealthy as us to allow this under this notion of well because I had to go through it it was really tough on me as a white person in this society who already has ten legs up on everybody else then everybody else who isn't white should have to deal with that.
	And white people too.
	That just doesn't make sense to me at all.
	It's the same thing with student loans and why people want to rail against getting rid of those.
	It's like let's take a generation and eliminate that for at least give somebody some benefit from that, some help going forward.
	It's really – it's probably another reason why we can't get anywhere because it's – I can't get there.
	I can't understand that ideology.
	I could never get to a place where we would meet in the middle on these things, right?
	That's what makes me feel frustrated.
	And it's not a right and left.
	Look at all these progressive or democratic run cities that have homeless problem issues, and they won't solve the problem either.
	This isn't necessarily a political party issue at this point.
	There is something fundamentally broken.
	Yes, you just nailed it to the wall, which isn't the way that all this is covered.
	They cover it as Democrat versus Republican, Red versus Blue.
	And again, just to keep everybody on the same space here, the Republican Party is an anti-democratic authoritarian white supremacist movement.
	That's who they are.
	We're not equating the two parties.
	But there is an economic Political consensus.
	There is the idea that the market has to be obeyed.
	The difference here, in terms of stuff like this, is that the Republicans are just like, survival of the fittest.
	Oh, you're poor.
	You're a sinner.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, you have done something wrong.
	The Democratic Party, or people that people like Joe Manchin represent, and other neoliberals within the Democratic Party, because neoliberalism goes across both spectrums.
	It is the economic consensus in this country.
	They, instead of saying survival of the fittest, you are a sinner, you didn't do something right, Democrats of the neoliberal variety like Joe Manchin, they want to look at the homeless.
	They want to look at the people who are suffering.
	They want to look at poverty.
	And they want to say, oh man, that's awful.
	I, I wish there was something that I could do, but there's a market and You can't just start doing a bunch of things.
	What about deficits?
	What about inflation?
	What about all of that?
	And they say, you know, my hands are tied.
	I just, I wish so bad.
	And you know, maybe the wealthy will donate some money.
	And by the way, that's all about tax write-offs and actually creating a government without voting, right?
	Without democratic consequences.
	It's basically doing things without people getting elected and saying, let's give money to these people.
	Let's give money to those causes.
	So what do they do?
	They say, ah, our hands are tied, which is another reason why the federal government is losing power.
	They are giving it to the states because it's by design.
	Neoliberalism is about standing there and creating a gridlocked government.
	And there's a reason Mitch McConnell is inviting Joe Manchin to the Republican Party.
	They have the same function.
	They are paid by the same people.
	They are encouraged and supported by the same people to say, no, the government shouldn't do these things.
	Right.
	And the response, I can see your hand wringing in case you're not watching this on YouTube today, you know from like liberal wealthy people in these big cities it's like they just kind of don't want to see it.
	You know it's almost like just put it somewhere we don't see it and then as a result you get like Skid Row.
	Skid Row is a real place.
	This isn't like a made-up thing in Little Shop of Horrors.
	This is a real place downtown LA It's it's it's blocks and blocks and blocks of tents and people living on the streets But it's not just there and then it's all way all across LA It's all across San Francisco all these places that are run by Democrats And and I think that yeah, there is a sense of like these are weird These are fellow humans and we I wish something would be done but like nobody knows who their local People, the people locally who run the city are.
	No one knows who's in charge of these things.
	No one, it almost becomes a thing where it's like I just don't know what to do so I can't do anything about it and that's about it.
	When if we finally did have a movement about with this where, you know, we could demand some accountability, you know, I shared with you a thread earlier on Twitter about someone who has been studying this and has really interesting information.
	It's only like, I think she said like 8,000 homeless people in San Francisco.
	How hard is it to solve that problem for 8,000 people?
	Now, I gotta tell you, in L.A., it's gotta be higher than that.
	But let's just say it's 20,000, 30,000.
	How hard would it be to solve that problem or at least make half of those people, you know, have the shelters to live in and be on a path to, like, getting out of their situation where they can then... But here's the biggest problem is, what is that path out of their situation?
	Are we just going to try and shove them back into the meat grinder of like, you know, you're going to get you're going to go to get this job and you're going to, you know, borrow this amount of money and then live your entire life paying it back until you die?
	Like, I don't know what that solution is either, because some of this problem are people who probably rejected capitalism in the first place.
	So a lot of what we're talking about here.
	Is the legacy of this right?
	Because what happens with neoliberalism, particularly when it's being birthed, and we're talking about Ronald Reagan here, by the way, I know everyone is shocked.
	But Ronald Reagan is brought in by all of these economic ideologues.
	They basically believe, and there's like this guy named Friedrich Hayek, who believes the government shouldn't invest money in anything because to invest money in something means that it's endorsing an idea or a people over other people and it leads to tyranny.
	So the idea is with Reagan that he's going to come in and he's going to take away all social programs.
	Right.
	So all of a sudden you're going to close down places that treat mentally ill people.
	You're going to take away shelters.
	You're going to take away programs that help these human beings.
	So what ends up happening right in this new system?
