Ginny Thomas, January 6th, and the Unraveling of Everything
Nick Hauselman is on vacation, so Jared Yates Sexton is left to fly solo. Jared addresses the cold, ugly capitalistic mess that is the aftermath of the Will Smith/Chris Rock incident before diving into the deeper story of Ginny Thomas pushing for an electoral coup as the economy and economic system starts to come undone. To support the show and access additional content, including the extra Weekender show every Friday and live-shows, become a patron at http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
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He's taking the day off, out on vacation somewhere in beautiful, beautiful California.
Which is unfortunate because I think if Nick was here, I think he would get a real kick out of talking about the biggest story in the world, which is, of course, Will Smith slapping Chris Rock live on the Oscars and the resulting media firestorm that has developed around it.
We have a lot more important things to talk about today, including Jenny Thomas getting caught, wanting to overthrow the Democratic presidential election of 2020, a federal judge saying that Donald Trump probably committed felonies in trying to overturn that election, and you know, the fate of democracy and so much more.
But I do want to talk about that incident real fast.
Um, not for the pop culture components of it.
Uh, I think that is a pretty thin gruel to be honest with you.
Uh, and also symptomatic of a lot of what's wrong with the United States of America and, uh, Western culture as it has created and proliferated around the world.
But I think it's a, weirdly enough, a really instructive moment for something larger that we have to discuss.
This is one of those moments where, you know, as a college professor, you see something happen that maybe catches the attention of everybody for just a moment and then you go in the classroom and you're like, you know what, let's break this down for just a quick little second.
So if you'll allow me, I want to give you my take on all of this.
For anybody who doesn't know, I can't imagine at this point that anybody has avoided this discourse because this was a perfect pop culture moment.
For for what this country has become, it included violence.
It included mysteries of compulsion.
It is a it is a spectacle from which we probably will not be able to untangle ourselves for a while.
But on the Oscars last night, comedian Chris Rock went up to award Best Documentary.
He did a couple of jokes.
They weren't particularly good.
And then happened to mention Jada Pinkett Smith that her hair was shaved.
For those who don't know, Jada has suffered from alopecia.
This is something I was not aware of until after the incident.
My guess is what we're going to hear in the next couple of days is that Chris Rock did not know that this was a medical condition before he made fun of it.
I will say he should have made fun of it.
We shouldn't be making fun of people for the medical conditions.
That is pretty repulsive behavior.
Will Smith, of course, was caught on camera laughing at this joke.
And then when the camera cut, something must have changed because he stormed up on stage and slapped Chris Rock in the face.
After that, of course, Will Smith was awarded Best Actor for his role in King Richard.
And it was a rambling, borderline, incoherent speech.
It was obvious that he wasn't well.
He did his best to, I guess, try and explain himself.
But it was obviously a speech given by a person who wasn't well.
And I think that's something that we can Sort of understand as this thing has played itself out now.
I don't want to talk about the he said she said popular culture components of this.
Again, find that very very lame to be honest with you.
What I do want to talk about, though, is what this moment means and how it is instructive in terms of how American culture and Western culture works.
And it's something to keep in mind for the future.
In this case, let's look at the components.
We have a literal assault that took place on live television between two famous people.
We then had a emotional situation that took place afterwards in which the person who assaulted the other person got on stage after winning their first Oscar, by the way.
And should have been the culmination or the pinnacle of their career.
Instead, he goes up on stage, is unable to contain his emotions, cries, rambles incoherently for a very long time.
This is a tragedy all the way around.
This is obviously very compelling from a human standpoint, but based on those two main components here, not to mention with a little bit of toxic masculinity sprinkled in for good measure, of course.
In the midst of all of this, this should have been a moment of Revoltion, perhaps maybe a little bit of empathy in there.
Instead, what happened immediately as this occurred was that people of all stripes, whether or not they were entertainment reporters, personalities, writers, podcasters, YouTube streamers, you name it,
They watched this thing happen, which, by the way, a crime took place on live television, followed by an unwell person in the aftermath of that crime.
They looked at that and one of the first things that they thought, besides surprise, was how can I possibly profit off of this?
This is going to make for great content.
This is going to help my YouTube channel.
This is going to help my podcast.
This is going to help my substack.
This is going to help whatever.
And I'm talking about this in part as somebody who right now is recording a podcast.
Someone who has a substack.
