This is an abbreviated version of our weekly Patreon show. This particular episode is available FOR FREE by clicking: https://www.patreon.com/posts/63021289 Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the response to the invasion of Ukraine from everyone, including Joe Biden, the media, and the conservative pundits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| This is your Weekender Edition. | |
| Because of circumstances being what they are, we are opening this up to non-subscribers. | |
| So if you are listening to the preview right now on Apple or Spotify or wherever you're listening to us, head on over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. | |
| It's unlocked. | |
| I think this is information that we need to get out. | |
| Nick, we We have worried about this for a while. | |
| We have talked about the circumstances leading up to this. | |
| We're recording this just so everybody knows where we are in terms of information and in terms of the rollout of events. | |
| We're recording this on Thursday, February 24th around 7 p.m. | |
| Eastern. | |
| And what has happened is that after months of buildup and after months of telegraphing and years of telling us what he wanted to do, Vladimir Putin announced that he was authorizing what he called a special military operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. | |
| Immediately, a full-scale invasion into the sovereign nation of Ukraine commenced. | |
| Hundreds of people have already died. | |
| Uh, we have seen the full force of Russian aggression at this point. | |
| Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has announced that if any foreign nation gets involved, except for Belarus, I mean, if Belarus wants to come in and kill some people, that's fine, I guess. | |
| But if a foreign nation interferes, that they will suffer greater consequences than any in their history, obviously a threat of nuclear war. | |
| We've watched some half-hearted sanctions that we got to get into roll out. | |
| We have watched the media absolutely fail in every regard possible. | |
| And we've watched the right wing predictably fall behind Vladimir Putin. | |
| But before we get into all that, Nick, what's your initial reaction on this thing? | |
| How are you feeling? | |
| You know, I'm not a war general. | |
| I've never served in the military. | |
| I have watched a lot of these movies though. | |
| I don't want to make light of this because it's not funny but it seemed to me the second that Putin began this speech that lasted over an hour and that we kind of knew what he was going to say and obviously they were bombing right within minutes of him finishing. | |
| Like, couldn't they have gotten the planes, like, up in the air in Ukraine? | |
| Because it sounds to me like they kind of bombed and destroyed the air bases and went alongside a lot of their, like, air power. | |
| And I think the point of that statement is that it just seemed like it caught enough people off guard in a very strange way. | |
| And the biggest thing I have to pull out my hair right now is that you're looking at all sorts of reports, information, Biden's going to go meet with people now to discuss this. | |
| I know they had a couple sessions ready to go into place earlier this week and then yesterday, but it's like why isn't every single plan ready to go locked in based on what happened yesterday? | |
| It seems like they're now running around with their heads cut off trying to figure out some sort of plan. | |
| Why? | |
| Why are we here? | |
| Why hasn't it already been ready to go for weeks, is what I understand. | |
| Well, when it comes to the Western powers and all these alliances, there is an explanation that we're going to get into a little bit later because I'm sorry, but these are piss poor sanctions. | |
| They're doing a little bit, but there's a reason why it's not the full bore thing, and this is part of a larger existential problem that we have to get into, and quite frankly, that the world has to face head on if this is going to be okay. | |
| In terms of Ukraine, in terms of the surprise I have to tell you, I expected this to happen. | |
| I've expected this to happen for a while. | |
| And I think a lot of people were incredibly surprised because, as we've talked about, Nick, we've been told that this couldn't happen. | |
| Right. | |
| We've been told that the way that the global order is set up, particularly through interlocking Capitalist systems and markets that nobody was going to go out and do something like this and in a way And this is part of the the problem here and part of the corruption Vladimir Putin has just been treated sort of like almost like a crazy uncle. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| It's like well, you know, he'll come into g8 and he'll say some things and yeah He's a dictator, but he's our dictator and he's certainly not going to invade another country meanwhile his corruption this course through the veins and of the international capitalist order. | |
| It has completely corrupted everything. | |
| It has led to this current moment, which we'll dive deeper into. | |