	You have a bunch of people who are obviously living in the street who are suffering.
	And it's kind of useful because on one hand, it keeps everybody looking at them saying, oh, my God, if I don't go to work, if I don't follow the line, if I don't do the right thing, I'm going to end up where those people are.
	But eventually it reaches a point where now the same people who believe that economic and philosophy, economic philosophy, political philosophy, those same people are like, oh, my God, have you been on the street?
	Somebody needs to do something.
	And when they say somebody needs to do something, they mean law enforcement needs to move them away from me, right?
	And then they can use it to push reactionary conservative movements and policing and all of that.
	What we're talking about right now is a failing system.
	It doesn't work.
	It has consequences when you take out all that government funding and push it towards militarism and bases and resource extraction and all of that.
	They're kicking the can down the road as things get worse.
	And as things get worse, they're like, well, I mean, my God, we can't fix any of this shit.
	We should just hire more police.
	And eventually what's going to happen is they're going to keep pushing more and more crime legislation, which you'll notice Nobody questions deficit spending when it comes to law enforcement, right?
	Like you just run up the deficit, go crazy, get more cops on the street, give them militaristic weapons and make them basically soldiers of fortune.
	But eventually what happens is it moves into another realm where you're not going to help people, you're going to give money to those enforcement As opposed to giving them housing, giving them mental health treatment, giving them jobs, any of that stuff.
	We could solve it.
	We could solve any of those things if we simply reverse course.
	But people like Joe Manchin, Mitch McConnell, on both sides of the aisle, by the way, it's not all of them, but there are a lot of these neoliberal ideologues who are pushing this idea and things are getting worse.
	And their ideology is failing.
	Period.
	Right.
	It's not even like, reverse course, you'd have to fundamentally change the thinking process of a huge swath of people, mostly in politics.
	I'm not even sure, I would imagine if you polled the country, similarly how we would poll the country for a lot of things, where like everybody, like even abortion for instance.
	Abortion is supported by 70% of the country.
	I would guarantee you that 70% of the country would say let's spend whatever money we have to spend to eliminate homelessness and to eliminate child poverty.
	Like I'm sure people we get more than 70% of that.
	Here's an interesting take I got and I've been watching some interesting stuff this last week about documentaries and whatnot.
	Here's my take, because you're describing the notion of, I'm picturing like, you know, conservative, middle America, silent majority people saying, get these people out of my face.
	I don't want to have them see there.
	Part of me feels like it's the same reaction they had to hippies in the counterculture.
	And the counterculture certainly spawned a lot of homelessness as well, right?
	People would leave home.
	They, you know, they get stuck in like the hate-ass very district of San Francisco.
	I have a feeling you might be able to trace a lot of the homelessness issue to, you know, that era when people were flocking there with no money or anything.
	And so I kind of feel like there's this notion of, and As Reagan comes along and as a direct response to the counterculture and to what the 60s represented, which was a moment where we thought maybe we did have some hope that the things we're talking about would have been enacted across the government as well and people would be treated with more humanely.
	Well, we trace the counterculture and that thing to Reagan ends that, right?
	And the 80s become this new era.
	Disco, again disco is everywhere, means everything to me.
	The death of disco I think is all is the end of the counterculture.
	I think if we're looking for the end of the 60s, it's not 1970, it's not Carter, it's I think it's 1979 where we that was the run from 66 or so to 79 and so I don't think it's it's a coincidence
	That Reagan takes power at the same time like that disco dies because those two things kind of are connected in my mind and bring us directly to where we are now in this weird way where we have people who are the ideology is now sunk in after 30, 40 years of we cannot help people if they're not going to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps as well.
	And that's it's intractable.
	I don't know how we get back to that.
	Yeah, so the idea for a long time, it was based on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes.
	And John Maynard Keynes, basically his ideology came about during the New Deal when it was the idea that, no, in order for the economy to work, the government needs to invest money in people, you know, and like in these projects and keep things circulating.
	But afterwards, people are like, well, I don't want to give money to people.
	Let's give money to the military instead.
	So what actually happens is there's a shift in resources away from human projects into militaristic projects.
	Right.
	And then in the 1970s, that sort of starts to fall apart as we start to have, of course, what some people will call stagflation.
	And all of a sudden they say, you know what, this doesn't work anymore.
	And neoliberalism is there to pick up the pieces.
	And neoliberals, the original founders of this idea, they were really freaked out about the idea of mass movements.
	They were really freaked out about democracy.
	They didn't want you and me to run things because I'm not an economist, you're not an economist, and this is the problem.
	And we're going to talk about Donald Trump here in a second, but think about the deep state that they always talk about, right?
	The deep state is the idea that politics is run by an unelected group of people.
	It doesn't matter what party wins an election, right?
	That's not wrong.
	That is basically how politics have worked because it's been moved towards technocrats.
	Technocrats like Ezra Klein, by the way.
	People who, like, know these things, right?
	We can't be trusted to make decisions.
	And in fact, it's bad for economies.
	It's bad for countries if it's shifting every four to eight years, right?
	So they wanted to get our voices out, which they have effectively done.
	And what happens, by the way, and we'll get to this in just a second, instead of voting to make changes, You use the dollar to make changes, right?