Somebody who obviously has a Twitter account.
I want to talk about the motivations here.
And what capitalism and hyper capitalism and neoliberalism have done to us.
There's a phrase that goes around quite a bit.
It's homo economicus.
It's the idea that we have been changed as a species because we have this artificial currency or artificial worth that compels us in ways that we oftentimes aren't even aware of.
In this case, we have a front row seat.
Up close and personal.
With what homo economicus means and what capitalism, neoliberalism, hyper capitalism, what they do to us.
It drains the humanity from us.
It makes us so focused on our own goals, on our own wealth, on our own careers, that it keeps us from recognizing human tragedy, human suffering.
And I would even go so far, and I don't feel bad in saying this, that it's much like the war in Ukraine.
We have a lot of cable networks, a lot of personalities, a lot of reporters, a lot of former military brass who have seen fit during this humanitarian crisis, this possibly species-defining moment that could lead, by the way, to our annihilation.
It could lead to the actual extermination of the human species and life on Earth.
They see this as like something to profit off of, something that can help their careers or give them a boost or possibly get them on CNN or MSNBC or Fox News, you name it.
This is something that has concerned me for a while.
And I'll never forget, and this was one of those moments where I think it became very clear to me.
It wasn't something I thought about all that much.
It wasn't something that I gave all that much time.
Back when Charlie Sheen and you might remember Charlie Sheen had this breakdown years ago where he went into quite possibly a manic phase in which he just started saying a ton of really really bizarre troubling things and all of a sudden you could not
Escape Charlie Sheen a And I'm sorry Charlie Sheen is not an a-list actor this is more or less a b-list celebrity that nobody had thought about in years and All of a sudden it was Charlie Sheen was everywhere it was anything that it was everything that anyone could talk about and Why was that it was something that?
Captivated humanity it was a breakdown and we loved these breakdowns and We love watching these famous people suffer and then collapse.
I mean, Britney Spears is a wonderful example of this.
Somebody who had everything.
Somebody who captured the attention of the entire world, who suddenly suffered under mental unwellness and collapsed underneath it.
And only now is she starting to gain back a semblance of control over her life.
But she was sacrificed at the altar of Western obsession with celebrity and gossip And these spectacles.
This isn't just tied to celebrities, though.
This is also part of what got Donald Trump elected President of the United States of America.
A two-bit reality TV star business failure embarrassment buffoon.
He was given billions, with a B, billions of dollars of free advertising space by all the networks, all of the newspapers, all of the streaming channels, you name it.
They gave Donald Trump billions of dollars worth of campaign promotion.
And why?
Because he was an embarrassment.
Because he said crazy things.
Because he was a scandal machine.
They gave him billions of dollars.
He may not be good for America, but he's good for CBS.
It's really disturbing.
And it's really awful.
And I have to tell you, as I'm saying this, there is no way that things are going to get better unless we start addressing homo economicus.
Unless we start addressing this craven, profit-seeking madness.
This is one of the defining issues of our time.
And this obviously is not as important as Donald Trump being elected President of the United States of America.
But I think it is a really, really instructive moment.
It's like one of those moments where the mask falls just a little bit and you get a peek behind it.
Just enough to start to understand what's going on.
Just pay attention to the frenzy around this, how it plays out, what it does, because this is about profiting off of human misery and chaos and fear.
That's what this is.
And that's what we've become.
And we, we should be better than this.
We should be so, so much better than this.
Now, speaking of people who should be better than what they are, I gotta talk about Jenny Thomas.
So, it has come out.
That Jenny Thomas, who is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is in her own right a conservative lawyer, an activist, a pundit, has been revealed to have traded multiple texts with Mark Meadows, Donald Trump's chief of staff, imploring him to try and steal the 2020 presidential election.
These texts are something.
I'll just say that.
Here's one exchange.
This came from November 10th, in which Jenny Thomas wrote to Mark Meadows, Chief of Staff of Donald Trump.
Help this great president stand firm, Mark.
You are the leader with him who is standing for America's constitutional governance at the precipice.
The majority knows Biden and the left is attempting the greatest heist of our history.
I mean, it's fundraising email boilerplate language.
I mean, it's just absolutely absurd stuff.
And you read it and it's so cringy because it's just so...
Ooh, it's such email forward nonsense.
Even the writing, and it brings back some of that trauma of all those Trump tweets with the weird capitalization and linguistics.