| And all it took was a decision to do something counter to regular conventional wisdom. | |
| And you benefit from that. | |
| We've learned that in capitalism. | |
| When you go against the grain and you trouble the order, when you disrupt it, A lot of the time you succeed and a lot of the time you benefit from it. | |
| Is it hard to connect the dots between people and the conventional wisdom not taking Putin seriously here and the GOP fully embracing Putin over the last four or five years? | |
| I think that's a real easy connect for. | |
| And that is a huge thing that, like, maybe people didn't want to make a big deal out of, is what Trump did to normalize Putin in America. | |
| And we talked about that last week. | |
| And, like, you know, even these meathead Republicans wearing the t-shirts that would rather be, you know, Russian than a Democrat. | |
| Like, these are the things that lead to this kind of stuff and this kind of thinking, even when it starts to permeate. | |
| The Democrats and just regular political discussion. | |
| So, you know, we're going to end up feeling repercussions of what Trump has done. | |
| And we need to discuss, I suppose, whether it's now or later in the show. | |
| You know, why? | |
| Why is he invading now? | |
| You know, why didn't he invade when Trump was in power? | |
| Well, I mean, part of that is because he probably expected Trump to get a second term, and he needed the poison of Trump to grow. | |
| I mean, the destabilization that led to Trump was only part of a larger theater, a larger plan that's been going on for a very long time. | |
| In terms of people not coming to the realization of what all this is about, the powerful and the wealthy, and you got to put yourself in their mindset for a moment, Like, they have been served by this neoliberal global order, right? | |
| There are winners and there are losers. | |
| And the people who have won, the way that they rationalize the way that they have won and the system they have played a part in is by not paying attention to the uglier aspects of it, you know? | |
| Like, there are a lot of people, and we'll talk more about this, Who have benefited from authoritarianism, who have benefited from anti-democratic despots like Vladimir Putin. | |
| And all around the world, there are all kinds of people who exploit people, who take their resources. | |
| And I'm sorry, but the reason that we're talking about this right now is because it's happening in Europe. | |
| That's why we're having this conversation. | |
| We're not having conversations about how all these different countries are destabilized in the global south or in Africa. | |
| And in this case, you have a lot of people who looked the other way and pretended not to notice what was going on because the system benefited them. | |
| And as a result, everybody today who's raising their hands and saying, how could you have ever seen this? | |
| Nick, the blueprint for this, which was written by Alexander Dugan, which is geopolitics. | |
| It's a book that he put out, which is basically a blueprint for how this works. | |
| It was published in 1997. | |
| Like, I was just learning to drive in 1997. | |
| I stand before you a 40-year-old grown-ass man. | |
| It has been 25 years since that blueprint was published. | |
| Those of us who pay attention knew that Vladimir Putin was going to do this, and he's attempted to do this in parts and in starts and stops for years, but the people who didn't want to pay attention to it didn't pay attention to it, or they helped and they got rich from it. | |
| It's a parade of people who were both complicit and people who were willfully, delusionally ignorant on purpose. | |
| Sure. | |
| And then to further that notion, what we had seen reports are that apparently Trump, if he had won the second term, was going to get the U.S. | |
| out of NATO and or destroy NATO in one swoop. | |
| And that is another one of those reasons why perhaps Putin waited Thinking, okay, if Trump does win this, that'd be a more opportune time. | |
| Okay, now they're on plan B because Trump did not win. | |
| He couldn't quite rig the election fair enough to make him win. | |
| Well, what I'll add to that too is, and we keep talking about this, Trump was a weapon. | |
| Trump doesn't have any ideology beyond self-serving. | |
| It took Trump getting in power for this right-wing extremist group to start intellectualizing it. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| And putting together this national conservatism. | |
| I mean today CPAC met and like these people they barely talked about Ukraine and if they did it was basically in support of Putin. | |
| You know? | |
| And they needed something in America to not just metastasize but to really coalesce into a movement. | |
| And at this point in 2022 They have effectively taken over the GOP. | |
| They have effectively become one of the two major parties in this country. | |
| And you have all these red states who are throwing their weight around. | |
| The fruit was ripe. | |
| And Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs he represents and the authoritarian movements that he represents all around the world. | |
