Sarah Kendzior On Why Right Wing Conspiracies Take Hold
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman welcome Sarah Kendzior, best selling author of HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT and THE VIEW FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY, to discuss her latest book THEY KNEW: How A Culture Of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent.
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What would happen if American truck drivers decided they'd had enough of people like Joe Scarborough and went on strike?
What would happen then?
Most of the time, trends start in the United States and they move north to Canada.
But this time, the opposite could happen.
Somebody's got to stand up, whether it's putting your semi in the middle of a town and honking the horn or whatever, or whether it's parents going to a school board meeting.
These people will never let go of our freedoms or our children if we do not push back.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the McCraig Podcast.
I'm J.D.
Saxton, and I am here, as always, with Nick Kalliselman.
Today, we have the triumphant return of one of my favorites, one of yours, Sarah Kinzier, the bestselling author of Hiding in Plain Sight and the new forthcoming book, They Knew, How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent.
We're going to have Kim Zier on here in just a minute, talk about those books and so much more and what's going on right now.
But before we get to that, Nick, we have to talk about this thing.
It's been brewing in the background.
It's been escalating.
The information that's coming to the surface about this.
Uh, is both not at all surprising and completely troubling.
Uh, for people who maybe haven't been keeping an eye on it, there are thousands of protesters in our neighbor to the north, Canada.
Uh, truckers, agent provocateurs, they have pretty much taken over the capital city of Ottawa, held it hostage for over 10 days now.
There's now been a state of emergency declared.
There's a lot to unpack here, but what do you make of this, Nick?
How do you feel about what's going on up there in Canada?
You know, unless I see Bob and Doug McKenzie out there on the streets, also with them, brothers arm in arm, then I won't necessarily believe that this is truly a Canadian phenomenon, if you know what I mean.
Yeah, and it's not.
Let's be frank, this is not at all a Canadian phenomenon.
Let me read you a quote from one of the coverage.
Some protesters carried confederate flags and at least one flag with a swastika drawn on it could be seen.
Remind me, confederate flag in Canada, does that have any meaning up there?
I don't think it does, does it Jared?
Let me check my history book and make sure that our neighbors to the north were not involved with the Confederacy.
No, no, no, they were not.
Wait, what about the Nazis?
No, no.
Nazis are kind of distinctly American if you think about it.
So on that note, yeah, it's not at all a Canadian thing whatsoever.
Undoubtedly, to be clear, there are Canadians who are involved in this thing.
There are Americans that are involved in this thing.
And the reason that this thing stinks to high heaven is because it is being actively funded and organized by right-wing elements, many of them within not just Canada, but the United States, throughout Europe, This is another one of those situations in which we have an astroturfed, supposedly grassroots movement.
And I got to tell you, I think it's really interesting that once again, they have taken a bunch of people who believe conspiracy theories, who are anti-government.
They have given them the money, the means, and the motivation to go to a capital city.
Welcome to the club Canada.
trouble the government.
I mean, it just seems really interesting that within a couple of years, Washington, D.C. has this and now Ottawa has that.
I don't think that's a coincidence by any stretch.
Welcome to the club, Canada.
You might as well, you know, don't want to feel left out at this point.
But by the way, what it looks like and it sounds like it's kind of even died down after the weekend.
But, you know, all these trucks are coming in and they're blocking off a lot of streets and that's causing a lot of issues.
And remember, when you want to make a big protest, if you block traffic, that's a big one, right?
That always causes issues.
But we also have to make sure, you know, they're also protesting and blocking lanes in between the United States and Canada.
Now, that gets to be problematic because a lot of people rely on a lot of what's in those trucks to be delivered as quickly as they can.
And when you're literally blocking the entire way access road with protesters, you know, weren't they passing laws where you're allowed to run them over?
I thought, what happened to that?
Yeah, that was like weirdly focused on certain protesters in certain areas.
And I got to tell you, the idea of clogging up a major, major city, a capital of a state, clogging it up with a bunch of trucks so that emergency people can't get through, so you block off not just traffic, but sort of the thoroughfares that make this capital work, that has really concerning elements to it.
You know what I mean?
Like a few thousand of these vehicles were able to bring a capital city to a standstill and stay there for days on end while the police and the military basically are sort of helpless to do anything about it.
And by the way, they are asking for the government of the country to resign because they have not met their demands and that they are unwilling to meet their demands I gotta tell you, this is not only anti-democratic, but it's really disturbing that something like this could be carried out and that it feels like something like this is a test run for something larger, is what it feels like.
Well, you know, progressives and, you know, the socialists understand that when you want to protest, you got to hit them where it hurts and really make it clear when you start to get into the economics of this thing.
So that's what they're.
Oh, wait a minute.
These guys aren't progressives.
No, these are not socialists.
No, but they're also but they they're somehow copying part of this playbook.
Right.
When they realize, wait a minute, we can the most impact we can make when you are protesting is to make it economic and to attack that infrastructure.
Gets the most press, gets the most people.
I would be caring about it as much.
But, yes, it's kind of disgusting that, like, they're – but it makes sense.
They will use whatever playbook and they'll reverse engineer and they will gaslight and they will project it all they can to organize these things and cause havoc because it aligns with – I guess, really, the only thing they have here is the anti-vax movement.
This is what they're aligning with.
This is why they are able to raise money from Americans, right?
Tell me where to send my money.
I will click that link and send as much as I can.
Well, and that's the problem is that a lot of these things, whether it's the anti-vaccine movement, of course, you have the CRT thing, quote unquote CRT.
All of these things are taking advantage of fears that are in place, cultural fears that are in place.
This idea that there's a tyrannical sort of an overview happening in this case, when it comes to the truckers and the way that all this this works.
This is globalism, right?
It's your ability to go over the border and then come back and move with the trade of all of this and the expectations that come along with that.
So all of a sudden you have this paranoia that is in place that has been weaponized and it has been stoked.
And by the way, the same people who paid for these truckers to get together and go to this place and are delivering them supplies and are carrying out the logistics and have created this plan from the very beginning.
Are the same people stoking that paranoia and those fears, right?
This is a plan that is being carried out by incredibly wealthy, anti-democratic people who want to exert pressure on the government and see what they can make them do or to see how far they can go in terms of pressuring them and or bringing them to their knees.
And it's not, again, just Canadians.
We have seen that millions of dollars were streaming in from the United States, so much so that as this became an occupation, GoFundMe actually shut down all fundraisers for this thing.
And what happened immediately, Nick, what happened immediately was when that shut down, the apparatus of the Republican Party, and I'm talking about West Virginia, Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, Texas, probably more of these states are already investigating why GoFundMe shut this thing down, right?
Why they would possibly keep people from putting this in.
And the reason for all of this is what has been hiding in plain sight all along.
And this is one of the things we're going to talk to Sarah Kinsey about in a minute, which is this is an international movement.
All of these people are in on it together.
They share information, they share strategies, they share resources.