I mean, it's so, so bad.
And then Mark Meadows writes back, this is a fight of good versus evil.
Which, by the way, remember, we talk about this all the time.
In how you take something material you take something like a political battle or a political debate or political contest and what do you do?
In order to legitimize something that is cruel, exploitive, illegal, anti-democratic, you gotta give it a religious sheen, right?
Because that's what does it in your mind.
If it's literally a fight of good versus evil, then you should do whatever you can, right?
In order to win that battle.
Meadows continues, evil always looks like the victor until the king of kings triumphs.
That's Jesus, in case you're keeping track at home.
This, again, is a battle between Christianity and Satan.
Do not grow weary in well-doing.
The fight continues.
I've staked my career on it.
Well, at least my time in D.C.
on it.
And then Jenny Thomas replies, Thank you.
Needed that.
This plus the conversation with my best friend just now.
I will keep, I will try to keep holding on.
America is worth it.
An absolutely nonsensical exchange.
But what people keep coming back around on and I want to address the way that this story has been reported so far.
At first, just so we can all get on the same page and then we'll get into the larger, more important story that's actually taking place here.
This is the wife of a Supreme Court justice.
Telling the chief of staff of a sitting president.
To do anything possible to overturn the rightfully won election of their rival.
To overturn the will of the people and interfere in the democratic process.
Now, do I think that Clarence Thomas should resign?
Absolutely, I think Clarence Thomas should resign.
I don't think Clarence Thomas should have ever sat on the Supreme Court in the first place.
I think he should have dropped out of the process when the Anita Hill information came to the forefront.
I don't think that he should have been confirmed even if he didn't drop out.
On the Supreme Court he has been pretty much an ineffectual member who has voted with the conservatives every time.
I believe he's only spoke out loud once or twice at this point.
He's not engaged.
He doesn't really contribute to anything besides rubber stamping anything that helps the Republican Party, corporations, and the wealthy.
At this point, he should resign.
He absolutely should.
Not only is he compromised, he's always been compromised, and this behavior means he should resign.
I totally think that.
At the very least, anything that ever comes up regarding the Republican Party or elections again, he should recuse himself if he doesn't resign, but he's not ethical and that's not going to happen.
Absolutely it is.
It only further shows something that we've been documenting for a while now, which is that the Supreme Court is not some sort of a priest class.
It is a political body.
It always has been.
And it just so happens that the corruption and the partisanship is on full display right now.
It's not new.
It just so happens to be at a level where people aren't going to be able to deny it anymore.
So it's legitimacy gone.
Everyone knows that this is a political body.
That's kind of a non-story at this point.
The Supreme Court was stolen by the Republican Party.
We all know that.
We all watched it.
Everybody knows what this is.
Everybody knows that this is a bought and sold situation with the wealthy and the powerful.
The real story here is not the Clarence Thomas angle.
The real story here is that the attempt to steal the election of 2020, the attempt to destroy democracy, the attempt to overthrow the will of the people, and this continuing project that I've been talking about forever to undermine liberal democracy in a whole, is top to bottom the entire purview of the Republican Party and the American right.
People want you to believe that this started with Donald Trump, that before he came along, the Republican Party was just a normal political party.
Yeah, they had their warts and all, but I tell you what, they, they, they were at least playing by the rules of the game and they weren't looking to destroy democracy.
And he came along and for a minute there, it got ugly, but you know, he got beat in, uh, in 2020 and now everything's fine.
That's a really conventional piece of history that's being sold anymore.
He was the problem, right?
He was the aberration.
I say all the time that he was a symptom, not the sickness.
And now everybody wants to say that he is, of course, the sickness.
And, you know, it wasn't really a coup and it really wasn't that big of an attempt on the presidency or power.
I mean, you know, whatever.
Whatever helps you sleep at night, I guess.
That's, um...
It's not going to help the rest of us, but you know, cheers.
That's going to help you sleep at night.
The truth is that Jenny Thomas is as mainstream and as connected of a Republican and as representative of the Republican Party as nearly anybody.
Her background
As I've already nodded to, is as a conservative lawyer who has worked incredibly hard to represent the wealthy and the powerful in the legislative process, to try and make sure that people get paid less, that regulations get destroyed, that women, by the way, are never going to be paid the same as men, and to keep in place these sexist, classist,
Racist ideas that that permeate The American economic system.
