Republicans on the Judiciary Committee have been trying to one-up each other with their racist and mysoginist attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in order to get sound bites for their future presidential runs. Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how this happening, plus answer Patreon subscriber questions on a range of topics including Donald Trump's lawsuits and the situation in Ukraine.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This is a special weekender edition because first of all, I am in a hotel, which means that I'm going to sound terrible, undoubtedly.
You know what?
Don't let anybody tell you I'm not.
That sounds great.
Your hotel room sounds amazing to me.
I love that and I love that.
I love the support.
I just I care about this.
I want this to be good.
I care about our fans.
I care about our patrons.
So, my apologies for hotel room quality recording, but to make up for it, we have a whole list of your questions.
So, we are going to get to that in a minute, but Nick, we have to start by talking about the confirmation hearings of Kentonji Brown-Jackson.
I wish I could tell you that it has been a respectful affair.
I wish it was true what everyone was saying, that Republicans were going to let this one slide because they had already stolen the Supreme Court.
They are not letting it slide, and it is just devolving into absolute racism, sexism, and apocalyptic fear-mongering.
It could not be more repulsive.
Jared, just tell me one thing.
What is a woman?
No, I'm sorry.
Define a woman for me.
You know, if I could just Take a second and admire the fact that the Republicans tried to bait her into a larger culture war question and she totally sidestepped them.
And now the Republicans are using her artful sidestep as a weapon against her and have now turned it into the biggest issue in the world because obviously, Ketanji Brown-Jackson wants to destroy all genders, bring in CRT, And, you know, just more or less destroy the United States of America.
That's what we're dealing with here.
And also, this isn't even about her, which is the worst part about it because it's so disrespectful to what she stands for.
They're doing this to get those soundbites to run for president in a couple years, right?
Or run for whatever they're running for.
That's what's so clearly obvious to me, and it's probably not obvious to their constituents or people who might vote for them, but that's what makes it so disgusting because They're just ruining, which by the way, Cory Booker, we need to make sure that he gets the kind of props he deserves.
He is not letting them, in a way, and he gave us a speech yesterday that had me almost in tears with the fact that he's trying to cut through that noise, silence these Republicans, and make sure that nothing gets in the way of this momentous opportunity to have the first black woman, first defense attorney on the Supreme Court.
It's a rollercoaster, man.
Well, and you know, everybody who sort of thought that this thing was going to go off without a hitch.
They were like, don't worry, we already own the Supreme Court, we'll go ahead and let you have one.
Never underestimate the Republican hatred of black women.
There is no possibility that they were not going to turn this into the largest possible circus that they could manage.
And you couldn't be more right.
You have a bunch of presidential contenders who want to get themselves out there as the culture warriors who can replace Donald Trump because that's what they're trying to do.
And on top of that, they're trying to get on Fox News.
And you even, you're watching this constantly.
They're just trying to create content.
And they're doing it by being as disgusting as they possibly can.
Lindsey Graham, by the way, friend of the show, friend of the pod, Lindsey Graham basically, by the way, still thinks the war on terror is still the biggest issue in the United States of America.
Grandstands, talks about how he wants all prisoners to die, and then just gets up in a huff and stomps out.
Ted Cruz, you know, basically an ambulance chaser, you know, reads the tea leaves and decides where he's at on every issue.
He's decided he'll double down on this.
Marsha Blackburn should be ashamed of herself.
I mean, Marsha Blackburn is just an absolutely pathetic United States Senator.
And Josh Hawley is a disgusting human being.
And what he has done over the past couple of days by introducing QAnon concepts and conspiracy theories into the record of this woman in order to try and defame her and knock out her candidacy has it's honestly, Nick, it's one of the most disgusting things I've seen in American politics in a hot minute.
And that's saying something.
Oh, listen, what speaks volumes is that you couldn't even mention John Kennedy amidst all of these people that are doing this, who not once but twice called her articulate and knows without question what he is doing, what he is saying, and why that is offensive.
You know that that's how bad it was that he was the least offensive person in this whole thing in this proceeding.
I kind of wished I would have heard Ketanji Jackson Brown say something to the fact that like you know to Holly or whatever saying do you honestly think that I approve of Child porn?
I really wish she would have said, why are you asking this question?
You know, just to kind of follow it up.
Now, you can't, you're not allowed to.
She doesn't want to stir it up any more than it has to be.
She simply is answering exactly the way she was coached to do it, which is perfectly appropriate.
But at some point, you wish somebody would step in here and say this because she's a mother.
She's a wife.
She's got law enforcement in her family.
I mean, this is clearly someone who does not approve of child pornography or people who are trafficking in these things.
And, you know, I don't know, I'm going on a bunch of different tangents, but here's the thing I want to say.
They want to drag her over the coals for like, you know, not adding three months or six months to a sentence.
As if those extra three months would suddenly, you know, guarantee that these people, like, wouldn't be arrested again within eight years of being incarcerated or whatever they're trying to say.