	All of a sudden now, it's about what you buy, what brands you buy for, what causes you support with your money.
	Reagan made that go through.
	Him and Margaret Thatcher over in Britain are the faces of this neoliberal idea.
	Do not be fooled by the fact that it's got liberal in its title.
	It goes back to the founding of liberalism, which we don't need to get into and trace right now.
	But the entire point is where we've reached now, which is, by design, the United States Senate is not passing things to help People, right?
	It's technically just a place that gives tax cuts and occasionally rolls back regulation.
	It's not doing it for us by design.
	What we're talking about here is not just Joe Manchin waking up and saying, I think I'm gonna win that bill.
	It is a project.
	And we are living in the consequences of that.
	And unless we realize that, and unless we move forward and fight back against it, That's it.
	Goddamn.
	You know, if it took my rambling, incoherent screed about disco and whatever to open up that from you, then it was all worth it.
	I think you're exactly right, because it is about that cultural change.
	It's about a giant shift in the epochs, for sure.
	And that is right around the time where that's happening.
	I think the problem is that when you start looking at things like solving governmental problems mathematically, you get into some real problems.
	It's kind of like what we're seeing in sports.
	It's anti-human!
	It's literally anti-human.
	You're exactly right.
	They boil down sports to analytics.
	And they forgot about the fact that humans actually have to interact in these team sports.
	And if you don't pay attention to that as well, in conjunction with the analytics, you're going to suffer.
	And that's always been the problem where they separate these two things and they're never able to sort of holistically come together.
	You know, I do want to touch upon the notion of, you know, you mentioned like, you know, defense spending.
	And for a long time, people were all in on that.
	And it felt reassured.
	And so I have some rhetorical questions in this notion, in the sense that, like, in the 50s, 60s, why did most people in America feel reassured by defense spending, right?
	Well, because they were scared.
	They were scared of the Russians, or of the Soviet Union.
	Well, why were we scared of the Soviet Union?
	Because the politicians were making shit up about why we should be scared about that.
	So we would accept that spending and turn in the deficits we did.
	Nick, I was doing research on this for the book and it's like during the Cold War, right?
	The powers that be, the experts, they would be looking at the facts and the figures in the intelligence and the facts and the figures in the intelligence were like, hey, by the way, the Soviet Union, like I understand that they're quote unquote dangerous, but also they're kind of a shambling mess.
	Do you know what I mean?
	Like it wasn't working.
	It was a big, giant mess of a project.
	And they said, well, the numbers and the intelligence can't be right because we feel like they're a problem.
	You know what I mean?
	So they just – you're exactly right.
	Like the way that they dealt with it was to create paranoia and to move reality around to what they needed in order to get the money and the spending, which is exactly where they're When they're thinking about, oh, should I pass this bill that helps people?
	You're like, no, there's that woman in Chicago.
	No, they're going to use it for drugs.
	So it goes ahead and it takes the statistics, it takes rationality, it takes all the humanness out of it and leaves you with this just absolute cruel, bloodless type of politics.
	The lengths the military and the CIA and FBI went toward creating a war, but it couldn't be with the Soviet Union directly, because they did sense that that would be annihilation of the world, but the amount of things they did to try and force proxy wars in Vietnam or in Cuba, Endless!
	So, by the way, and that almost, you know, would dispel any JFK conspiracies, because in theory, they could have blamed it on the Russians, and that obviously would have started the war, and that would be what they wanted.
	They wanted war so badly.
	Dr. Strangelove is not a science fiction movie.
	This is, it's based in reality, what they were trying to do.
	But the bottom line is, it's like, yeah, these things are long-standing effects.
	And again, we go back to, like, why we need to learn about the origin of our country, because The inherent effects it has on the way people think about what the government should be in this country.
	These influences last decades upon decades upon hundreds of years.
	Generations.
	Yeah, and it's exactly why we're here now with Trump.
	It's because of all those things and you know what and the people who might want to say don't worry we'll have an election and we'll change everything around and it'll all be great again.
	Like we have ebbs and flows of that.
	But you can see the nefarious parts when we get into those moments.
	Those last forever.
	Like those, they are deep rooted influences on people that require like basically death before we can get away from that ideology from that group of people.
	And even if that gets us away, because it's passed down generation to generation.
	I mean, you know, one of the weird things that's happening here, and there's a strange thing, because we, we, those of you who listen to the show all the time, you know, that a lot of what we're tracking is the radicalization of the American right and the growing authoritarian problem, and that a lot of what we're tracking is the radicalization of the American right and the growing authoritarian problem, and all of its weird psychological implications, like And
	And there's this very strange thing that has happened over the past couple of weeks as the holidays have been going on.
	Donald Trump, by the way, who is, again, a complete and utter buffoon, and he's a symptom, he's not the disease, has been going around, he's been doing interviews, he's been on a speaking tour with Bill O'Reilly.
	And by the way, what a hot ticket that must be.
	You know what I mean?
	Going and watching those two.
	And Trump was on stage with O'Reilly, and then later on, he did an interview with Candace Owens, who, I mean, just an intellectual heavyweight, Candace Owens is.
	I mean, just incredible.
	And in both of them, Trump got in front of crowds, and then Candace Owens, and said, you know, don't be afraid of vaccines.
	I created the vaccines, right?
	They're not killing you.
	It's the COVID that's dangerous.
	And I actually saved a bunch of lives by, you know, Operation Warp Speed.
	And by the way, that is true.
	That that that that that thing and whoever would have been president, by the way, would have done it.
	It wasn't like Donald Trump was in a lab cooking things up with a beaker.
	But meanwhile, he gets booed at this one thing.
	There's a major, major outrage after the Candace Owens interview.
	And by the way, the way they were trying to clean it up.
	I love this clip of Alex Jones, of course, who was like, you're either ignorant or you're evil.
	You are either completely ignorant about the so-called vaccine gene therapy that you helped ram through with Operation Warp Speed.
	Or you're one of the most evil men who has ever lived to push this toxic poison on the public and to attack your constituents when they simply try to save their lives and the lives of others.
	We're about to lay out the basic incontrovertible facts That what you told Candace Owens just a few days ago is nothing but a raft of dirty lies.
	And he believes that because he comes from a generation, like people you oftentimes forget like how old Trump is.
	He comes from a generation, I've seen other people that are older have the exact same perspective, like they came from a time before TV, before internet, before being able to conduct their independent research, you know, and everything that they read in a newspaper, that was pitched to them, that they believed that that was a reality.
	And one of those things was, you know, this push for vaccines and believing that people were gonna die without vaccines.
	And so I believe that his support of the vaccine is genuine and it's not based in any corruption at all.
	I believe also that he only reads the mainstream media news, believe it or not.
	I do not believe that Trump reads Or partakes in any other news sources You know, I don't believe that Trump is on the internet or you know that he's necessarily uses like, you know The web to try to find you know obscure websites.
	I think that he just relies on you know typical mainstream sources so Then we, of course, have Candace Owens, who's out saying, oh, don't worry, Donald Trump's just old.
	He reads everything he believes in the newspaper, which, if you believe that, why do you want him to be president?
	A guy who can't, like, understand facts, figures, and research for himself, and he's being misled by newspapers.
	That's neither here nor there.
	Of course, and Bill O'Reilly had to come out and say, well, Donald Trump called me after the thing, and I really had to console him.
	His feelings were hurt.
	There is an odd thing that is happening with the Republican movement, and this goes to bring the prior point forward with neoliberalism.
	We're taught, and we've talked about this before, that we're competitors, right?
	We can't trust each other.
	You're my economic competitor.
	I'm your economic competitor.
	One of us has to win in this zero-sum game, which, by the way, the Cold War helped create, right?
	In this case, I actually think that Trump voters and Republican voters have to do some weighing of cognitive dissonance in terms of power.
	So for instance, in the beginning, COVID was a hoax, right?
	It wasn't real.
	Oh, it's just in everybody's mind.
	It's not real.
	That was because Trump was saying the numbers have to stay low in order to win reelection.
	Right.
	Then all of a sudden Biden wins and all of a sudden the numbers are going crazy.
	It's like, no, it's really dangerous and he's doing a terrible job handling it.
	But the vaccines are dangerous.
	Right.
	So don't take those because I truly think and I'd love to hear what you have to think about this.
	Unconsciously, I think they want covid to be terrible.
	And they're not they're willing to get sick in order to make the numbers go up to hurt Joe Biden politically.
	I think it is a cynical type of win or lose A zero-sum political game that the Trump people understand, I think, intuitively and instinctually in a way that some of us don't.
	Does that sound right to you?
	Well, it also sounds like what Trump was accusing people before the election of doing, too, like people are getting sick because they want to, you know, I think he accused the Democrats of that, to get the numbers up and make him look bad.
	I would, I would hesitate to say that like there are Republicans out there or right-wingers who would simply say, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm like, I believe that they just don't want to be inconvenienced anymore.
	And I believe that they think that, you know, people die.
	And I also believe that there are people out there who still think it's not that serious.
	Right.
	We're still seeing anecdotally those, those stories from, from nurses where they're, you know, everybody in the hospital now is, are unvaccinated.
	I think it's 99.9% of people are unvaccinated who have to go to the hospital.
	And they're still saying, well, they still don't want the vaccine or whatever.
	They wouldn't do it.
	But the question I have, I wrote down my notes before we recorded, was, would there have been such a big anti-vax push without Trump?
	Let's say Trump was not part of this equation.
	I kind of think that there would have been anyway.
	Now, I think he's weaponized it.
	I think he's exponentially increased this notion.
	And I think the internet itself is really the biggest problem here because you didn't used to have these crazies across the country being able to connect with each other.
	And once they connect...
	VHS tapes to each other.
	Yeah, right, right.
	They're saying letters, right?
	Like, you know, with a banjo playing in the background.
	Like, that's what it used to be like.
	But now that you can find, like, a few of these people across the country that you can connect with a lot easier, you know, that starts to bleed over and affect, like, the people next to them a little bit more.
	And that's what's created this movement.
	Because we've always had these people in our country, right, who would rebel against vaccinations.
	Um, so that's really what I'm more fascinated with is like, was it really Trump who ultimately created the situation we're in now versus it would have already happened anyway?
	You know, the more that I think about Donald Trump, the more I think I realized that he is, he is the embodiment of all of it.
	Like not, you know, not that he's a maestro, but it's just like he is maybe the most definitive Human being who has this mindset, you know what I mean?
	Like he's he's hooked up right up to the IV of GOP right wing insanity, right?
	And so I think with him as president, there was no way possible that we weren't going to have that fracturing of reality.
	I think that reality was already fracturing.
	I think that this Like, when there are pandemics, I mean, the 1917 influenza, of course, had its fair share of crackpots and conspiracy theories, but this was going to be turbocharged, and I think in part because of that zero-sum politics.
	You know, what was that quote he said at first?
	He's like, I want my numbers to stay low, right?
	The numbers, I want them to stay low.
	Right, in the mind, It has become very much that American life is about living your life, right?
	Living the life that makes you feel good, living the life that conforms or makes you feel bad.
	A lot of people really like being pissed off in this country.
	They just dig it, you know, and they like just having somewhere to throw their anger.
	I think in terms of the vaccine, and this is what I'd be interested to hear from you, Do you think if Trump would have won re-election, do you think with the vaccines coming out post-election, do you think that his supporters would have gone along with getting vaccines?
	Or do you think there still would have been such an anti-vaccine thing?
	Because Fox News, the right-wing ecosystem, the internet sites, all of that, they had an economic incentive To give people a different reality than CNN, MSNBC, New York Times and all of them.
	Do you think there would have been more vaccines or do you think it would have played out largely the same way?
	Well, one thing that comes to mind is that Trump had gotten the vaccine but didn't tell anybody.
	It was in secret.
	That's a good point.
	While he was in office, I believe.
	That's what happened, right?
	I believe is how that works.
	So that's one thing that's interesting.
	He was already, before even the election happened, kind of re-recognizing what the movement was like about vaccines coming out, I think.
	So, the question is, if he wins re-election, the cynical version of me says, no, of course Fox News would be pushing vaccines.
	You know, anything to make Trump look good.
	They've gone back and forth.
	Kind of, but it's... Not before, but yeah.
	You're right, I think they probably would have gone more with that.
	Yeah, so I think that, yeah, so here's what's really interesting is, you're almost saying, if Trump would have been re-elected, we wouldn't have had Omicron.
	Oh, no, I think I think we would have had Omicron because again, going back to neoliberalism, you had to you had to have profits of the vaccines.
	Right.
	So you can't just get that around the world.
	So at this point, I think the pandemic is more or less Really bringing to a boil the problems of neoliberalism.
	We can't give money to people.
	We can't help people.
	We can't do anything politically.
	We can't be one people ever, any way, chance, or form.
	We have to do everything for profit.
	And this thing exposed every problem with it, I think.
	But just to be clear, in my mind, if Trump won, you would have seen Fox do reports about how important the vaccine is and everyone should be getting it.
	I do feel like that's probably what they would have done only because it's it's clear that that's what they're doing now and the opposite version of that because they know how important it is they all they're all vaccinated but they continue to erode confidence in the vaccine in a very overt way but but as a result it's only because you know it's interesting because it's like they're doing what they know their viewers want to hear.
	Yes.
	So it's a reactionary thing.
	So in reality, though, but then, you know, there are moments, I'm sure, where they will get out in front and try and influence the discussion as well and create their own reality.
	So either way, Trump would have called them and said, listen, this is my vaccine.
	I want to make sure people understand that.
	You've got to push it.
	And they would.
	And so that's what would have happened, I'm sure.
	And it's disgusting and it's horrible.
	And we're going to have hundreds of thousands of people dying because of it.
	And to underscore all of this, their reality can change.
	On a dime.
	It is not consistent.
	It is the most cynical, changeable, malleable possibility that there is.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, it literally from one moment to the next, it can move.
	Some of them believe what they're saying.
	Others are just bullshitting constantly and grifting.
	Some are in between and moving back and forth.
	But you're exactly right.
	They are selling the people what they want.
	I think that's one thing that I think we get lost.
	I was thinking about that this morning, is a lot of people think about this as brainwashing, but you wanna go back to the Cold War, one of the discoveries is, there's no such thing as brainwashing.
	You can't get people necessarily to believe what they don't want to believe or what they don't already believe a little bit.
	You can steer them into it.
	You know what I mean?
	Like you can go ahead and turn the knob a little bit.
	You can prey on their absolute worst instincts, their paranoias, their racism, their sexism, their classism.
	You can do all of that.
	And it's what Fox and Trump and all of these movements and enterprises do is they know that there is an economic incentive for it.
	There's a market, right?
	There is a demographic market out there that is waiting for someone to sell them the reality that they want.
	And that's what they do.
	They just sell it to them constantly, and they basically sell their own anger and their own prejudices back to them.
	Well, to touch upon the malleability of their ideology, look at the evidence of Trump being booed at his own rally.
	Think about who goes to these rallies.
	These are the people who love Trump and would never, you know, say anything ill of him, and yet they're willing to boo.
	So what that also tells me is that, you know, Trump is only two sentences away from becoming, you know, a pariah.
	He could easily say something else like that, that would go against their ideology, and then they might even disown the guy.
	Don't you think that, okay, and because there's a couple things to follow here, don't you think when they're booing him, they're not booing him because he's endorsing vaccines, although that is like, The message.
	Right.
	They're booing him because they think that he's saying something that the Democrats want.
	Right.
	That it's something that the enemy wants.
	Like, I don't think that like they'll say that they believe that it has like the mark of the beast or microchips or, you know, whatever bullshit is being said today.
	But I think, deep down, it's like, how could you say that you're going to help the other team, right?
	Like, and I think that they feel, and I think that they sort of have that brain worm where they're like, you know what, I love Trump, but he's getting a little older, and maybe he's lost his fastball, which I actually, and this will be something I'll be interested to hear from you, I think it does open up the possibility of a challenger.
	It does open up the possibility that it depends on the instincts of these people.
	The Republican right wing extremist market, they love Ron DeSantis.
	That is the one that they are pushing, pushing, pushing because he has a lot of Trump's characteristics to him.
	He's craven.
	He's an opportunist.
	But I think it opens up the possibility.
	I almost feel like not necessarily a pariah.
	It could be like when you're watching your favorite pitcher or basketball player and their skills have eroded.
	You know what I mean?
	And you want to remember them in their prime.
	It almost feels like there is an opportunity in all of this for some sort of a challenger to rise up against Trump.
	I want to parse those words.
	I got to go really carefully with what Trump said, but in my mind's eye, he didn't tell anybody, take the vaccine.
	He said the vaccines are good.
	Yes.
	And you know, but I think he even said he parsed him saying, you know, people that can do whatever they want, because again, he's still trying to ride that, that line.
	But even he won't say, Hey, you guys should all get the vaccine.
	It'll save your life.
	You know, you'll be out of the hospital and you might, you know, and like, cause remember the biggest disconnect here is that People will think, "I got the vaccine, but I still got the virus.
	I'm not sick.
	I'm not going to the hospital." But it doesn't matter to them.
	If you get it, it means that the vaccine didn't work, which is not how vaccines work.
	This one only keeps you out of the hospital.
	But Nick, true Donald Trump fashion, the way that he talked about it was he had saved every life on the face of the earth because he's in his own mind.
	He's a messiah of his own making, right?
	He saved the world because he did Operation Warp Speed.
	So I think you're right.
	He tried to have it both ways.
	And if there's anything Donald Trump hates, it's getting booed.
	He's so fragile.
	And this might, I think there's a real possibility that he might back away from this thing.
	But I think the vaccine and his part in having the vaccine created, I think this is one of the, I think it might be partly a weakness of his.
	By the way, if DeSantis runs, that could end up being the opening that would help the Democrats win the election for presidency again.
	Because they'll kill each other in the primaries and then damage the brand, which, you know, wouldn't normally happen.
	In a normal situation, Trump would run again and no one would oppose him.
	But if DeSantis does that, you know, by the way, it'll be really fascinating because they'll go on now or not war against DeSantis.
	Trump will.
	And that'll just be kind of fascinating to watch.
	But again, it'll just destroy our political system and our norms and what we should have.
	But it'll also be, it'll be fun to watch what they'll do to each other.
	Oh, it would be brutal and it would it would lower the discourse to just unseen levels.
	But, you know, that's that's the damnedest thing here is everything is so volatile because this movement is so messed up.
	It's such an unwell situation and we want to talk before we wrap this up and a reminder We'll be back on Thursday with our weekender episode you can get that over at patreon.com slash mccrae podcast As this is going to be our last main show before the end of the year We want to take a quick second to look back and I was asking Nick before we tape this to sort of put together some thoughts What do you think?
	How will 2021 be remembered as a year in politics and culture?
	I have my thoughts on what the narrative of 2021 is, but what do you think we'll look back on 2021 as?
	What's the story for you?
	I mean, it kind of almost feels like a bit of a ground zero for, like, the most worst version of our timeline going forward, like, 10 years later, where this was the moment.
	Because, you know, by every metric you want to rate, like Joe Biden, for instance, it was very successful.
	He did a lot of great things this year, right?
	There's a lot of things they could point to that were good, like, you know, that most presidents would love to have had in their first year in office.
	Yet the discourse and the approval ratings and even just the – a lot of times when somebody's going relatively well for a president from one party, the other party is kind of quiet.
	They'll start criticizing like the way they're dressed or whatever.
	Or they look for scandals.
	Yeah, right.
	Like, you know, that kind of thing.
	But this is different.
	This was like, they've tried to portray this as the most nightmarish version of our country ever.
	But if you use the same metrics they always used for their candidates, it's like, no, this was a fine year.
	This was good.
	We got some good things done.
	So I worry that that's where, this is the moment.
	This is the incubation period here.
	And by the way, it all revolves, In a nice encapsulation by this guy, Jared Schmenk, whatever his name is, who goes on, who calls into, I think they called into NASA to talk to Santa, like as they do.
	NORAD.
	I think it was NORAD.
	They call NORAD, sorry.
	Every year they call to talk to Santa.
	It's usually a robocall or whatever response.
	It's never, you know.
	But meanwhile, they fucking get Joe Biden and Jill Biden to answer the phone.
	They literally are alive with them.
	They have this wonderful conversation talking about Christmas and kids and names and all sorts of things.
	And this fucking guy tells him, let's go, Brandon, at the end.
	And I think it's a wonderful encapsulation of where we're at, where a guy like that would be willing to say that to someone like Biden to his face.
	First of all, stupid.
	Just stupid.
	He was just joking, Jared.
	It was a joke.
	And by the way, while we're on the subject, we haven't talked about Let's Go, Brandon on this show.
	It doesn't sound anything like Fuck Joe Biden.
	The only reason that this happened in the first place is because people were chanting that at a NASCAR race and like a reporter said that they thought it was Let's Go Brandon.
	It sounds nothing like it.
	And meanwhile, to further how childish and stupid the Republican Party is at this point, how vapid they are.
	They have done this thing.
	And I don't, personally, I don't know how you feel about it.
	I don't care if you say fuck whoever the president is.
	That's your right as a human being.
	Like, criticize the president all day long.
	It's stupid, is what it is.
	It's dumb.
	No, it's stupid in that context.
	Yeah, you could go on Twitter in all caps and say fuck Joe Biden all you like.
	That's, I think, what your point is.
	But if you're going to have a conversation directly with the guy, and you're talking about Christmas.
	This is not policy conversation.
	You're not in the middle of a congressional hearing.
	Which would be even worse.
	But like that's really where it was.
	And this guy, he says he's a Christian.
	He says he has really high morals.
	He's got his kids right there.
	And by the way, I love Biden's response.
	And now they've tried to turn this into, oh, Biden is so, you know, addled and whatever.
	He doesn't know what he's talking about.
	He doesn't even know what that means.
	Of course he knows what it means.
	Jill Biden gasps next to him.
	She knows what it says.
	I'd love that he goes, I agree.
	Let's go, Brandon.
	Like, how better to take away the power?
	Yeah, fuck me.
	Fuck me.
	If you want to say that, fine.
	Then that's okay.
	Whatever.
	Because by the way, the opposite of that would have been horrible.
	Is Biden really going to be like, hey, dude.
	Really?
	You really want to go there?
	Wait, I would have been cheering that on too if he would have wanted to go that way and be like, come on, what's this malarkey?
	Why would you say that?
	He could have done that and scolded the guy or whatever, but nonetheless, I love that response.
	Yeah, I agree.
	Let's go Brandon and let's move on.
	But here's the thing, Rittenhouse has been now this hero for what he did.
	Guess who appeared on Bannon's show today, and I'm guaranteed he'll probably be on Tucker tonight, is this guy.
	And he gets to now say all the things he wanted to say because it's a perfect wrap-up of the year from their side.
	Can I give you the quote because I wrote it all down?
	You know, Kimmerer would be happy that I did some, you know, transcriptions here.
	But basically he goes, let's go Brandon encompasses the entirety of our frustration with Joe Biden, the administration, the leftist mob, the cancel culture, the mainstream media.
	They are the ones who made this a thing.
	We're able as conservatives to find humor in this.
	But we've got the debacle in Afghanistan.
	They're not even talking about that anymore.
	It's crazy to me how quickly they've forgotten about that story.
	There's still people trapped over there.
	We've got the supply chain issues.
	We've got the inflation rates.
	We've got the terrible policies on abortion.
	I'm a very pro-life person.
	The border crisis.
	Federal mandates regarding vaccines.
	So in one shot on the Bannon Show, he gets to lay out the entire, you know, platform of the Republican Party as if to justify why he wants to say, fuck you, Joe Biden, when in reality, that's that's not the reality, right?
	That's that they've been able to invent all of these these crises and all this anger toward this.
	And that's what 2021 represents to me.
	And they're trolls.
	I mean, that's what this is.
	It's a troll.
	Let's order this.
	At any and all costs, no principles, nihilistic, just a complete troll job.
	That's all this guy is.
	That's all he was doing.
	And he got a platform.
	And, I mean, my God, he probably, you're right, he'll probably be on Tucker here pretty soon.
	He'll become, he'll probably speak at a Turning Points event.
	I mean, he's not going to get the heroes welcome that Kyle Rittenhouse got because he killed human beings.
	But I'm sure they'll find a slot for him, you know, right before they go out and they eat and they have a great time and a black slap and make some money.
	But here's the thing, Kyle Rittenhouse is not a hero because he killed people.
	It's because he got away with it.
	That's right.
	That's what they celebrate, is that that verdict came out in his favor.
	I think.
	I mean, that's my take on it.
	I completely agree.
	And, you know, it makes it much more likely this stuff is going to happen, which I will say that my take on what 2021 represents for me, it goes along with that.
	This is, when you're talking about a movie, you're talking about a ramp up towards, like, big, major moments.
	2021 is a ramp up moment.
	What we watched here was radicalization take on an entirely new tone and tenor.
	Unfortunately, and this is something that you and I were screaming from the rooftops about, people thought things were going to be fine once Trump left office.