This has been her entire purpose of her career Along the way Jenny Thomas who of course is playing a role in January 6th, and we'll get more into that in just a second has basically Run up a resume that if you took her name off of it and put it up next to any mainstream, influential Republican operative, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
She worked with the Heritage Foundation.
I've mentioned them before on this podcast.
This is the think tank that creates the instruction manual for Republican presidents.
And by the way, what are they trying to do?
They're trying to get rid of regulation.
They're trying to get rid of taxes.
They're trying to destroy the federal government and any sort of power or oversight that it has.
They're looking to promote hypercapitalism, neoliberalism.
That has been their entire purpose.
And why do they do that?
Do they just do that because, I don't know, it's a hobby of theirs?
Or it's just ideologically where they fall?
It just so happens that the heritage people get together and do this.
No.
They are on the front lines of the battle for control over how America works.
And where do they get their money?
Who are they working on behalf of?
A very, very small number of right-wing, libertarian-minded, powerful, and wealthy people.
These are the Koch brothers and people like them.
That's where money comes from for groups like the Heritage Foundation.
They go to Washington D.C.
on behalf of these extraordinarily wealthy people and they do their business.
Jenny Thomas worked for the Heritage Foundation.
She also worked for the Chamber of Commerce, which, by the way, works the exact same way.
The Chamber of Commerce, which has been behind so much of this, is about promoting the market and promoting businesses and getting rid of any federal oversight or regulation.
All of that, by the way, just sort of underlines the fact that she worked hand in hand With George H.W.
Bush and George W. Bush.
This is mainstream Republican politics.
George H.W.
Bush and George W. Bush were sort of cut from the same cloth in terms of what they were promoting.
Now, W. Bush, of course, we remember for his swaggering, fake cowboy posturing.
But the Bushes were very much neoliberals, pushing free market, or extreme free markets, deregulation, and austerity for everybody except for the most powerful and the most wealthy.
Of course, then we have a moment in which Jenny Thomas then works and promotes the Tea Party, which is a moment where the same wealthy people who are funding things like the Heritage Foundation or the Chamber of Commerce or are giving all their donations to people like George H.W.
Bush or George W. Bush, Where they figured out that they could leverage all of the conspiracy theories and racism around Barack Obama being elected the first black president of the United States of America.
They decided they could use that fear to push their agenda.
That they could create an astroturfed, absolutely artificial movement based on conspiracy theories and latent white supremacist paranoia, that they could do that to push America further and further to the right and essentially take over the Republican Party in totality.
They sort of worked together, the Republican Party and these ideas, these forces, particularly this extremist libertarianism.
They had worked together for years.
But in this case, the wealthy who bankrolled all these politicians, all these think tanks, all these movements and campaigns, they saw an opportunity to really take over the party even more.
And how did they do that?
They did it with the Tea Party, by mobilizing a faux populistic movement that capitalized off the conspiracy theories and latent white supremacist paranoia regarding Barack Obama as the first black president.
Jenny Thomas has her fingerprints all over that.
Now, after working for years and years and years to disenfranchise people, to overturn regulation, to forward these interests that we're talking about, Ginny Thomas did not initially support Donald Trump in terms of the primaries.
I could be wrong on this, but I'm fairly certain that she supported Ted Cruz, who, by the way, it has just come out.
And this is wonderful that Ted Cruz had his own plan to try and overturn the election of 2020.
So well done, Ted.
Really, really well done.
So what happened?
Is that Jenny Thomas, after Donald Trump, wins the nomination?
She joins a group called Groundswell.
And Groundswell is a group, it's another one of these shadow-funded organizations that's always working on the periphery and really affecting politics in massive, massive ways.
She starts working with Groundswell.
And one of the things that this organization is trying to do is they try and influence Donald Trump.
And I want to go ahead and talk for just a moment about what was happening with Trump and the Republican Party proper.
I've already spoken about the fact that he was given billions of dollars of free advertising from the networks and newspapers and all these mediums.
So Donald Trump obviously catches fire and does it by running to the left and in certain ways of the Democrats and the right of the Republicans.
He's all over the place with a completely incoherent, off-the-map, pseudo-political philosophy that he doesn't mean, by the way.
He can go around talking about making America great again, draining the swamp, building a wall, meanwhile telling people he's bringing back their factories or that they've been screwed by free trade deals.