It's ridiculous what that is and why they're trying to pin this on her.
I don't know.
It's really, you lose faith in the system pretty fast.
Well, I want to talk about the legal system for just a second.
I want to say something that a lot of people don't want to admit, that probably would keep a lot of people up at night, which is the legal system is completely and utterly flawed.
And to sit with any judge, I don't care who it is, to sit with any judge and just sort of pick out certain cases, certain sentences, all of that, you can destroy anybody.
You can say they're inconsistent, you can say they're soft on crime, you can go ahead and look at somebody who committed another crime after they've been released, or you name it.
You can actually defame anybody who wears the robe at any given time.
What Josh Hawley did was very, very specifically plotted out.
And the idea was to go ahead and lean into the QAnon conspiracy narratives that liberals and leftists and powerful people are part of a larger child-abusing conspiracy, and that's why they need to be defeated.
He knew what he was doing.
The people on his staff knew what he was doing.
And it is a further indication that the Republican Party is not going away from QAnon.
They have to have QAnon.
They have to associate themselves with it and embrace it.
And what Josh Hawley has done, and what he has been doing recently, has been embracing those fringe elements of the Republican Party and bringing them in closer.
And if you listen to what he says, and he says it all very, very explicitly, He is saying that there is a concentrated evil conspiracy going after white men and going after white people and their families.
And Kentonji Brown-Jackson has become the embodiment of white supremacist paranoia.
The idea, and you know this as well as I do, the idea is that affirmative action has made an entire generation of untalented people who have risen up and they're being used as pawns in a larger culture war to attack white people.
And I have to tell you, Jackson's candidacy has brought to the surface some real ugliness that we all knew was there.
They can't handle it.
They can't even begin to hide that that stuff is there.
I mean, and she is a completely inoffensive candidate.
I mean, just completely inoffensive.
And the fact that they've had to go to these depths is really telling.
Alright, you're going to have to talk me out of at some point discussing the nuance of child porn, I suppose.
But let's put that somewhere else for a second, because... By the way, they basically... I just want to say this about this.
The fact that he talked about this, and the fact that they're always talking about this, it's just a weapon.
Nick, I posted today basically talking about where all this stuff comes from.
And do you know what happened?
One of these major right-wing accounts came after me and was like, oh, you're defending this?
Because that's what they do.
That's the goal here.
It's basically just a cudgel to sit there and say, "Oh, you defend child abuse." It's like, no, that's not what we're talking about.
You are simply taking this other issue and transplanting it because they don't care about issues.
They don't care about actual discussion.
They don't care about actual discourse.
It's about winning.
It's always about winning.
That's what this is. - And every judge on every political part of the spectrum has all come out and said that they need to redo these sentencing guidelines for this particular violation of a crime Because they were written before we had the internet with all the kind of stuff and opportunities you have now to download and whatever.
And there are distinct categories of these violators that now deserve certain types of punishment.
She is punishing these people.
This is not like she is letting anybody off or anybody free and there's not even much, you know, wiggle room anyway for what she's doing in terms of, you know, assigning sentences.
But let me just go pivot that for a second because as part of the race thing, what they are also doing is, you know, in line with what you said about affirmative action, What they're trying to gin up is the notion that look at all the black people that are committing all these crimes that are now getting a lenient sentence because she is black.
That is what I hear loud and clear screaming from the rafters from these people is that that's what they're trying to connect here.
It almost reminds me of, I don't know if you remember, there's a tennis player from Australia, Leighton Hewitt, I think, who was number one or top ten, whatever.
And remember, he accused a line judge in the middle of a match of favoring his opponent, who was black, and the line judge was black.
And like, that was actually a discussion for a while.
But this is sort of like what they're doing as well, saying, clearly, look, she's going to let black people off on easy, you know, with an easy sentence because they share the same color of skin.
That might be worse than the smearing of the child porn stuff.
I don't know.
Oh, it's the same thing as Black Lives Matter, right?
Oh, they're burning down America's cities and nobody's doing anything about it.
It is part of, and we've talked about this, but just to make sure that everybody's on the same page.
It's the fascist white supremacy conspiracy theory, right?
There are puppet masters outside, usually Jewish puppet masters, who are controlling the world and they're trying to destroy America.
You have a bunch of liberal leftist traitors on the inside who are trying to destroy the country from within.
And then the third side of that conspiracy theory are people of color.
And they are dangerous and they have to be subordinated and their will has to be thwarted or else they'll destroy literally everything.
And you have been listening to a free preview of our Patreon-exclusive Weekender Show.
If you want to get in on all the fun and get that bonus episode every week, not to mention exclusive content, live hangouts, question and answer sessions.
We're even going to do some of these live so you can come and watch how the sausage is made.
All you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
On top of that, you get to hang out with the Muckrake community, which are Really good group of people.