	They thought that once the election was done that everything was good, everything would go back to normal.
	Those of us who pay attention knew better.
	And we knew better because Trump is a symptom of something larger.
	And for all the people who thought that things were just going to go back to normal in January, particularly on January 6th, got a rude awakening very, very quickly about what was building.
	And we keep saying that that was important of something that is coming.
	That was not the end of the story.
	That was the end of a chapter.
	And January 6th showed that there is will for violence.
	There is will for anti-democratic actions and that this is building as the Republican Party.
	I mean, my God, what an embarrassing, disgraceful year.
	Like the bullshit with Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss, in which you want to talk about an ideology that doesn't make sense.
	The Dr. Seuss Foundation took some books out of rotation, and so they blamed Democratic hordes, and then gave money to the group that took the books off the shelves.
	And then, of course, you have all these conspiracy theories, The pandemic has made it clear that we have no ability to handle problems.
	We have no ability to even begin agreeing on anything approaching objective reality because there's an economic and political incentive not to.
	So what we saw in 2021 was that things are not back to normal.
	In fact, they're getting worse.
	They're getting much, much worse.
	The Kyle Rittenhouse situation, I think, should serve as a wake up call for a lot of people, the people who still think that things are going to get better and suddenly fix themselves.
	In terms of Build Back Better and what we've now dealt with in this conversation we had today with neoliberalism, the good news is it's very clear what we need to do.
	And what we need to do is we need to break out of the Reagan, Thatcher, neoliberal model and start reinvesting in people and building a movement to get wealth and the entrenched power out of politics.
	That's the only answer.
	That's the only thing at this point that can fix this.
	The question, and this is a very modern American question, is will we realize the very obvious problem with the very obvious solution in time to fix the very obvious problem with the very obvious solution?
	And that's what 2021 is for me.
	Now, a tweet that went around, a thread that went around, you know, the other day on Twitter by Shadi Hamid, who's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, was really troubling to me because he basically places the entire blame of COVID on liberals and on the elites, the intellectual elite.
	Here's one of the tweets which said, it's an intriguing question as to why progressives insist on undermining their causes by alienating people who might otherwise be sympathetic.
	There's a smugness that's extremely off-putting.
	Even if progressives were right about everything, it would still be hard to support them.
	And I suppose he's – I don't know if he's talking in the passive voice or like this is what he believes too.
	But like that is what the right has also done is in some weird way by acknowledging science or trying to encourage people to be safer or go above and beyond what they could – what they would normally do to be a little bit safer, just to be on the safe side.
	That is smugness.
	That is intellectual, you know, oppression to them.
	But that's how this whole thing has occurred.
	And you want to talk about another thing that 2021 made apparent.
	It's something that I've unfortunately had to look at and experience.
	There is a problem in higher education, in the university system, all of it.
	In terms of like charging people exorbitant fees, making them run up student loans, which by the way keeps a lot of people from going to college.
	It keeps a lot of people from climbing up into the middle class or the professional managerial class.
	Well guess what that does?
	That pisses people off.
	People where I come from.
	Right?
	People from poor families in middle America whose kids can't afford to go to college.
	Well, what's that make them do?
	It makes them resent experts.
	It makes them resent academics.
	It makes them resent these people.
	And yes, there's a cultural divide, but the Republican Party figured it out.
	They are now the party of the wealthy and the party of the poor.
	They now Just completely straddle both of those places because Democrats, in a lot of ways, and this is something the Democratic Party has to figure out, they have no idea how to talk to those people anymore because they're like, ah, the markets won't let me do it.
	I wish I could do something, but I can't.
	And I can't explain to you why, right?
	I can't explain to you about deficits and inflation and means testing.
	In fact, all of their solutions involve forms and programs that those people don't know how to use.
	They don't even know how to access it.
	The people that I'm talking about, my family, the people I love, they don't know how to get all of those things.
	They haven't been taught, right?
	So they now have created themselves as this completely malleable bullshit party that doesn't stand for anything except for power and profit, but they have managed to create this bizarre coalition that oppresses everybody except for the white, wealthy political class.
	That's it.
	And the corporate class.
	That's it.
	But otherwise, they now straddle basically all parts of society.
	All right, everybody.
	Before we go, I just want to say thank you for what I have to say, and I think Nick agrees.
	Our most successful year so far, not just in terms of, you know, bringing people together, in terms of people listening and supporting this show.
	I think we've hit our stride.
	And one of the reasons that we've hit our stride is because of your support and your kindness.
	And we just want to say thank you for that.
	And these are rough times.
	Obviously, everything that we talk about is very, very serious and pressing.
	But you make it worth it.
	You keep us going.
	We're going to get back in 2022.
	We're going to keep fighting.
	I'm not giving up.
	You're not giving up.
	Nope, I'm not giving up.
	Hey, listen, things are okay.
	Except for COVID, things are okay.
	Yeah, we're going to get there.
	We're going to beat this.
	Hopefully, let's make 2022 a better year.
	Happy New Year to you and yours.
	If you need us before 2022, the future, you can find Nick.
	Can you hear me?
	S-M-H.
	You can find me at J-Y Saxton.

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