Basically anything that can voice the anger of people who feel like they aren't being heard and who, by the way, have been radicalized by right-wing propaganda and just absolute garbage for years.
Donald Trump was able to do all of this not because he was some sort of political genius.
But because he had help.
And part of that help came in the form, of course, of people like Steve Bannon.
And Steve Bannon, who is a white nationalist who is pushing illiberal democracy, Christian democracy, whatever we want to call it, but it's authoritarianism and it's a reformation of past hierarchical power, trying to bring it into a new age and possibly plunge us back into the past and get rid of democracy and multiculturalism and liberal democracy and you name it.
I mean, just trying to construct a horrific future.
One of the things that happens here is that after Trump is elected, and you might remember Trump's inaugural speech, of course, he's talking about American carnage, he's talking about factories going away, he's talking about free trade deals, he's going to make he's talking about factories going away, he's talking about free trade deals, he's going to make America great Those are the words of Steve Bannon coming out of Trump's mouth.
Trump doesn't believe any of this.
I mean, he doesn't have any actual principles.
But, I mean, that is what got him elected, in large part, along with other things that we've talked about.
Trump gets into power and one of the things that happens is once Trump gets into power there becomes more and more of a tug of war over that power and over the influence.
Steve Bannon wanted to use Trump as a cudgel to push a liberalism and authoritarianism and this sort of national conservatism that we're now dealing with in the post-Trump times.
But as soon as Trump is elected, he's handed the same report from the Heritage Foundation.
That same instruction manual on how you're supposed to be a Republican president.
And how are you supposed to be a Republican president?
Well, it's a pretty standard thing.
You get rid of regulations.
You cut taxes for the wealthy.
You install austerity for the people and you push hypercapitalism, neoliberalism, this extreme idea of a free market society that is completely and utterly focused on helping the wealthy and the powerful.
Well, guess what?
That's what he does.
He absolutely turns his back on this faux populist movement Which was a lot like the Tea Party, by the way.
Just another iteration of it, a new generation of it.
He turns his back on those people, continues to tell them that he's there for them and he's going to do what they want him to do.
Meanwhile, of course, he fires Bannon, not just because of what happened in Charlottesville with the alt-right and those white nationalists and extremists, But also because Steve Bannon was getting too much attention and he was also engaged in sort of a civil war with Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law.
Bannon gets kicked to the side of the road like, you know, a rotten tomato.
And all of a sudden that neoliberal libertarian idea that people like Ginny Thomas are so fond of that they're trying to push that all of these people around Trump Want.
It kicks into high gear.
And Trump just continues selling the same bullshit, saying he's gonna make America great again, bring back factories, help the normal people, all of that, while meanwhile just basically just stomping on the gas pedal of the neoliberal project.
And it just leads to more open corruption and human suffering.
All that takes place.
Now, there's a thing that happens in all of this, and we need to understand this getting up to January 6th of 2021.
And we need to talk about how we move from someone like a Ginny Thomas moving from groundswell And trying to get these neoliberal appointments within the Trump administration.
How they move from that to advocating the overthrow of a Democratic election.
How does that occur?
How does that take place?
Well, give me a moment.
I want to change speeds for a second.
Put a pin in this.
We're going to come right back to Ginny Thomas.
We're going to come right back to Trump, January 6th, all of that.
Or talk about a little something that is brewing right now.
This is an article that was originally published in Bloomberg and you might have noticed over the past.
A week or so the articles in Bloomberg and you might not have even noticed that one of these was an article in Bloomberg.
Maybe you saw it and you threw your laptop across the room or your phone across the room and vowed never to look at the Internet again.
There's this one article a few days ago that was like economic times are rough.
Nobody said this was going to be fun, but maybe you should stop eating meat and you know, maybe you should pick up a third or fourth job.
You'll figure it out.
Well, here's an article that just came out.
This is the title.
A world that's more expensive is starting to destroy demand.
And this is by David R. Baker, Alison Smith, and Sheila Taubin.
And one of the things that this article starts to get into, and it's really amazing by the way, that all of these people who are quote-unquote economic experts, These people who basically go to every one of these conferences.
They publish widely.
I mean they are paid millions a year to go to places and tell the rich and the powerful everything that they want to hear.
You've run across many of these people at some point.
And what happens is they'll go around espousing the gospel of free markets, neoliberalism, austerity, hyper capitalism, all of that.