| They're feeling themselves, and now is the opportune time for them to do it, and the poison of this corruption is so thorough that it's more or less just sort of paralyzed the world's ability to deal with this. | |
| I think, you know, they're tapping into the strongman, right? | |
| Everybody, I mean, for a long, long time in America, The notion of, oh, he gets things done. | |
| He kicks ass and all that stuff. | |
| That was a really, you know, desirable trait that people wanted in their politicians. | |
| They wanted John Wayne. | |
| Yet, we also wanted some version of statesman who, you know, who could reach across the aisle and all those different things as well. | |
| So, that's the other thing that was so dangerous about that notion is that you can tap into that and then it's a very, very quick line from wanting that kind of person, the John Wayne, to getting to Putin. | |
| And I don't think anybody reflected on that and thinks about how important that would be or how important it was to not encourage that kind of imagery and then blind nationalism to a country, to an entity that we have, you know, that you see with some of these authoritarian countries. | |
| Yeah, it's bad. | |
| And again, this now, you can ask me if you want, Nick, why do you hate America? | |
| Because, you know, I'd be rallying against a little bit of, you know, overpatriotism, over sense of nationalistic pride, all those things. | |
| But that's what it ends up leading to. | |
| And I would argue that we need a certain amount of people, probably the majority, who want to see the country continue to do better. | |
| That's the motivation for wanting to progress and have a better country. | |
| And the second you start to get relaxed with that and, you know, and stop pushing for things that are better, then that's when you start slipping into authoritarianism. - Well, and there's actually two things that happen there. | |
| It's either authoritarianism or nihilism. | |
| And there is a certain thing that has happened, and I wanted to talk about this very quickly, because I think that this is telling, and we're already talking about some really heavy shit, Let's just be straight up honest about that. | |
| This thing is a mess, and what we're going to talk about for the rest of the show is a mess, but I want to talk very quickly about one of the reasons why people miss this thing. | |
| And for anybody who spends any amount of time online, you may have noticed a bunch of leftist and left-wing people and progressive people were like, yeah, they're gonna invade Ukraine. | |
| Sure. | |
| Oh, the State Department says that an invasion is imminent. | |
| Well, where is it? | |
| Why didn't it happen today? | |
| And actually, there are a lot of people, a lot of really, really smart people, leftist, who are both, they were both caught, like, Unaware, like blissfully unaware by this thing, but also they have now thrown in their lot in denialism where they're like, well, America's evil too, so what are you going to do? | |
| And part of what has happened here, and this is an important thing to keep in mind as we have this conversation, and based on what you just said, Nick, it's really important. | |
| I think that we do this podcast, both of us, because we do want this to get better. | |
| Because we actually do want to diagnose and talk about what's going wrong and where we can possibly go. | |
| The left has been so mired in nihilism. | |
| And so mired in defeatism that at this point they have looked at the capitalist international order and they bought the bullshit that it was always going to last forever. | |
| They're like, what's the use in even trying anything? | |
| Like there's nothing you can do. | |
| The left will never reignite, which is bullshit because if you actually look at world history, it's up and down, right? | |
| There are moments where you feel like nothing could possibly ever get better and then there are moments of revolutionary change. | |
| And the left here missed out on something very obvious, which is Vladimir Putin had every reason to invade Ukraine in order to make his power more, in order to increase his profits, and in order to buck and disrupt the system. | |
| Meanwhile, you have leftists left and right who should know better. | |
| Leftists are supposed to be completely and utterly vigilant about imperialism. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| Like that's something that you're supposed to keep track of and they missed it because they are so mired in nihilism that they can't believe that the world can change and more specifically that the world can get better. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Nihilism, Donnie. | |
| And unfortunately, we're not supposed to be worried about them if you listen to The Big Lebowski, but this is a time when you have to be worried because we're on the precipice here of falling into something else. | |
| I gotta share with you, did you see what Tommy Tuberville said about Putin and why he invaded Ukraine? | |
| I do a really good job of avoiding everything that Tommy Tuberville says, but because this is a show, I will now OK. | |
| I mean, listen, I'm not quoting some, you know, some rando here. | |