This is simply another episode of the same thing that took place on January 6th and which continues to take place all over the world in all of these main quote-unquote Western democratic states.
And it's just literally another iteration of this and another attack of liberal democracy.
Right.
So we have to make that clear.
This isn't really about anti-vax.
No, it has nothing to do with that.
No.
It's, you know, Justin Trudeau is, however you want to put him in the liberals and progressive scale, he's somewhat, he's somewhat progressive and somewhat about, he's got a minority government as it is now.
Couldn't even get the control of the whole government the way they run it.
This is an opportunity to, yeah, cause havoc and to try and get more conservative, you know, politicians.
Because here's the thing.
Who do the regular folk Get mad at when certain supplies aren't coming over the border to them so they can buy them or use them or whatever.
It's a charge.
Yeah, that's it.
It has nothing to do with, like, you know, who really is to blame here, which are these protesters who are obviously, we explained what they're doing.
You did, by the way, did you mention the sheer numbers of the GoFundMe campaign?
Did you say how much they were making?
Oh, they're crazy.
It's like millions.
Millions and millions of dollars, which is probably why they want to shut it down to make sure because this could be one of those banning things where they're buying yachts with it or whatever they're doing.
Well, and on top of that, Nick, it's one of those things where you are getting people used to seeing things like this, right?
So on one hand, the capital city of Ottawa gets completely clogged up with all these trucks.
You have all these bad actors.
By the way, there's been assaults, there's been property damage, there's been intimidation in these cases, there's been like this huge infrastructure of occupation that's happening in this city.
That gets people in Canada, but also in the United States used to it.
There's already talk of the possibility of these things happening here.
Well, guess what?
We have already had our capital city occupied and potentially overthrown.
January 6th gives people the idea that you can go into the halls of power and intimidate lawmakers and that that sort of intimidation, that sort of violence, those sort of actions are in your toolbox.
Right.
If you don't like what the government's doing, you can march in there.
You can break windows.
You can overpower these people.
And you can say, shockingly enough, that this is legitimate political discourse.
Oh, it's tourism, Jared.
It's just tourism.
They stayed between the lines in that one room on the velvet carpet.
And, you know, this is all about the experience, right?
You want to recreate.
So, you remember in, like, Waiting for Guffman when Corky St.
Clair talks about putting, like, tinders into the air conditioning vents so they could feel the heat of the backdraft play in front of them on their noses, right?
This is what they wanted.
You're going to walk through the Capitol.
It's going to feel real, whatever.
But we all know this was just our way of – by the way, it's our way of doing what Black Lives Matter protests were when they were smashing some windows of a CBS.
Do you have a CBS where you are?
Yeah, we got a CBS.
Okay, everyone knows what that is.
So CBS, Rite Aid, whatever, that is the equivalent, right, of being able to smash through windows of the fucking Capitol and march through – tours for the most part, by the way, while we're on the subject of who's breaking windows and where.
You're exactly right.
It's a co-opting of, quote-unquote, tactics, even though that this is – Again, it's astroturfed.
It's dangerous.
Like, it's real danger.
I mean, to be able to take over a capital city like this in the same way that happened in Washington, D.C.
I mean, we are literally watching the unraveling of liberal democracy.
That's what this is.
It's a full-out assault.
It's a coordinated, full-out assault.
Right.
And if you don't take it seriously, like you said, it becomes... There's no... Here's the thing.
Hitler, and the farther we get away from World War II and the Holocaust, right, the less power it could potentially have on us and what we forget about it.
And how they could happen again, which is why there are very important mechanisms in place, the Auschwitz Museum, things like that, to make sure we don't forget.
But this is clearly what they're trying to do here, is rewrite the entire history of this very quickly, relying on the fact that the American public and their, you know, lack of ability to focus on things and, you know, for any amount of time, is, yeah, it'll lose its power, it'll lose what we remembered of it, and eventually fade.
Yeah, it wasn't a big thing, and it didn't really mean anything, and we don't have to really worry about it anymore.
Well, and I think there's a really good sort of example of this, which is the fascist march on Rome, right?
You know, you have Benito Mussolini, who leads his political movement to Rome, and basically through intimidation, you know, inspires the government.
To give him power.
Because it is a matter of coalescing these forces and showing that you do have force.
Right?
So, like, let's say, for instance, that you manage to somehow or another get thousands of people, truckers, individuals, to go into a capital city, or if you get God knows how many people were at the Capitol on January 6th, they show that there is a danger to government, and unless they are listened to, and unless that they are given power and sway, particularly, by the way, the thing that we haven't mentioned in all of this,
Which is that neither of these governments, the United States or Canada, have been particularly effective.
That's a problem, right?
They are not, like, one of the things is we're feeling like liberal democracy can't answer things anymore.
It can't exert power or influence or leverage anymore.
And as we lose faith in those things, and we have lost faith in them for a variety of reasons, people can come in and say, look how many people we've got.
Look how much they care about things.
They're more than willing to break into a Capitol and do this.
They're more than willing to track across the country.
It is the perception of power and momentum that takes place in these sort of situations.
Yeah, if you were to have shaken your head a lot more violently and spoken those words in German, you would sound exactly like what Hitler was saying for those years while the Nazis were taking power.
How many people believe that the FBI was involved in January 6th?
A lot of people, right?
A lot of people think, you know, a false flag, it was BLM, it was all these different things.
That's not, that doesn't, the debunking of that doesn't have any effect on a lot of different people in America.
Well, I gotta say really, really quickly, and let's be clear because we like to get accurate information out there.
There is no telling what law enforcement was involved in January 6th.
We've talked about this before.
There's so many weird interlocking things.
We've got informants, we've got people on the ground, we've got intelligence that was in the crowd.
There's a reason that people don't trust the government.
There's a reason why people have lost faith in this is because they've constantly operated on a deep political level doing things that you can't even pay attention to while they're screwing around with reality, while they're using psychological operations.
This is not something that just happened overnight.
Liberal democracy loses its power and its luster as the people in power and with influence push away openness.
They push away good faith.
They push away intent and they hide behind the scenes.
And as that happens, you You do lose trust.
There's a reason why we have lost trust in them.
And the only way that that can be dealt with is to rebuild it, right?
Is to figure out something that is new and different and gives a certain momentum to it.
And they have failed in almost every regard lately.
Well, the rebuilding needs to also be transparent in its desire to help people.
This is where we diverge because you could probably sit with a right wing Sure.
conspiracy guy and have a nice cordial conversation about how ineffective the government is.
Sure.
We could probably also have a discussion about how neither of us would like taxes.
We don't like taxes in general, right?
We pay them.
We know and understand the value of the cost of living in an open society.
But still, you could bond over a few of these things.
But it diverges so quickly when you realize how desirous they are.
Is that the right word?
Desirous?
Of, you know, authoritarianism, right?
They want this strong leader to come in and get rid of rights, make sure other people have to go, you know, follow some strange, you know, book that somebody wrote thousands of years ago on a whim.
Oh, jeez, I'm gonna go to hell for this, but whatever.
You know, the Bible, whatever.
Like, you know, you know.
The more and more I think about these things, the more I see these old movies, these old documentaries about stuff, I gotta just tell you, these things like the Bible are written, guys are like, hey, let's just have them ring the bell seven times.
Make it eight.
Okay, perfect.
That's how it feels to me now, in my old age, nonetheless.
But I gotta tell you that the people who seek theocratic control, and this is something I keep finding in my research, some of them totally believe in it.
Some of them truly and honestly believe that, you know, this scripture or faith, whether it's Christian or otherwise, is actually the truth and the reason by which we should order society.
There are just as many people who don't actually believe in it, but they see the power in the mythology of it.
And you're exactly right.
Where we diverge Is the question of how do you rebuild faith?
How do you rebuild trust and community?
Versus, no, the hammer needs to come down and the people who should be in charge have to be returned to power, right?
And how do you do that?
You say, well, here's something that supersedes information.
Here's something that supersedes liberal democracy.
Here's something that supersedes democracy, which is the rightful people based on some sort of controlling mechanism.
And that is what we're actually dealing with right now is the fact that there is an authoritarian, anti-democratic movement that is working in this world right now to try and restore those hierarchical, theocratically based ideas and liberal democracy, I hate to tell you, it's on life support right now.
And until we figure out a way to make it better, or until we figure out a way to restore some of this trust, I mean, we're pretty much screwed, and we're going to see more of this, is what's going to happen.
Which is why it's awesome that we're going to have Sarah Kensler come on in one second, because it's really, she is able to distill this in a very specific, detail-oriented way that just makes it much more clear, and even though how we're describing it right now, I can't wait for everyone to hear it.
Yeah, so let's get to that.
We got Sarah Kinzier here in just a minute.
We will be right back.
Hey, everybody.
As advertised, we have a real special guest today.
One of my favorites, one of your favorites.
We have bestselling author Sarah Kinzier, who has a new book that I know you are as excited about as I am, which is They Knew How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent.
Go pre-order this thing.
Hopefully it'll get here sooner than later.
We need it.
Sarah, thank you as always for joining.
Oh, thanks for having me on.
So, you know, it's funny.
Last time we talked, not a lot has happened since then.
Things feel great.
Rainbows, strawberry shortcake, all that good stuff.
I guess I would like to start this thing, considering there's so much to get to.
I would love to hear the state of the union as Sarah Kinzer sees it at this moment.
Where are we in things?
How are you feeling today, early February 2022?
I mean, it's horrific.
It's worse than even I expected.
And as you know, my expectations were really low.
You know, I think the difference between now and the last time I talked to you in this format, you know, which I think was like late 2020, people had hope, you know, that the Biden administration was going to hold people accountable, that they're going to pass, you know, their platform, the platform on which they ran, the platform that was very popular and that managed to bring in a broad constituency.
Instead, even the most rudimentary things have still not been addressed.
We don't have a functional postal service.
We have a 9-11 worth of people dying every day from the pandemic, and we're told to normalize that, to streamline mass death, which is an ominous indicator.
There's been no accountability for a coup.
There's been no accountability for a Kremlin asset and his mafia network inhabiting the White House for four years.
There's been no discussion about the national security ramifications of that.
And we still have the old pre-Trump problems of unchecked plutocracy, income inequality, opportunity hoarding, loss of voting rights, systemic racism.
Like, sorry to be such a downer, but this is just literally what is happening.
And the longer it lasts, the more people get used to it, the more it congeals.
The worse off we are because people, they lose the drive and the momentum to try to bring about change.
I just want to make sure, did you mention controlling local election boards and also book banning?
Was that in that list or not?
That wasn't, but you can add them.
It fits right into the broader rubric of the attack on voting rights and the attack on free speech, free press.
Honestly, I'm very worried about Digital media, because there's been this huge change in publishing with more and more paywalls.
Everyone keeps saying to these kids who are losing books from their libraries and their classrooms, like, oh, well, go get it online.
That's becoming increasingly difficult, more expensive.
And I worry about in the future under a different kind of government, because I don't think the Biden administration would do this, I could easily see a future where books and articles and whatnot aren't just deleted, but are rewritten to represent something that the author never said.
I think that would be more effective, and so that's the direction I see them going, but hopefully that won't come to fruition at all, and if it does, I think we're still a couple years away from that, but who knows?
Full surprises this last couple of years!
Deep fakes is also another thing I'm concerned about.
A buddy of mine is doing a documentary on that because I think at some point we're not going to be sure whether a video is video or not, right?
And we won't be able to verify if someone actually said it or not.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, I've been worried about that for a while.
I worry about that in terms of elections, but just generally speaking, and you know, you combine that with quote-unquote Cancel culture.
And you know, that's like a whole side topic.
But you know, there's no denying that there's this, you know, kind of mob tactics to try to destroy people's lives, whether they're random people, whether they're famous people, whether they're good people, whether they're bad people, it's possible.
My point is that it's possible.
And when you add this deep fake technology and all these other new mechanisms, It's just going to allow really bad people to go after their political enemies or go after people who they don't like or trying to do something positive or good.
Yeah, and to add to all this, you know, everything that you just brought up, unfortunately, has a profit motive behind it.
Everything that we're talking about here, it not only gives people more power, but a ton of people are making money off of it.
And I think you and I probably share this.
After what happened in 2016, there was sort of a hope that maybe some people would look in the mirror and suddenly realize that they had made just an absolute shit ton of profit from destroying the country, putting people in harm's way, spreading a bunch of dangerous, poisonous ideas.
But it actually feels like that's accelerated.
It feels like now that is the biggest business going, doesn't it?
Yeah, it does.
I mean, I think some of it is Trump removed whatever what was left of the barrier of shame, you know, profiting off of death, profiting off of lies, propaganda, destruction, so on and so forth.
There is no accountability for that.
There's no punishment for that.
There is endless reward for that.
And you see this in particular in the book publishing industry with all these little "tell all" memoirs that are really "tell some," like tell the scandal and withhold information about the crimes or not tell information about the crimes to congressional committees, but put it in a book.
You see this in the infotainment industry.
In general, it's a very perverse incentive.
It's not necessarily a new thing.
It's what guided tabloid media.
It's what guided, for example, the O.J. Simpson trial, all these things that came before it.
You know, people learned from those events, and they're learning from the last four years.
And it's distressing.
You know, I keep wondering where the folks went who were quite vocal about the systemic problems that we were facing all throughout the Trump administration, and especially during the 2020 campaign, where a lot of people were saying this is a deep-seated problem.
Of corruption.
This is a problem of millionaires and billionaires having far too much power over individual citizens' lives, over our local constituencies, over our elections, over these things that, you know, determine the course of our future, like climate change, and that that needs to change right now because it's an urgent crisis right now.
And those critiques, you know, are often suppressed, silenced, or people seem to be intimidated.
They don't want to make them, and that's a problem.
Well, your book is called They Knew, How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent.
I can't help but think that there's a companion piece called They Live, the movie.
I'm not sure if you've seen it.
I've seen it.
And the question then is, well, who is or who are they in your mind?
Yeah, you'll see that in the book.
I'm leaving that vague for now.
I'll just say that that movie is a good, you know, guide.
One of the points I make in the book, which I'm sure will be causing me trouble, is that, you know, there's a difference between conspiracy and, quote, conspiracy theory as used in a pejorative sense.
And what we're looking at are actual, honest to God, conspiracies.
We are looking at plots by very powerful actors acting in secrets secret, you know, for destructive, immoral, sadistic purposes and profiting enormously off that effort.
And that shouldn't be something that's looked at as some, you know, wild-eyed, crazy thing.
You know, that is something that should be looked at seriously.
You know, the mafia is a conspiracy by that definition.
That's how it works.
Intelligence agencies and their little rogue units, like the type that were in Iran-Contra or another, you know, more recent nefarious elements within our government.
You know, those are, they are carrying out actual conspiracies.
And this refusal to look at that, to just dismiss everything as, quote, conspiracy theory, you know, to put something real, like, say, the Jeffrey Epstein, Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell operation.
In the same category as JFK Jr.
rising from the dead to be Trump's vice president.
That is a problem, and they do that purposefully to try to make people not explore these topics for fear of seeming insane.
And so I kind of break down over the decades some key examples of those.
But the they is more sprawling than it is specific, I'll just say that.
And it depends on what issue you're looking at.
Yeah, and you know, it's really telling.
The more that I figure out what is actually going on, the more you start to realize that the same people who are in, well, they used to be smoke-filled rooms, now they're glass boardrooms, right?
Those same people have these incredible connections.
You have the wealthy who are using think tanks to dismantle democracy, to protect themselves, to further their profit, and they are the same ones who are spreading conspiracy theories in order to limit their hangout and their possible being revealed as what they're doing.
It's a really insidious plot.
It's really repulsive and also effective.
It's incredibly effective.
And I think, you know, part of the reason it's effective is because people are so careerist and they're so conformist and they're so afraid of being labeled, you know, as a crazy person or a crazy conspiracy theorist.
And a lot of that is a repercussion of the economy that you and I have grown up in, you know, as children of like the Reagan 80s, where jobs are scarce, opportunities are scarce, people are endlessly pressured to fall in line.
And the sort of like, you know, free thinking, creative spirit that you might have seen in the late 60s, early 70s, and also the culture of accountability that led to things like, you know, the Pike Committee, the Church Committee, the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate hearings, do all of these things in a very the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate hearings, do all of these things in a very That's gone because people have become very timid.
You know, it's not just cynicism.
It's not just people sort of throwing their hands in the air and saying, oh, you know, no one ever listens to it anyway.
It's trying to fit in into a particular kind of corporate mold.
And people are so conditioned to feel that way that they're just afraid to speak their mind.
They're afraid to delve into these topics.
I mean, another reason not to delve into them is because the people running these operations tend to threaten to kill you.
And that's its own separate thing.
And that's a legitimate concern.
But the fear of just being labeled someone who doesn't belong, someone who should not be part of this discourse, this media, this political system, that's a deep-rooted fear that I think a lot of people are reluctant to address because that itself shows, you know, you're an outsider.
You're not part of the system.
But I'm kind of like, who would want to be?
You know what I mean?
No, it's a really insidious thing.
And, you know, I always get asked by people, they're like, why don't pundits and journalists, why don't they get what's going on?
And in a lot of cases, they know exactly what's going on.
They also do not want to expose themselves as questioning it because it might limit their career opportunities.
And on top of that, God forbid, they're seen as being hysterical hair pullers because they won't be booked on the shows.
They won't go to the same parties.
Their kids won't, you know, it's this entire weird nexus that they're a part of.
And in truth, they're people of privilege themselves.
Oh, absolutely.
Most of the people in the media at this point are either legacy cases or people who are able to do these jobs because they have trust funds and they have all these built-in advantages.
And as a result, they don't want to cook that goose.
They have no desire whatsoever to actually talk about what's going on if they can even see it in the first place.
Yeah, it's a system that runs on nepotism and inherited wealth.
And just people who are, you know, if they're not doing that, they're willing to, for example, take out, you know, tens of thousands of dollars of loans to live in a place like New York and D.C.
work as an unpaid intern, work as a low-paid staffer.
I think actually the younger generation, they're sick of this.
They don't put up with it as much.
They're pushing for unions.
You know, they're just like, forget it.
The payoff here is not worth it.
It's not worth my soul.
It's not worth, you know, whatever money I have.
And so I think that that's actually a positive change.
But unfortunately, you know, the folks at the helm now, they're the product of that system.
You know, it's intergenerational, and it's extremely corrosive.
You know, a problem of nepotism became a problem of national security.
And, you know, I wrote about that in my last book, In Hiding in Plain Sight, with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, you know, who are just paragons of that system.
You have, you know, Kushner paying off Harvard to get admitted, and then building up all this, you know, credentialism, using the White House for that while carrying out Cleptocratic initiatives with various oligarchs and mafiosos mean they're a rather extreme case.
But yeah, it's bad and it's a shame.
And one thing that's interesting to me, there's never really a bright side to a pandemic, but the pandemic shattered the illusion that people need to be living in a certain place to be part of political discourse, to be commenting on things and so forth.
It's still extremely limited.
You're still seeing people who are very wealthy, who are from prestigious backgrounds, who are not from states like yours or mine.
I mean, I'm assuming you're still in Georgia?
I'm still down here.
We're still in Georgia.
I'm still in Missouri.
And, you know, therefore, therefore we don't count.
The irony here is actually that the Trump people, the MAGA people, have figured out to not do this.
If we were pro-Trump, We would have endless career opportunities.
We would just be, you know, picked up.
We'd be boosted.
They have this network.
They have the think tanks.
They have the media.
They have the political groups.
They're all deranged.
They're all incredibly destructive.
They're absolutely nothing I'd ever want to be a part of.
But they are, in one sense, a model for what the Democrats, with all of their billionaire backers, could be doing, and sometimes did.
You know, there were once outlets like ThinkProgress that once existed.
Until it started talking too much about kleptocracy.
Until it started talking too much about millionaires and billionaires and their corrosive influence.
And then, I believe it was Neera Tanden, but other people, they just shut it down.
And so there's no infrastructure, comparatively, to expose these dark elements.
There's only dark elements giving money to people who will go along with their ambitions.
I'm kind of curious about that because Air America was another example of a progressive outlet that didn't work.
Is there a connection between what we're talking about either with, you know, lowercase c conspiracy or capital conspiracy?
And the reason why audiences will flock to right wing stuff a lot more?
I mean, it's a lot more than progressive, you know, platforms.
Yeah, I think some of it is the delivery of the right wing, where they're really outraged and angry.
I mean, often it's about things that didn't happen, like a migrant hoard at the border.
You know, it's things that they're just inventing, whereas they're not actually angry over atrocities that are happening, and that's because it's often their president and their party that's carrying out the atrocities.
You know, they'll speak in simple language, they'll show emotion.
It's more compelling viewing.
A lot of the times, I mean, I grew up as a kid watching, it was WWF, WWE now.
And it's like, that's the model.
And I feel like if people understood that, they would not only understand how to make compelling viewing, but they would understand a lot of the dynamics between Trump and the press, that they're not his enemy, that this is, you know, kayfabe.
This is a fake feud.
And so they're really good at creating storylines and plots and heels and sudden twists, whereas the Democrats, I don't know what they're doing anymore.
I mean, honestly, like I don't watch any of the cable shows.
You know, I watch like clips that come across my way on Twitter, but a lot of times I'm sort of watching to see like, well, what is the official narrative that they're trying to create?
Because the problem is we all saw what actually happened.
You know, we watched the attempted coup on our country and attack on the Capitol on live TV.
We've watched various, you know, people in Trump's fold confess their crimes at rallies, on Twitter, on the Internet.
So all we're watching when we watch like a cable news show that's supposed to be liberal or progressive, Are people narrowing the scope of that story and trying to be shocked about things that we already know?
And they're feigning shock to avoid accountability.
That's why you see so many former FBI people, former DOJ people, other representatives The people who could have stopped all of this and realized it's dangerous have to pretend they have no idea what's going on and that there was nothing they could have done differently.
But it's a lie.
And we all know it.
So for me, it's just frustrating, you know, to watch this sort of programs.
I'm so glad you brought that up with the people who could have done something because you mentioned Iran-Contra and we can't ignore that one of the key figures of bearing in that and by the way Congress was controlled by the Democrats for like 40 years and still couldn't bring themselves to impeach a president over that which is still mind-boggling but we know part of the reason was because William Barr He was involved in being able to cover this up, and here he is back in the same situation here.
So I'm kind of curious what your take on this is, because we never could quite figure out why he quit so suddenly in December of 2020 with a very strange, I want to hang out with my family more or whatever.
Can you give us your insight and your take on, especially now with the new revelations, what was the behind the scenes of that decision?
Yeah, well, first, you're absolutely right about Bill Barr.
He's extraordinarily dangerous.
He was so dangerous that William Sapphire wrote an article back in 1992 saying, Bill Barr is too extreme.
He's crazy.
We need to get rid of him.
And this is like William Sapphire.
So if Bill Barr's too out there, For him, and we saw him covering up a variety of crimes.
There was Iran-Contra, there was also BCCI.
He was basically the cleanup guy for the Reagan administration and for the continuation of that with the George H.W.
Bush administration.
So in 2018, when he was nominated, all of these quote unquote legal experts should have been gravely alarmed.
And instead, all I saw was, Bill Barr, he's an institutionalist, he's gonna keep Trump alive.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
This is Wikipedia level knowledge about Bill Barr.
You don't need to be old enough to remember this.
This is literally what he's known for.
He's the cover up guy for elite criminals, and he's gonna go cover up some more elite criminals, including the Jeffrey Epstein case.
and everything the Trump administration did.
My take on him leaving in December is that he knew that this attack on the Capitol is coming because it wasn't very hard to figure out because the attackers were announcing it all over the internet.
And Michael Flynn and Roger Stone and Lin Wood and all of these other people and Trump, you know, they were out recruiting militants They were out coercing people who were a little on the fence about all this to join in.
They were promising them they would be safe and they would be pardoned and there was a legal system in place.
And I think Bill Barr looked at all this thought, I don't think he really worried about, you know, getting in trouble because he doesn't do that.
That's not the way he thinks.
But he's like, I'm going to extract myself from this situation At this time, because I've done my job.
I came in, I buried all the bodies.
I, you know, no one can find the graves.
Everything's cool.
I'm going to take off, you know, hit me up if you need a cleanup guy again.
I'm still your man.
I mean, I think he may he may return.
He's also, you know, he's on the older side.
He's like 70 or something.
But these guys, I swear to God, they live forever.
It's like Dershowitz and Kissinger.
It's like my lord, you know?
You got Betty White dying and I'm like, sorry, you know, you don't want to wish this thing.
But it's like, you know, God works in mysterious ways.
I'll just say that.
So you don't make any sense of the notion that like he was seeing what was going on, realizing how illegal this was, and it's like, well, I gotta get the hell out of here.
But because my take on that is, in order to protect his own skin, he was also de facto allowing it to happen, right?
He knew once he left, most likely they were, I mean, he might have been shocked they didn't actually, they didn't pull it off based on who was going to take over for him.
So do you feel that was part of it?
I think he may have thought that they were going to pull it off.
I think he knew if they didn't pull it off that there would be a lot of problems and he didn't want to get involved in that.
He was there for the dry run.
He was there in June 2020, you know, when they were going to have the military fire on Black Lives Matter protests, you know, in DC.
And so they were kind of testing things out.
I think they used a lot of those protests and also the protests that were happening in Oregon and Portland and so forth as sort of like, how far can we take it?
What will the military do if we tell them to carry out an illegal order?
And, you know, you also saw, of course, the resignation of the head of the DOD at that time.
You saw a lot of people taking themselves out of the situation.
And I was worried because, as I said, you know, the militants and insurrectionists themselves were announcing this plot.
But Michael Cohen had also alluded to it long before.
And strangely enough, Nancy Pelosi, with one of her big Democratic donors, Chaim Saban, very casually in the end of 2018, said on a stage that if the Capitol crumbles, the foremost priority of the United States will be Israel.
And I saw that and I'm like, why are you talking about the Capitol crumbling at all?
Where's this topic coming from?
Why do you think there's gonna be an attack on the Capitol?
And then why, if there is one, is your loyalty to a foreign country?
That it's Israel is neither here nor there for this purpose.
She could have said Canada, and I would have been like, what the hell?
That is one weird thing to say.
So I was worried about an attack on the Capitol from late 2018 on, And then when it actually started to show up in this militant discourse that was all over the internet, I thought, oh my God.
And so that's why I don't buy for a second, of course, the FBI claim of like, oh my goodness, we didn't see it coming.
Like who would have known?
Of course they did.
We all saw it.
Like there were, you know, randos on the internet all being like, yeah, don't go down to DC to counter protest in January 6th.
It's a trap.
You know, don't, don't fall for their plan.
Yeah, and you know, the easiest narrative that there is out there is that, you know, all of this was Donald Trump.
He was just a poisonous influence who came in and somehow or another everything fell together.
And, you know, going back to what you were saying about like the Biden thing, like the narrative was the adults are back, everything's fine, we've moved beyond.
And it is such wish fulfillment delusion, but also a total lie that there isn't an infection here that goes back decades.
It goes for years and years and years that all of this has been put in a row.
Now, all of a sudden, nobody wants to talk about the fact that the billionaires have funded all of these efforts to overthrow elections.
They funded all these efforts to go into each of these states, take over all of the necessary posts.
And we have people in every single place who are in line who have already shown a willingness to overthrow an election and carry out a coup.
It's insulting and infuriating at the same time.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think especially in terms of voting rights, like that's been one of the most ominous and somewhat shocking developments just because maintaining voting rights, overturning the partial repeal of the VRA, getting back those votes, those rights that were lost.
It's not just the moral thing to do.
It's not just the thing that is legally best to do.
It's in the self-interest of Biden and the Democratic Party to protect that, because it was their base that managed to turn states, for example, like Georgia, blue and got the Senate and the House and the presidency for the Democratic Party.
They have shown no interest in protecting black voters.
They've shown no interest in protecting the Democratic base and making sure that young people who maybe voted for the first time in 2020 want to come back out again.
They haven't kept their promises to that constituency around things like student debt or healthcare or just basic economic survival, things people need.
They're acting like they don't want to win.
I feel like we're in a very strange election situation where we have one party that is overtly saying, yes, we're going to steal the election.
We are rigging the election.
We're throwing out votes we don't like.
Like, forget it.
There's no legitimacy to that.
They're not even putting on a pretense of legitimacy, and that's the Republican Party.
The other side is basically doing everything possible to Actually lose the election, which is crazy.
Like my concern in 2020 wasn't that Biden or the Democrats would actually lose because their platform was popular and, you know, people, they hate Trump a lot more than the media likes to portray it.
They like to make it like a 50-50 situation.
It was never like that.
You know, he was extremely unpopular, especially by the end, you know, with the pandemic and everything.
At this point, with Biden, the frustration is so enormous, and with the Democratic Party as a whole.
And on top of that, they're not protecting voting rights.
So if they do manage to actually get their base to want to turn out, if they manage to get all those volunteers and activists who are so disillusioned right now back on the Democratic team, They still will lose because the Republicans have abandoned the rule book entirely.
So I'm kind of like, well, that's an emergency situation.
That's something you should have been dealing with as soon as you got in office.
It should have been top priority.
Cuz all other rights stem, in some sense, from the right to vote.
And they don't treat it like a priority at all.
They're interested in it for three weeks at the end of 2021, beginning of 2022.
And they've abandoned it again.
So, yeah, mysterious.
You know, let me ask this because it's a little bit confusing as far as we want to blame Biden for like maybe not getting legislation passed when clearly.
So here's the question.
He should have known that it was going to be razor thin with these two, you know, these two senators who were probably not going to play along.
It's almost like, what was he supposed to do?
I suppose, did he know while he's promising in the campaign that it was all a bunch of bullshit?
He was never going to reach across the aisle?
I mean, and he certainly, did he know that they would never get even all the Democrats on the same page for some of this stuff?
That's the question we want to, I know we want to criticize him for, but is there anything else he could have done?
And then as a side to that, you know, a guy like Lindsey Graham, who never would have agreed with Trump on anything, suddenly becomes his mouthpiece.
So is that what we're insinuating?
That whatever Trump did to Lindsey Graham is what maybe Biden needs to be doing to, you know, Manchin and Sinema?
Well, I definitely wouldn't recommend doing things Trump does, because they're pretty extreme, but applying pressure in that sense, yes.
I mean, I think that Biden possibly could not have seen cinema and mansion coming, because I think there's a lot of dark money, dirty right-wing money pumped into those two.
that people didn't necessarily think would have the sheer amount of influence and leverage that it did end up having.
We don't fully know the story there.
He should have known about voting rights, being that there's been a sustained attack on voting rights for several decades.
And of course, in 2013, we had the Supreme Court ruling and we just had an attempted coup.
Like, that's kind of a wake-up call, when the previous candidate says, you know, your election is illegitimate, and then a bunch of guys show up and they want to, like, murder members of Congress, and, you know, they're saying, right, we're going to take this back, we're going to take this presidency back.
By any means necessary, kind of a sign that, yeah, you need to prepare for the worst here, and of course you should be on the ball of voting rights, Of course, you shouldn't alienate your base.
He could have given that speech he gave in Georgia last month a year ago, and it would have been a lot more effective then, and then just had to sustain, we are protecting our democracy.
We're not going to let go of the gains that we've made in terms of organized activism around voting rights and so forth.
back in 2020, but instead it was just like, ah, whatever, infrastructure bill.
And the minute they started on on that with Build Back Better, I was like, well, this isn't going to pass.
Like, what are you doing?
Why are you wasting time on this?
You need to gut out the corruption, and you need to protect voting rights, and you need to have consequences for the people who attempted a insurrectionist coup.
Like, those are your top three things to do to just preserve the country on a basic level.
You know, our national security, our sovereignty, our public safety, our ability to vote, all those things.
They didn't do that.
And I don't know exactly how delusional Biden is.
You know, he's been in government for a very long time.
I don't know why you want to reach across the aisle to somebody who clearly wants to punch you in the face, but if that's what he's going to do, he should have really, he should have learned by the insurrectionist coup, and the people with the, you know, hang Mike Pence banners, and the other rhetoric aimed that perhaps perhaps these types and the other rhetoric aimed that perhaps perhaps these types of negotiations, these little handshake deals, were not going to work out.
And And yes, of course, he and others should have been applying pressure on Manchin and Sinema.
But as much, you know, blame is on Schumer and others in leadership positions for that, you know, as there would be on Biden.
Yeah, and by the way, speaking of wrestling, and I think that it is the only lens to actually understand the current climate.
Weirdly enough, if people don't know wrestling terms, they don't know wrestling reality and faux reality, they need to get up on it quick.
And, you know, it's like one of those things where it's like, the Democrats and the Republicans have been having a wrestling match for decades.
They've been using each other for fundraising, for getting out the vote.
Meanwhile, they've been going to the same parties, using the same fundraisers, all of that.
Now all of a sudden, there is this generation of Democrats, and I think Joe Biden's part of them.
I think his saying he wants to reach across the aisle showed this.
I think that they truly thought that this was some sort of an act that they would snap out of, and that there isn't an authoritarian movement happening here, and that there isn't some sort of actual anti-democratic movement taking place.
And on top of that, they have every reason not to believe that because they're being paid by the same donors.
They are being funded by the same people who don't want you going out there and saying Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin are being funded by those people because they're funding them as well.
Yeah, that's one of the central things, I think, is that this money, in many cases, comes from the same pot.
And obviously, you know, you've detailed this in your book with all these think tanks and the Koch movement and the libertarians and, you know, that whole thing that came out of the Reagan Arrow, which is a little bit different in that it's, you know, not the dominant force of the Democratic Party.
But I mean, I can name, you know, billionaire donors, people like Glenn Blavatnik that are just throwing their money around.
You know, they're playing both sides.
And so in that sense, it is like professional wrestling in that people are going through the motions and, you know, feigning some kind of enmity or feigning that they're going to work together to build policy.
I'm not quite sure which one is worse.
But, you know, this is a power struggle, like there is a genuine Power struggle here.
And the Republicans don't have interest in anything other than having a one party state in which they are not accountable to anybody.
Their donors are not accountable to anybody.
Corporations are not accountable to anybody.
And the rest of us can just suffer and die.
And I mean that in the most literal way, because you see that in the reaction to COVID and, you know, in terms of how the Biden administration fits into things like that.
You know, I'm concerned watching what's happening now as we have near record rates of hospitalization and death.
And they are really just like, yeah, let her rip, as if it's just gonna end after this, as if this is just some sort of, you know, grand finale.
It's not, like it's an ongoing pandemic that seems to be utilized to make enormous profits for big pharma in particular Pfizer and other companies.
And you know, that's not a conspiracy.
That's just what's happening.
And it's a result of absolutely horrific policy decisions made by real people who could make different decisions.
They could make different decisions that could help our country.
And they're choosing not to.
And I think that that shows, you know, the leverage of the American people has just been decimated.
And I think in 2020, folks had the illusion that some of that leverage was back, you know, that we do have some sway.
over our elected officials.
It seems clear that generally speaking, we don't, or that the elected officials who are looking out for us, excuse me, and I do think there are some don't have much sway over the ones who are not. - You know, I think this ultimately kind of proves that Trump was right when he realized how much of the political problem this would be for him.
COVID would be for him.
And obviously, the Democrats, I think, are realizing that now and having to scramble to make it sound more like Trump, in a way.
But the problem with that is that the result is all the extra deaths and people now not even believing in science.
Is that a fair connection to make between how Trump politically dealt with COVID And how everyone else here is actually dealing with science.
I gotta say, we haven't talked about this on the podcast, but this is a good time to bring it up.
If you look on the New York Times or the Washington Post, they have articles one after another that the pandemic's about over, it's about done.
And then right underneath they show the deaths and they're at record levels.
It's the exact same thing that Fox News did at the very, very start.
It's just a laundering through a different lens at this point.
It's the, it's the quote unquote, right people dying now.
Yes, I think that that's what it is and it's really frightening because of the people that Biden has put in this administration to guide the policy.
They have a eugenicist bent.
I mean, it's kind of bizarre to me that Fox News is not all over this, because you may recall from the Obama era when he was trying to put it through Obamacare, and of course, the Republicans had a shit fit and didn't want it to happen, and they kept bringing up death panels.
They kept saying, there's this evil doctor, Dr. Death, Zeke Emanuel, he is going to choose who dies, he's gonna kill your grandma.
He's now doing that.
That is a key person guiding Biden's policies is Rahm Emanuel's brother, who's a physician.
And then you have Jeffrey Zients, who has no public health background at all.
He's just he's the wealthiest member of the Biden administration.
And he's making decisions that benefit corporations and the ultra rich.
And meanwhile, you know, doctors, nurses, teachers, parents, like people are suffering.
And there's this bizarre narrative of like, somehow folks want the pandemic or they're like, we must get rid of the restrictions.
And I don't know about you.
I think we're in a similar place.
Cause like, we don't have any restrictions in Missouri.
So now we're just wide open.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
What's happening where I live is that the public schools want the kids to wear masks in school so that they don't get COVID and spread it and potentially infect people and kill them.
A very sensible goal.
We're getting sued by the Missouri Attorney General To make sure that kids can't wear masks.
So there are, you know, the freedom to wear a mask if one wants is being taken away.
That's our actual problem.
But all of these assholes like in the Atlantic and the New York Times are on this like, oh my god, you know, we're living in tyranny.
We're living in fascism.
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
Like, we've had no lockdowns at all.
It is so weird.
And it's so coordinated.
And I feel so bad For the epidemiologists and public health officials who are trying to cut through this crap and are really trying to inform the public.
And I keep wondering, well, why doesn't the Biden administration hire them?
I mean, that's one of these things, and it sort of goes back maybe to what we were saying before about nepotism and, you know, influence networks, you know, determining who works in positions of power.
Like, if you look at who Walensky's father is, for example, he was a 9-11 war profiteer.
Like, that's the sort of backgrounds a lot of these folks Come from so when you get like a nice good faith hardworking epidemiologist who just really wants to make life better and protect the most vulnerable, protect the elderly, the immunocompromised, people who are impoverished, etc.
they're not going to be interested in that person.
And that, it breaks my heart because it's so much, it's wasted potential.
And it also just really hurts American people who need a voice.
They need someone in a position of power to speak for them and protect them and give them guidance, give them good policies to figure out how to get through this pandemic.
Because nobody's like, I want to wear a mask forever or I want school to be virtual.
Like no one actually wants those things.
They make up these fake straw people that allegedly love pandemics and love rules.
Like I don't know anybody who likes any of that stuff.
And I mean, I'm sure you could probably find somebody, but it's weird.
That dichotomy that you mentioned of the death toll, and then right next to it, like, we must open up everything.
It's like, it is all open up, and that's kind of why we have the big death toll, you know what I mean?
Like, maybe the time when the y-axis on the chart is the curve that's flattened, maybe that's not the time to, quote, you know, take off the masks or whatever it is you're proposing.
I mean, I don't even know, because as I said, there aren't really restrictions.
Yeah, I'd love to live in a country where I wasn't afraid every single day that my mother was going to catch something that will kill her because she has COPD.
Well, we're going to let you go in a second, but I would be remiss if I didn't ask you.
One of the things that we're paying really close attention on this show and that we're documenting is not just that the MAGA authoritarian thing is growing, but that there is a coalescing now of political energy behind what is now calling itself national conservatism.
We're talking about a bunch of people who are funded by people like Peter Thiel who are coming out and they're selling Viktor Orban to the Republican Party.
They're selling Putinism to the Republican Party.
And these are actually even more dangerous people than criminals like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.
We're talking about some really, really sick people here who are pushing authoritarianism, anti-democratic policies.
What do you see happening here?
What are you keeping an eye on?
How do you feel that this is going to play out over the next couple of years?
Well, I don't want to, like, terrify anybody, but I think that the main goal of these groups of sadistic billionaires and oligarchs, people like Peter Thiel's, to basically take over the natural world as climate change is looming, scoop up what's left of it, and then force us all into an AI universe, which is why initiatives like META, you know, Peter Thiel's on the board for that,
Are being launched and, you know, also, you know, destroy our expectations of what life could be, of reality, of our ability to, you know, I don't know, like have control over what we see, over what we do.
I can see a lot of really dark things coming and it is transnational.
You know, they're working in an axis of autocracies with, you know, Orban and Putin and Brexit UK and others.
I hope folks recognize the severity of this potential threat and don't just treat it like lunacy, like I'm just somehow quoting the Matrix and putting it into regular life.
Like, I feel like a lot of times these folks, they watch these movies that served as dark dystopian warnings.
They're like, well, that's inspiring.
Let's see if we can make that happen.
That's not the lesson that's supposed to be learned.
But those are unfortunately good guidelines as to where we may be headed, unless folks intervene.
And everyone should remember that, that this path is not set in stone.
You should fight against it anyway, even if the odds are long, because it's the right thing to do and you don't need a reason other than that.
Alright everybody, this has been Sarah Kinsey here.
A real, real treat.
Thank you so much for coming by.
Again, the new book is They Knew, How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent.
Get your pre-orders in today!
Today!
Yes, pre-order it!
Today!
As anybody with a book can tell you, the pre-orders, they help.
Capitalism.
Sarah, where can the good people find you?
Sarah Kensier on Twitter.
It's probably the most reliable place.
And also Gaslit Nation, my podcast, which comes out once a week wherever podcasts are available.
All right.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
All right, everybody.
That was Sarah Kensier.
Always a great joy to have her on the podcast.
It's been a hot minute since we had her on here.
We need to make sure that it isn't So long before we do it again.
Again, her book before was hiding in plain sight, which I think gets into a lot of good detail about this international anti-democratic movement.
This knew when they knew how culture of conspiracy keeps America complacent.
I can't wait to read this thing that's coming out this fall.
You can preorder it now.
But yeah, Nick, we, we, we got our work cut out for us and I have faith in it.
I think that we're going to come out on the other side of this thing, but, I gotta tell you, the signs, the writing on the wall, they just get brighter and brighter every single day.
You know, it's funny, we didn't mention in the beginning of this conversation about with the trucking thing in Canada, you know, Facebook is at it again.
And all these Facebook groups are helping to organize.
The jokers at Facebook are at it again.
Meta, yeah.
And so as a result, I just saw a thread where they were digging through who are organizing these Facebook pages that have hundreds of thousands of people who are following it.
And none of these people are Canadians.
None of these people are local to any of this thing.
You know, it looks all again like a, you know, manipulation of the social media and the algorithms to foment, you know, just this movement and make it look like it.
It probably, by the way, it makes it look like it's bigger than it is.
Yep.
And that's part of probably what you're channeling, is it feels like a huge thing of how are we ever going to, you know, overcome this push from the right, when in reality it's probably as fake as what, you know, Fox News tries to push.
The amazing thing about all of it, and by the way, the rise of the Internet made all of this possible, right?
Because the Internet is what carries, like, neoliberal globalism around the world.
It's what makes all of this possible, right?
But it also erases borders and makes it to where, like, malevolent actors can interfere in your stuff from thousands of miles away, right?
There are the benefits and the cost of this thing, obviously.
And in this case, you have just a coordinated, well-funded effort to use sock puppets, to use fake accounts to just You know, one person can take care of like four or five, 40 to 50 groups, you know, around the world that can marshal all these people and not only feed them misinformation, but to radicalize them.
And it actually takes a very, very small movement, which is only, you know, concentrated wealth.
We're talking about just a couple of, you know, groups of people who are doing all of this.
Those people can seed it into thousands, if not millions of people.
I mean, if you look at the numbers, there are millions of Americans right now who prefer Vladimir Putin over a Joe Biden.
And they believe that because they have been soaking in conspiracy theories that have been created and propagated by incredibly wealthy people.
And so you're right.
These groups are pushing so much of it.
They're not grassroots.
They're not real.
They're completely astroturfed and they're completely fabricated.
But the more that it happens, the more that it convinces people that it's real and that they can do something about this situation.
It prepares them for that type of violence and anti-democratic activity.
The antidote, I would think, would be to have the foreknowledge of what they're going to say.
So you were prepared for when that comes out.
Like, the Fox News people are making the Russians into the good guys here and making Ukrainians into the bad guys at this point.
When you know that they were going to do that, then it kind of helps to have a barrier and be like, yeah, that's just absolute and utter bullshit.
And that, you know, we owe it to other countries.
At least JFK had promised that we would help protect democracy across the world if it's under threat.
And now you might have an argument with that and whether or not we should intervene in those kind of things.
But at the very least, let's make sure we know which side people are on.
And to hear these Tucker Carlson people Disgust it like that and and really and and and overtly frame it as if Putin It's like the good guy taking back land that would belong to them, you know all this the whole time It's disgusting and it's it's easily it sways so many people You know There's a connection between that and like even like the Joe Rogan thing that keeps coming up in the last several weeks with the n-word, right?
we talked about this a long time ago with us another guest other ones watch or somebody but Maybe it was Chauncey about the n-word becoming recycled, being able to be used again.
And it really feels that way when you're looking at all the Joe Rogan clips that keep coming out.
If you haven't seen them, they're out there now, edited together dozens and dozens of times.
It makes you feel like someone's gonna feel like, hey, just like they said for the insurrectionists on January 6th, hey, you know, the n-word, what's the big deal?
We should be able to use it, you know?
Black people get to use it, why don't I get to use it?
Like, that's what they're gonna end up happening.
Well, it's a really insidious type of information warfare, is what it is.
And, you know, all of this is about moving the Overton window.
On one hand, like, it's okay to say just terribly, terribly awful, offensive, painful, hurtful things.
On the other hand, it's okay to, you know, get in your car or fly out to Washington, D.C.
and try and overthrow the government, right?
It's simply about changing the way that things work.
And I think for anybody who's paying attention, like there's a lot of people undoubtedly who politics is very, very exhausting and paying close attention like they can't necessarily do it.
They don't have the time.
They don't have the resources.
They don't have the frame of understanding.
They're looking up right now and they're like, what in the hell has happened to this country?
How did we get here, right?
I'm a frog in a pot that has slowly come to a boil.
But for those of us who have paid attention to this, and this is of course part of the project that we're part of, is documenting this, talking about it, making sure that we're connecting all the dots and making sure that the narrative is clearer and clearer.
This is obviously like an intentional turning up of the heat.
All of this is about moving that Overton window until years later, you look up and you're like, oh, look at all of this way that we've moved.
Right.
There are the tracks.
There are the footsteps right there.
I can see exactly how we got from point A to point B to point C. And it is it's very obvious that reality is shifting very quickly right now.
You know, it's been picking up speed, going downhill, moving faster and faster and faster.
But things like what we're seeing in Ottawa, things like what we saw on January 6th, which are, you know, intentional coordinated actions, you know, many of the things we talked with Sarah about, these things are going to become more and more frequent as this thing picks up speed.
But if you pay attention to it, you can see exactly where it's going.
You can see exactly where it's heading.
And that's the reason why We predict the things we do.
It's not because, you know, we've got a crystal ball over here.
It's just a matter of actually paying attention and doing the math.
It's obvious.
All right, well, we're going to continue doing that math.
We're going to be back, of course, for our exclusive Weekender edition on Friday.
If you want access to that, go over to Patreon.com slash muckrake podcast.
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Where you can go on, it's a great social media where people share information and are there for each other and supportive.
That's patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me SMH.