And it's just, it's a religious truth, right?
Because that's what this is, by the way.
It's a religious faith.
And they'll run around and they'll talk about how, look at, look at growth.
Look at the GDP.
Look at, look at all this.
All the indicators are there that, that this thing is working great.
And, you know, we probably shouldn't raise anybody's wages because that would lead to inflation or that might cause a problem in the system.
And better yet, we should probably lower wages, get rid of regulation.
You know, just give more money to the wealthy and the powerful because they're obviously the people who should have that money.
Well, something funny about that.
And if you've been listening to this podcast for long enough, you've heard me talk about this a few times.
There is an inherent contradiction at the heart of capitalism.
And this is one of the reasons why I've been able to make the predictions that I have about the way the economy is going, politics is going, culture is going, society is going.
And that is because unfettered capitalism leads towards monopolization.
It leads to hoarding of wealth and power and capital.
As long as the wealthy and the powerful are allowed to control everything, What they're going to do is they're going to take more and more for themselves to the point where, I don't know, they're able to fund their own private space exploration programs.
Or they're able to try and end death as we know it, right?
Buying private islands.
Maybe 5, 6, 7, 8 private islands.
You know, there's no end to this.
What happens over time though is the inherent contradiction of capitalism starts to rear its ugly head.
What happens is, as the wealthy get more and more powerful, they buy off more of government, and all of a sudden, there is a vast, vast chasm of inequality that starts to open up.
And as that inequality takes place, inevitably they buy more and more of government, and that chasm of inequality grows and grows and grows.
And as they gain more power, they pay people less.
All of a sudden, you can't even get a job with benefits anymore.
You have to work as a gig worker and there's no minimum wage.
Nobody takes care of you.
And suddenly, like, the jobs that used to support people, those are gone because they've been moved overseas or they've been turned into slave labor, right?
And all of a sudden, you look up and it's like, you're in the United States of America.
Which is supposedly the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world.
And suddenly, people can't afford homes anymore.
Also, corporations and algorithms have just been buying them up and turning them around for profit, making sure that only the wealthiest people can actually own homes anymore.
I mean, literal home ownership, which is supposedly the bedrock of American consumer society and American society at large, all of a sudden that's not even really possible anymore.
And then you can't afford medicine.
You can't afford the education you're supposed to have in order to move up the ranks and engage in this professional managerial class.
All of a sudden, you're not able to buy anything.
Well, guess what?
The bottom falls out.
And this isn't new.
This isn't like something novel that I'm telling you about.
The reason why I've been able to predict this is the reason why anybody who actually pays attention to history and how these things works can tell you that this is going to happen.
Because this is what keeps happening with capitalism.
It keeps growing and growing and growing in terms of the consolidation of power and wealth until there's nobody left to buy those things anymore.
There's only a small concentration of people who can afford lives.
And guess what?
When that happens, you can't sell products anymore.
You can't sell houses anymore.
You can't sell cars anymore.
You can't even sell clothes anymore.
So what happens?
The bottom drops.
The market destroys itself.
It overheats.
It collapses.
Boom.
Bust.
You name it.
That's what we've been looking at for a while now.
And when you couple that with that chasm of inequality and austerity, which of course means we're not investing in healthcare, we're not investing in roads, we're not investing in communities and human lives anymore, and all of a sudden life feels empty and hollow and you're pissed off and you feel powerless and alone.
When all of these things combine, a pressure builds up.
And there's only a few ways that that pressure can be expressed.
One is through elections.
You can go and you can vote the bastards out.
You can find somebody who will actually represent you and your interest, and you can have almost a bloodless or a peaceful revolution.
Well, you gotta do what you can to stop that if you're among the wealthy and the powerful, which, strangely enough, is what they've been trying to do.
They've been trying to disenfranchise people.
They're gerrymandering their districts.
They're putting in place election officials who will overturn elections that they find to be offensive or problematic.
They tried an actual coup of the 2020 election.
Including the one that Jenny Thomas played a role in.
Not only did she encourage Mark Meadows in that regard, it's now looking like there's a very real possibility that she helped fund the efforts, that she helped organize the efforts.
Which is one of the things that I've been talking about this whole time, which is that January 6th was not just a bunch of people who rushed in the Capitol simply because they watched too many YouTube videos.
There are a lot of wealthy people who wanted to overthrow the election of 2020.