| This is the the senator from Alabama. | |
| He basically said, I'm looking for the quote right now, but basically said that, you know, because they're starving in Russia, they have to take over Ukraine because there's bread there and things that he can go, he can feed his people. | |
| He needs more farmland if he goes into Ukraine. | |
| That's the reason. | |
| Here's what he said. | |
| He can't feed his people, quote unquote. | |
| It's a communist country. | |
| Oh, he said it's a communist country. | |
| So he can't feed his people so they need more farmland. | |
| I think this is at CPAC. | |
| No, he was interviewed in local news in Alabama. | |
| That's what he said. | |
| So this is what we're dealing with here. | |
| This is a sender that this fucking party elected that represents you. | |
| If you're in the Republican Party, this is your guy. | |
| This is the guy who represents you and what you all stand for. | |
| I gotta tell you, first of all, that is as stupid as stupid gets. | |
| That's incredible. | |
| Oh, I know. | |
| And while we're on the subject, as stupid as stupid gets, Trump's reaction to this is mind-numbingly stupid. | |
| And I don't know, Nick, how you feel about it, but the further we get away from the Trump presidency... God, I hate saying those words. | |
| The further we get away from Trump's presidency, every time I see a quote from him, I, I've lost my callous. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| Like for four years, it was like, yeah, whatever dumb shit thing this guy says, obviously he's going to say it because he's, you know, just absolutely inept and stupid. | |
| His statements on Putin, are not just self-serving and self-aggrandizing like this would never happen if I was in office and meanwhile he's like I looked on TV and I saw and it's always about TV because he's obsessed with TV and what he sees on there and he's talking to it like who's the kid on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? | |
| Is that Tommy TV or whatever is that his name? | |
| Is it Tommy TV? | |
| It's basically Tommy TV, but you know, he had the keys to the nuclear arsenal for four years. | |
| And he's like, "Oh, so many tanks." And "Oh, those are peacekeepers all right." And "Oh, very smart." Calling him a genius. | |
| Watching the right wing... | |
| Oh, sorry, Mike TV. | |
| Mike TV, there you go. | |
| It's so astoundingly stupid. | |
| And then in contrast, speaking of the people who reverse engineer what Trump has done and turn it into an ideology or an ethos, watching people like Tucker Carlson, who every single night is basically denying Ukraine's right to exist, is calling it a client state of the United States of America, like watching the idiot part of the GOP | |
| like flounder with this thing is they're trying to understand why they support it and watching the ideological apparatus of it which understands that this is about white patriarchal evangelical illiberal power it's astounding and and and the people who for a long time Nick have been pretending like this wasn't going on if they are never going to recognize what has happened here This would be the moment, right? | |
| And the fact that they still can't understand and they can't wrap their heads around it. | |
| Like, I don't know if those people are ever going to open their eyes at this point. | |
| Well, the thing that I've noticed, and I had this conversation last week with a person in my family, and it's an extreme melancholy when you're faced with the ideology from the right. | |
| And when someone who, like this person I'm talking to, is so inundated, has all the answers based on all the things that it is to Tucker and Hannity and all these guys. | |
| But, like, here's where it becomes clear. | |
| I don't think it has anything to do, necessarily, with what you just mentioned. | |
| I think that they have to be against the Democrats. | |
| They have to bend over backwards with whatever they can do to somehow throw shade on the Democrats and their vision and what they think the country should be. | |
| And so no matter what, if they have to go back and reverse their positions or have to almost like just accept completely... By the way, they'll even acknowledge that certain pieces of information are troubled at best and have not stood up to scrutiny, but it doesn't matter and they hope that you don't check it out. | |
| And it all has to go down to as long as I can make sure that there's shade thrown at the other party, that is my only, that's my goal. | |
| That's the only thing I stand for. | |
| I think there are a lot of people who are like that. | |
| I think, I think again, much like when we talk about like January 6th or what's going on in this country, it's sort of like, like a seven layer cake, except for it's just disgusting and not even close to being delicious, right? | |
| Mayo and yeah. | |
| You know, it's, it's, it's like, You do have, and the Republican Party's always been like this, you have a very, very thin minority of the Republican Party, which is ideological, right? | |
| That actually has beliefs. | |