These are the same people who are trying to disenfranchise people now, who are trying to use conspiracy theories right now to overthrow public education and take over communities.
The same ones who are writing the legislation in the states to go after people, women, gay people, people of color.
The same things that the Heritage Foundation are trying to write to capitalize off of all of this.
One way that the pressures of this unequal disgusting society can be vented is through elections.
They're trying to get rid of that.
They don't want elections.
They don't want real democracy.
It's not good for business.
If you're electing new people based on merits and material conditions, I mean, my God, can you imagine?
They might actually get some regulation in there.
They might actually make sure that there's something more equal or something fairer.
They might get in the way of austerity.
We can't have that.
Absolutely.
Use QAnon and The Big Lie and all of these white supremacist paranoid narratives.
Use that.
Have them have them storm the Capitol.
And meanwhile we'll get somebody like a John Eastman over here to figure out a quote-unquote wink wink nudge nudge constitutional method to try and overthrow the system.
It's not a coincidence that people like Jenny Thomas, who are connected, of course, to a Supreme Court Justice, and by the way, a lot of those people are involved in this project as well, and they have been for a while, want to overturn democracy.
This is one of the steps in this entire matter.
And once the inherent contradictions of capitalism build up all that pressure, there are only a few ways for it to vent.
I've already said one.
That's an election.
You change things through the system.
The next possible method is through uprisings, through violence, through protest, through some sort of a movement to try and put things right.
Well, guess what?
When you face that and you start thinking about those things, the wealthy, the powerful, you know what they turn to?
You know who they turn to?
Fascist.
They turn to fascists.
And they turn to fascists who will recruit unhappy, disillusioned, directionless young men, particularly white young men.
They prey upon their insecurities.
They prey upon their fear.
They prey upon their lack of direction.
And like I keep saying, they hand them an armband.
They hand them a uniform.
They teach them how to march.
They fill them up with a bunch of conspiracy theories and white supremacist rhetoric.
And then they send them out to crack some skulls.
This is the story that keeps getting told.
Same thing with the election.
If they figure out a way to rig elections and people start protesting that and getting angry about it, they'll figure out some fascists to throw at them.
The convergence right now is in national conservatism.
That's where the people who want to disenfranchise people of color and women and gay people are partnering with Christian Dominionists.
Some of them are the same, some of them are just partnering with one another.
And they are taking on a more and more fascistic approach that takes things like Trumpism and intellectualizes it and tries to give it some sort of a philosophical sheen.
That's where all this is going.
That's what's happening here.
You have a moment of crisis.
The system is starting to buckle under the inequality and under the exploitation and the cruelty.
It will reach a point where the pressures have to be vented in some way, shape or form.
What we're watching in Ukraine with Russia, Vladimir Putin is just another expression of all of this.
We are in a new epoch.
There are certain people who recognize that and other people who are in absolute denial about that.
The pressures they've been building up, this supposed system that is concrete and unchallengeable and steady and permanent.
They always tell you that and then they look up after the bottom falls out and they say, who could have predicted this?
Everybody.
Everybody could have predicted it.
If they simply paid attention, if they looked at what had happened, and if they looked at history, because this story just keeps playing out.
I gotta tell ya, it's a rerun.
It just so happens that the particulars, and the characters, and the technology, and the times, they change, but it's the same story over and over again.
So I'm not shocked that Ginny Thomas played a big role in this.
I read a thing today and I was like, she probably had a role in the Canadian Trucker Convoy.
Color me shocked.
Absolutely surprised, let me tell you.
It's the exact same thing that I've been telling you for weeks.
You have to peer behind the curtain and what you start to notice is that it's the same individuals.
It's the wealthy.
It's the powerful who continue to try and protect their own interests.
They're trying to stave off the repercussions and the consequences of their hoarding of wealth and power.
It's what always happens.
Because this system just continues to collapse and drown under all this corruption.
As the inequality grows, the frustration grows, people start to realize that all the old narratives, all the old myths, all the ideas of things like American exceptionalism and meritocracy, that those were lies to start with.
They were fairy tales.
And they were meant to make people believe in something that was never real so they wouldn't challenge the system or want anything else.
And as long as they could buy a car, as long as they had their hot meals and their television sets and all of these luxuries, which are all just consumerist luxuries, and as long as they watched on the TV as the celebrities played their games, and they were the ones who soared to great heights and then, you know, fell and, and, and, and, Just absolutely collapsed.
You know, these were the mythologies of the time.
These were our, you know, Greek mythological heroes.
We got to watch them fly too close to the sun and then dive into the ocean.
That used to be enough, because back then, that deal, that post-World War II deal, that you could have the house, the car, you could have all the luxuries, and you could have a job, and maybe you didn't like the job, but as long as you went to the job, your kids had a better chance than you of climbing up that ladder, because the meritocracy is real.
As long as that was in place, it kept some of those pressures from building up to a dangerous degree.
But the wealthy and the powerful can't help themselves.
The inherent contradictions of capitalism, this interruption of supply and demand, it leads to this.
Because the entire system says you can't have enough.
Matter of fact, there's no such thing as enough.
There's always somebody else that you have to compete with and outdo.
And you have to keep striving and striving and striving until you are the last person on the face of the earth, or, I don't know, out in the cosmos, as things are playing, as they're playing themselves out now, that you are the one who ends up with it all.
Meanwhile, we're just over here in collateral damage.
They can't help themselves.
They have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing and rigging the system in their favor so that they can be the one, the one, who has all the money, all the resources, all of the power.
That's how this game works.
It was put into play to try and interrupt the sport of kings because all of the kings were attempting to try and have the ultimate power over the world as they killed each other.
Or rather, they had their subjects kill each other in order to try and gain power for themselves.
Capitalism was supposed to have been this expanding idea where all kinds of different people could have money and could have representation.
It was meant by the mercantile class, by the liberal middle and upper, lower middle, all those bourgeois interests that they would be able to have power and share it and have control over a system.
Meanwhile, by the way, they kept out poor people, people of color and women and because they didn't know any better.
They needed that white male bourgeois class to control everything.
It was supposed to spread the power out.
But because of the way that capitalism was designed, its inherent compulsions, that you need to continue to grow and grow and take everything that you can for yourself until there's only one, until you are king.
It expanded itself out almost like a big bang and now it's coming back crashing down in the center where there will be tremendous heat and tremendous pressure.
It's no surprise that these people are doing what they're doing.
It is depressingly predictable.
And it's why we're living in the moment that we are.
And I have to tell you, this is why it pisses me off every single day that people are in denial about this.
Because anybody who pays attention to this and looks at it through clear eyes knows what this is.
Clarence Thomas should resign.
I mean, that's open and shut.
He never should have been on the Supreme Court.
He never should have been confirmed.
He should have dropped out back when those Anita Hill details surfaced.
Should have happened.
Should have never been on the Supreme Court.
The Republican Party should have never stolen the Supreme Court.
There's so many other things that the Supreme Court never should have had or never should have done.
But this is about more than Clarence Thomas.
This is about more than the Supreme Court.
And of course they are looking at this through such a narrow lens because they don't want to deal with the fact that a very, very small group of rich and powerful people have been systematically destroying liberal democracy since there was a liberal democracy.
It just so happens that we are reaching another crossroads, another epochal moment in this ongoing struggle.
We've had it in the past.
We've had past world wars, we've had fascism, we've had moments where illiberalism challenged liberalism, and we managed to avoid an outright meltdown.
Well, here we go again.
So what's happening again?
This Jenny Thomas thing is just a small component in a much, much larger thing that people are absolutely losing the thread on because they never understood the thread in the first place, because it helps them not to examine it.
They do not want to look at this system and see its inherent flaws that everybody knows.
Even the original capitalists knew that this was a problem to a certain extent.
Even Adam Smith, who wrote Wealth of Nations and more or less diagrammed this idea, constantly said it's a bad idea for monopolization and that small, small concentration of capitalism.
Which is why governments and powers need to restrict them and why unfettered capitalism isn't a good thing.
It just so happens that as monopolization and as that hoarding of wealth and capital and resources started to take place, they started creating their own ideas about how capitalism should work.
It's a religion.
It defies any and all empirical evidence that everybody can see who actually pays attention to this stuff.
They believe in it as a faith despite all contradictory evidence.
They believe in it as a faith.
All right, everybody.
So, we're going to come back on Friday with a weekend or episode.
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Thank God we don't do advertisements.
Thank God I don't have to sit here and talk to you about this incredibly serious stuff and then try and sell you a mattress.
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Alright everybody, until next time, hopefully Nick will find his way back to us in the near near future.