| You know, they're well-read, they have like an ideology that they believe and that they express, and if put on the spot, like they could tell you what it is, right? | |
| Meanwhile, that small, slim layer of Republican right-wing people They control everybody underneath, right? | |
| That's the only way they could ever possibly win elections. | |
| And underneath there are, I'm sorry, but Donald Trump is lucky every day of his life that he doesn't swallow his own tongue. | |
| I mean, really, that's the level of intellectual heft that we're dealing with here. | |
| And by the way, the only person who rivals him is his son, Donald Trump Jr., who today, and Donald Trump Jr., first and foremost, is a troll. | |
| That's what he is. | |
| Like, that's the only thing he's got. | |
| Like, he's such a pathetic wretch of a person. | |
| That today he was like, uh, now would be a good time not to worry about pronouns. | |
| And it's like, okay, that's what you got? | |
| Like, really? | |
| Like, you're a guy who has floated the possibility of running for governor of New York, and all you can do is try and troll people? | |
| Like, you're so pathetic and sad. | |
| And meanwhile, you have a group up top. | |
| I'm sorry, but they support Vladimir Putin because they are part of the same political and ideological project. | |
| And Vladimir Putin has talked to them and has coordinated with them and has helped them financially and politically and socially. | |
| And meanwhile underneath you have a bunch of people who probably can't even begin to understand why they're doing what they're doing. | |
| But you're right, it's just like this weird oppositional trench warfare politics. | |
| And it's sad because it's not like, I'm much more into like math. | |
| If I could prove a point with math, I'd much rather do that. | |
| Like, you know, we have to argue about the economy or this and that, whatever. | |
| And it's like, they don't want to react to that. | |
| You know, you want to be able to say, well, look, you know, The Republicans have done more to blow up the deficit than the Democrats ever have over the last 40 years, and yet you're railing against, you know, the deficit we have now and all these things we never complained about before. | |
| But, like, it's fascinating, again, to see the reaction when you say, you know, it is. | |
| It's math. | |
| I'd be happy to show you if you want to see that. | |
| And they're just like, you know that Danny DeVito meme where he goes, nope, and he just shakes his head? | |
| No, I've seen that. | |
| I use it all the time. | |
| That's what it's like. | |
| It's like, nope, nope. | |
| I can't even hear it. | |
| It doesn't make sense to me. | |
| I'm not going to acknowledge it. | |
| And it just continues to build on their layer cake in their head filled with sour cream and mayo. | |
| Awful. | |
| And the thing about it is, and this is sad, but most people don't understand why they believe what they believe. | |
| They really don't. | |
| They really don't. | |
| They're acted upon by forces that they could never possibly understand. | |
| Like, one of the biggest things that has taken place in this country is that there has there has become an economic divide that is like really hard to put your finger on but it comes down to this there are people who are internationally wealthy you know what i mean like they have they have tens of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars or billions right and then you have a bunch of people who just have millions You know? | |
| And like, so they might be the linoleum king of Nebraska. | |
| Actually, it would probably be more like Lincoln, Nebraska. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| One area, they're the main person there, and they probably have a worth of $6 million, $7 million. | |
| They don't know why they don't have tens of millions. | |
| They don't know why they don't have hundreds of millions. | |
| And so, as a result, they feel like they're repressed. | |
| Right. | |
| And that they're oppressed and someone is holding them down. | |
| And those are the people who are flying in on private jets to storm the capital on January 6th because they believe there's a conspiracy against them. | |
| Meanwhile, today, they woke up and immediately were like, yeah, this Vladimir Putin guy, I think he's probably on the right side of this thing. | |
| And the Ukrainian civilians who are dying, like, oh, they're on the wrong side of this thing. | |
| They don't understand That that's how they ended up on this side of the divide, right? | |
| The ideological people at the top of that bullshit layer cake, they understand it. | |
| They get it. | |
| That's why they can appeal to those people. | |
| That's why they can bring them along. | |
| Tucker Carlson knows what he's doing. | |
| Tucker Carlson is a smart person. | |
| Steve Bannon is a smart person. | |
| The people who are employed by these think tanks are incredibly smart people. | |
| Then meanwhile, these other people are like, You've been listening to our Patreon episode. | |
| But wait! | |
| The whole thing is available for free and open to anybody who wants to hear the rest of it. | |
| Just visit patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast |