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April 5, 2022 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
51:48
Russian Sanctions Failing While Conservatives Erode Freedom

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman sift through the latest Republican outrage over LGBTQ+ and how ineffective the US sanctions are on Russia.  To support the show and access additional content, including the extra Weekender show every Friday and live-shows, become a patron at patreon.com/muckrakepodcast    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
And when Republicans, they get back into power, Apple and Disney need to understand one thing.
The Antitrust Division at Justice needs to begin the process of considering which American companies need to be broken up once and for all for competition's sake and ultimately for the good of the consumers who pay the bills.
That is treating parents as domestic terrorists, spying on moms and dads who simply show up at school board meetings.
We know that's going on.
Putting a threat tag label on parents.
This designation, this label on moms and dads simply standing up for their kids.
And Democrats are focused on legalizing drugs and helping the cannabis industry.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I am Nick Hauselman, as joined as always by my loyal co-host, Jared Yates-Sexson, who is struggling with a little bit of a voice issue today, so I get to introduce the show.
So thank you all for being here.
So glad to be back from a vacation that I was away in Mexico, and I'm back now, and happy to be kicking this off.
So, Jared, give us a little test of the voice here.
Let's see how you sound.
I sound like I'm trying.
Is what I sound like.
I sound like I'm trying to play through the injury.
I think it's a cruel joke that you were gone for a week, and you come back, I'm pumped for the return, and as a voice artiste, I can't, I've got my, listen, for those who don't know, they're not watching on YouTube where you can watch clips, I've got my mug of green tea with honey.
Don't let anybody tell you, I'm not trying.
Right, you're the hardest working man in political podcasts.
That's what I've been saying for a while.
Well, I'm sure that the first sentence or two after the sip will really be clean and clear, so we're looking forward to each time you do that.
And for the ASMR people, we can hear you sipping, that would be even better.
But we've got to jump into some things here, Jared.
A lot of stuff happened while I was gone.
You were really holding down the fort.
The one-man shows are really, really impressive, I've got to tell you.
To be able to do that, like that, for so long is, you know, perhaps that's why your voice is struggling today.
Well, you know, it was interesting.
So you left and it was like...
I sort of expected there to be, like, a couple of days there because, you know, unlike The Weekender, the one, of course, that is available to patrons over at patreon.com slash myquickpodcast, you know, I kind of expected, I was like, oh, maybe I'll take The Weekender a little bit easy this time or whatever.
And then it turns out there's a seven hour gap on Donald Trump's White House phone calls.
It turns out that, I don't know if everybody knows this, but they're basically an organized crime family.
And you know I had to kind of do that and then go into a weird deep dive about French politics and fascism.
But glad you're back.
I'll just say that.
Oh yeah.
I mean you know it's funny because we just keep our eyes keep being opened to the fact that you know When we created certain laws that you're supposed to, you know, turn into records and keep all these stuff organized, I don't think anybody really thought, like, well, what would the punishment be if they break these laws?
And so, as a result, we really, you know, you kind of realize, like in The Last Action Hero, like, You could do some really terrible things and there isn't really a specified law or punishment for this stuff, so we really need to revamp.
Listen, while we're at it, we could redo the whole Constitution.
Let's update all the language, too, while we have a chance.
We need to look into some things, is what we need to do.
And you know, you talk a lot about, and I've always thought this was a good point, the elimination of shame.
Shame is sort of a, not just a social construct, but sort of a social mover.
And, you know, like one of the things that we're following today is this awfulness out of Ukraine.
And, you know, I wrote this the other day and we've talked about it a little bit.
Everyone sort of expected this Ukraine.
First of all, institutionalists thought it would never happen.
It would never possibly, ever possibly happen because, you know, there's a world economic, capitalistic system.
Then it happens, and then there's sanctions, Nick.
And, you know, that'll do the trick right there.
I mean, basically, Vladimir Putin's obviously out of his mind, but he's not that crazy.
He'll get out.
Here we are now.
And we're recording this at the beginning of the week and reports from the economic sector, you know, where everybody was sanctioning Russia and it was like Russia's persona non grata.
They're done.
They're canceled, Nick.
They're done.
Well, guess what?
All of their Russian gas and oil export numbers are up.
The ruble's back, baby!
Ruble fever!
Go get your ruble.
All the banks are totally fine.
And it's weird, Nick, because it's almost like the people who are sanctioning Russia, speaking out against Russia, waving Ukrainian flags.
It's almost like that was a public relations stunt and they were just waiting for an opportunity to start bringing in that sweet, sweet Russian black gold.
Right.
Well, it's like they just like I said, you know, with these laws they put on, you know, presidential records that, you know, that really don't have any teeth.
The sanctions allowed this little bit of a, you know, carve out here that they can continue to sell gas with rubles.
And of course, that's what makes that the value just continue to go back up before higher than it was before they invaded Ukraine.
So right.
If you're really trying to punish, you know, Vladimir Putin and make a point of anything, which it sounded like it was going to work after about a week, You know, and look like the economy was just destroyed, whatever.
It's like, no, there's no doubt that he's actually, they're benefiting from this.
You know, what's worse is that a lot of businesses, even in America, are benefiting from this because they've just raised prices.
Hey, there's a war.
We gotta, you know, things are suddenly more expensive, right?
We gotta, you know, increase inflation, I guess, from this.
This is a big handout to a lot of people who could easily speak out against the war, but know that there's a lot more money coming back in their pockets.
Well, and a lot of it is about ethics, morals, and honor.
You know, you're talking, going back to that honors thing, like, some people kept their records, incriminating records as presidential administrations or bureaucrats or whatever, because they were afraid of getting found out.
They were afraid of being punished.
They were afraid of losing their office.
You know what I mean?
Like, there were consequences to it.
But some of those people actually believe that they were acting within a system of ethics and morals and their own honor code.
You know what I mean?
And in this case, these companies and these countries weren't sanctioning Russia because they felt a deep, ethical, moral imperative.
Because capitalism doesn't give a shit about moral imperatives, right?
The only thing that matters Is will there be a public relations problem?
Because I don't go along with what people think is right.
And now we're in a really gross part.
And we got to talk about these atrocities are being uncovered right now.
But we're in this really gross, really, really disturbing part.
And this was what I was worried about when this war started, Nick.
And it was what happens when the cameras turn on?
What happens when we start talking about other things?
You were gone, by the way, when the Will Smith slap discourse was happening.
I felt like we could have done a good 20 minutes talking about that.
But that literally, and I'm being flippant about it, but that changed discourse.
And that's who we are as a culture.
We're just constantly moving from one thing to another.
We're over a month into this war now.
People are tired of it.
They're not interested.
And as a result, the companies and the countries are like, Oh, is the coast clear?
Oh, okay.
Well, fine.
It's more economically advantageous to go ahead and import Russian oil.
And so they went along with it because it was never actually about value.
Right.
And we see, you called this, I called it, somebody did a few weeks ago on the pod saying, yeah, this is going to drag on for longer than they thought.
And we're just going to, you know, it'll just kind of go away, like in our consciousness.
We don't even realize.
I didn't want to be right.
I did not want to be right about that.
But that's, Who we are.
And that's terrible, but it really is.
The sort of accelerated nature of our culture is just there's no way that we were going to keep paying attention.
I got to hijack this or take a left turn for a second because I was listening to another podcast about Joe Manchin and sort of his origin story, which would be a rival, you know, the Joker, I guess, in terms of evil.
You know, it got me wondering, who would ever want to get into politics now, right?
You know, it seems like it's such an ugly, horrible place.
People get crucified.
You're not going to get any of the best and the brightest anymore who want to get into this.
But I realized listening to The Mansion, the podcast, Why do you want to get into politics?
Because you'll increase your personal wealth 20, 30, 40 fold.
And it's exactly what he had been doing since the very beginning.
Double handouts, double dipping, changing laws to help the company that he is then renting out all the space to.
and so it was like it made perfect sense all of a sudden if you look at it in that perspective why anybody would want to get into this because there's so much money to be made again remember how we mentioned there's not a lot of like ethical you know oversight and punishment well these are the guys who are taking extreme advantage of this and as soon as they get into the office they have no incentive to actually fix or clean that up because they know how much money they could make either if it's trading stocks which is still legal
Or having a private business and then, you know, voting and helping laws directly related to the businesses that you're in.
It is insane how we can allow this.
We are in a sea change.
And in the past, the very, very recent past, and you got to think again, and we always end up using Reagan so we can set like a pin down and we can go from it.
So go back to Reagan, you know, this beginning of a neoliberal sort of, you know, hyper capitalism, free market type thing.
You know, it became a thing where all of a sudden it was like, well, somebody needs to go to Washington and make sure that our business interests are being taken care of.
And all of a sudden it became much more, it wasn't people making their way up through the ranks.
Because it used to be, it'd be like, Nick got into politics on his city council because he wanted to get some sidewalks in.
Next thing you know, he's running for Congress, right?
All of a sudden it starts shifting to where, like, you go to Washington D.C.
because you have a vested business interest.
You are wealthy yourself from some sort of a thing.
And think about Trump for a second.
He said the quiet part loud multiple times.
He's like, I'm actually losing money doing this.
This is my sacrifice becoming president of the United States of America.
And a lot of these people, they'll go on and do it and then they'll, you know, they'll leave and they'll get a golden parachute and they'll go get aboard because they helped those people and got legislation for them across.
Now a couple things are changing.
We've still got those people, but they have so plundered the government and so changed our politics.
That now all of a sudden you're starting to see like ideologues come in who literally want to take control of it for ideological purposes, whether or not they're white supremacist or chauvinist or whatever.
And now you have a new generation of people who saw Donald Trump and they're like, I want to be a reality television star.
I want to be, you know, I want people to pay attention to me on CNN or Fox News or whatever.
And so it is starting to shift.
But public servants are starting to go away because again, we've talked about it.
It's gross.
No actual self-respecting person really wants to go ahead and volunteer for this.
And if they do, it's almost like, oh my God, I gotta get this stuff on me.
Well, I can't help but think about Clarence Thomas then in terms of talking about what's gross.
Because, you know, talking about the fact that we're missing seven hours of White House transcripts and we know Ginny Thomas is clearly involved and connected to Mark Meadows and to Trump directly.
Now that keeps coming out in a trickle.
It's like there's no – the Supreme Court is supposed to govern themselves.
You know, the actual justices themselves are supposed to say, oh, you know, this is a little bit of a conflict of interest.
I'm going to have to recuse.
But there is no other way to govern that or to enforce that.
This goes back to, you know, people were really smart in theory when they created the government and they would have thought about these things and corrupt judges.
Certainly, they were used to the idea of corrupt judges back then.
But there's no other way.
Yes, there is!
Oh my God, there is!
Because they believe that wealth made you confident.
When the founders founded the government, they were like, we're a bunch of wealthy guys because we're very confident.
And one of the reasons they wanted a one-state government is they were like, wealthy people will never disagree.
Like, we're all on the same page.
And meanwhile, and you want to talk about people who didn't have foresight, they never thought about the fact that there was like a completely different economy, a mercantile economy, an industrial economy in the North, and there was an agrarian economy in the South that already disagreed at the so-called Constitutional Convention.
They never thought for a second that there would be any infighting.
There was no need for parties.
We're wealthy white men.
Obviously, we'll figure it out.
It was an incredible lack of foresight.
I think it's also possible that maybe being wealthy back then meant a lot.
It's a lot different than it was now.
In the sense that there's probably a lot fewer wealthy people.
Is that safe to say?
You've studied that more than I have.
I mean, they're differently wealthy.
I mean, over time what has happened is that wealth has concentrated so much.
I mean, one of the things that we weren't even planning on talking about today is Elon Musk probably put on a pair of jeans that he hadn't worn on a while, found some money in it, and bought the controlling share of Twitter.
You know, Jeff Bezos got a wild hair one day and he's like, I don't know, I just got paid back on PayPal for a dinner that I paid for.
I might as well buy the Washington Post.
And it's a different type of concentration of wealth.
The problem is, when wealth gets to this point, and this is why These nation states are paying for the Russian gas and the oil is because the people who only care about the wealth are now the ones who are pulling the strings of government and they're not interested in those higher callings and higher purposes at least the founders and say what you want about him because they were racist sexist classist assholes like they still convinced themselves that they believed in something.
They truly thought that they had a purpose.
Now it is literally like, yeah, why would you not buy oil and gas?
But I will say very quickly, we're buying oil and gas from tons of murderers.
We're buying oil and gas from tons of people who butcher people, including American citizens, who totally oppress their people.
It just so happens in this case there's a little bit white hot of a spotlight being turned on it and at least we can start to see a little bit of it out in public.
Right.
And don't forget the minerals you need to buy that can create the old iPhone here.
We're rapidly moving into one of those sci-fi movies where the precious mineral is being wasted and we have to kill it to get it.
An interesting dichotomy I'm thinking about is, do you know who Gary Vee is?
Have you ever heard of Gary Vee?
I didn't expect to talk about Gary Vee, but go ahead.
He's a guru.
Well, you know, when he first started, he was running his parents' wine business, right?
A little mom and pop shop.
And he was able to leverage the internet and become this wildly successful, very, very wealthy person who is now an influencer.
And I love the guy.
He's great.
Mansion was helping running his parents' carpeting business.
And it wasn't doing very well at all.
And so instead of like maybe what Gary Vee did, which was using ingenuity and smarts and personality, whatever, he just went into fucking politics and like changed the rules of coal, whatever, saw some opportunity.
It's almost like that, the land of opportunity where we're going to like, you know, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, but instead he's like, we're just going to completely change the framework of how these laws work to benefit these coal companies.
And by the way, I happen to be directly benefiting the more these coal companies make, the more I make.
That's, that's the, It's such a weird cynical difference that I don't see how, again, this is what happens when you mix democracy and capitalism.
It's not democracy, it's the capitalism part that when you mix it always makes it toxic.
Well, the problem is, and this goes into another thing that we have to talk about, the problem here is that you can convince yourself that you're doing what's right.
And that's how cognitive dissonance so often sort of gets laundered.
In this case, You know, somebody like a Joe Manchin who's literally killing the planet.
There are millions of Americans right now, tonight, who their lives are made worse because Joe Manchin does what he does, right?
I mean, that's an actual true fact.
But meanwhile, that corrupting influence of wealth and capital, as it grows, Right.
And as these people keep voting for bills that make sure that money gets redistributed from the bottom up and that people make less money, that there are less regulations and that that wealth that we're talking about grows more and more concentrated.
Well, eventually, when you have all that wealth, what do you spend it on?
There's only so many cars you can buy.
There's only so many trips you can buy.
There's only, I don't know, so many space fleets that you can fund.
Eventually, you start spending it because it helps your bottom line.
You start spending it on political action committees.
You start spending it on politicians.
You start making sure that you are fixing the government.
What is happening right now, and one of the things I keep sounding the alarm about, whether or not it's Vladimir Putin, or we got to talk about our old good friend, Viktor Orban here in a second.
One of the things that these authoritarians and these dictators keep taking advantage of is the fact that that greed, that greed and that lust for power has so overwhelmed any semblance of conscience or morals or ethics or honor.
That they have been able to buy into this system.
Putin and his oligarchs are fine because we took their money.
We laundered it for them.
We sold them everything that they wanted.
It courses through our politics.
The Republican Party sits upon it, right?
Eventually, all of that corrupting influence goes and it just floods everything to the point where there's nothing else for it to do except for it to literally destroy democracy because If you're in control of these companies, if you're in control of billions upon billions of dollars, why would you trust that schmuck on the street to make up choices for you that could possibly change things in your life?
You know better.
You're wealthier.
You're more powerful.
And eventually that corrupting influence just completely overfloods any semblance of conscience.
And that's where we're at right now at this very moment.
And I think the other really key here is that when you have that kind of greed and authoritarianism, you lose complete competency.
The government isn't run competently.
The military isn't run competently.
Now, here's the problem.
I say that as if, like, democracy we have now is competent.
Um, and I would, I would, you know, I have to hesitate to say that, but it might be a little bit more competent, a little bit more able to do some of the things it's supposed to do versus what we're discovering now in Russia, which is that the military is so misrun that they couldn't even, you know, schedule supply lines properly to get them there.
And they're getting, they're killing generals left and right, which, you know, this is, Listen it's loss of life is terrible and I hate to say I'm like I'm cheering for Ukrainians which means I'm cheering for the death of you know these these poor soldiers in Russia who weren't trained properly have no idea what they're doing but it also leads to the kind of atrocities that we're seeing which is a direct parallel to what we saw like in Vietnam for instance as we're Turning through as many soldiers as we can, lowering the standards to let people in the army because we have to send them over to fight in Vietnam because we're so desperate to like not lose a war.
Well, this is what happens now when Russia is going on and, you know, if it is to be believed, but we're seeing the reports that, you know, even Joe Biden is waiting on as far as atrocities and war crimes.
This is a direct result of when you have a guy like Putin or a guy like Orban running their countries.
So something happens when you carry out a war like what's happening in Ukraine.
A lot of people involved in it simply don't believe in it.
They're conscripts, right?
They've been sent out there.
They have no idea what's going on.
They're surrendering left and right.
They're calling their mothers.
But I do have to go ahead and draw a more recent comparison, which is the War on Terror, which was very, very see-through in terms of what it wasn't.
You know who really enjoyed the War on Terror?
Fucking sickos.
You know what I mean?
Like Special Force guys who would go out and just straight up murder people in cold blood.
Like people who would murder human beings in real life if, you know, if they could get away with it, and maybe have.
In this case, what we're seeing are the true believers of Putinism, of that Z idea that we're talking about, the stuff that Alexander Dugin has set up, that ideology.
You have a lot of those guys, and you have a lot of really scared people who are taking out their frustration on a lot of different parts.
We're now seeing, of course, as forces, and by the way, people keep saying retreat.
They're not in retreat.
They're regrouping because we're not going away.
I mean, the bombings are still occurring.
God knows what the next level in this thing is going to be.
We're now finding mass graves.
We're now finding people who have been restrained and murdered.
And I want to point out, this is something that it's now becoming obvious because we're starting to see some Russian documents that are floating around, that that ideology that we've sort of hinted at, is making its way through the state structure.
And whenever Putin said denazification of Ukraine, they've now come to define denazification as getting rid of anybody who doesn't consider themselves Russian.
Anybody, it's not just even anybody who like fought against Russia, it's any Ukrainian who believed that they were Ukrainian, right?
So basically, and this is the way purges and genocides work, they have completely weaponized reality and they've said if you don't believe that a Ukrainian person is technically a Russian person, which means that Russia owns Ukraine and has every right to be there and killing people, then you have to die.
You either have to die or you have to be taken away or you have to be made an example out of.
And what we're seeing is a new ideological ratcheting up of this war in Ukraine because the ideology has to grow worse and worse and worse and more aggressive.
This is a genocide.
And this genocidal violence is only growing, and it's only going to grow.
Well, we've seen reports for several weeks now of Ukrainians being carted away and shipped to eastern parts of Russia.
And it's devastating when I'm looking at this because it just reeks of concentration camps.
No one seems to have much information at all from as far as I can tell about where they're going, what's happening to them.
You know, I even saw, you know, we have to remember a lot of people are related to each other in both Ukraine and Russia.
So you have, you know, cousins fighting against cousins and, you know, close family members.
So there, you know, there was a report where a woman had called, you know, her parents I think were killed.
She tried to call the uncle who was Russian.
This woman is a Ukrainian.
And he had to sort of pretend he didn't even know who the hell she was on the phone.
And what I got from that was that he was so panicked that if they, you know, if they're monitoring phone calls that they would make that connection that he would get carted away or killed or something because he's related to somebody in Ukraine.
This is, this is, I mean, listen, that's, this is what, Biden is talking about as far as war crimes.
I mean, this is the kind of thing that needs, we saw Slobodan Milosevic be brought in front of the Hague eventually for the war crimes he committed as a president of a country.
So there is hope that this could actually happen somehow.
But at the very least, it's, you know, every time you keep saying this will never happen again, we won't have another World War Two, we won't have another guy like Hitler.
And then they keep popping up.
Yeah, I mean the problem with all this, obviously, not just the fact that genocides are one of the worst things that human beings can do, but because of the way that we've set up our politics and society and cultures, they happen a lot.
You know, they happen all the time because all of a sudden you start having a disagreement about resources, about land, about who has what and who is what, and the next thing you know, Going back to what we were talking about, you create a story, and within that story, one person has the right to power and resources and to make the decisions, and the other people either go along with it or they die, right?
I mean, and it's everything.
And the terrible part about all this is that it's the same story that keeps getting told in these cases, right?
You know, whether or not it was the genocide you just referenced, we can talk about the Holocaust, we can talk about any number of genocides that have been carried out.
The idea behind it all is, hey, we don't want this war, but there are secret forces that control the world, and they are forcing us to fight.
And again, we keep saying this.
They're saying the Jews are doing it.
And then that's what's happening right here.
I mean, they'll say George Soros, but it's not just George Soros.
He's the stand-in.
He's the avatar.
In this case, it's the idea that white Christian patriarchal societies are being destroyed from the outside and being pitted against one another.
And as a result, you can do whatever you need to do.
Go in, murder everybody, kill them.
They were probably terrorists.
They were probably part of the conspiracy.
And you can see it, everything from mass murder, mass execution, systematic murder, sexual violence against women.
I mean, my God, kidnapping children and regifting them to other parents.
I mean, it has happened time and time again, but it follows the same cycle.
And as I was watching this thing start to take shape with Ukraine, It was obvious it was going to have this component, because they're literally fighting over reality.
They're fighting over a story which determines, one way or another, what controls the world.
And real fast, going back to the Founding Fathers, they told their own story about this, and it led to the genocide of the Native Americans.
Because it's who decides what to do with the land, with the resources, what to do with the future, and the side that loses, unfortunately, ends up almost being wiped off the face of the earth.
Well, you know, I was going to say that, you know, Jared, I really can sleep well at night these days because I know that that could never happen here.
Possibly.
Never possibly happening here.
Never.
Never.
How could it?
America, the home of the free, the land of the brave.
How could it ever happen in the United States of America?
Meanwhile, you know, this is how close it could become.
I mean, you look at a guy like Orban, and it's exactly the trajectory that we know that Trump wants to take.
Well, and I want to say on that note, man, you know what's happening in Hungary?
And they base all this, and God, I hate having to talk about this shit because it's so weird and grim and disturbing.
The entire idea, Nick, Is that gay people are destroying culture.
And you know, Orban has basically just completely turned the weaponry of government.
And by the way, for anyone who doesn't know, he just won his fourth term.
And immediately, who did he come out, Nick?
He came out and he went after NATO.
He went after the European Union.
He called Zelensky, Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, he called him an enemy.
He also called out the quote-unquote George Soros empire, right?
And what do they do?
They pick a group like gay people, who by the way is also who Vladimir Putin has gone after, Here in America, they're going after gay people.
And I have to tell you, if these people keep getting their way, we're going to look up one day and it's going to be like, are you gay or are you dead?
And that's, I mean, that's legitimately what we're inching up on right now.
Now the other thing is, you know, he was expected to have a really big fight in this election to win.
There was a lot of fierce opposition to him.
They thought this was going to go down the wire and he won kind of comfortably.
And I got to tell you, it sounds a lot like how we probably feel what was going to happen in 2024.
Oh yeah, Trump, there's no way he lost in a landslide before he's going to lose again.
I gotta tell you, there's a lot of versions of the Matrix right now where all of a sudden we wake up that next day and he did win a comfortable margin of votes across the country.
And whether or not you want to get into the Hungarian electoral system and whether or not that was legit or not, I don't know.
I'm not an expert on that one, but the same thing is going to be spotlighted here as well.
If Trump wakes up as the president next time, We're all going to be wondering how that happened, too.
Nick, I'm sorry, but here's a spoiler.
The Hungarian political system is not legit.
They've had a total authoritarian near dictator in power for many, many years.
It is not legit.
And actually, I got to tell you, I don't trust the results.
Shocking.
But on top of that, the opposition party barely had any ability whatsoever to appear on state-run media.
One party, Fidesz, controls state-run media, basically just pushes everything that Orban wanted, and there's a really interesting connection here because American conservatives, they saw Orban, and they were like, we need our own Orban, and then Donald J. Trump wandered out and was like, I heard you needed an Orban, I got you fellas.
And what happened?
He used the refugee crisis, right, a lot of Islamophobia to talk about borders, about walls, they build all these walls, and based on that fear, which is also what got Donald Trump elected in a lot of places, they went ahead and they took over everything.
They changed the Constitution.
Of course, they went after gay people.
The entire state.
If you walk around Budapest, it's one sign after another about George Soros and these conspiracy theories.
They took over culture.
They took over movies.
They took over news.
Meanwhile, it's a twisted dark mirror of what they've been trying to do here, and going back to what you were saying, there is still a very real possibility they can pull that off here.
It might have been a year ago maybe it was six months ago at some point on this pod I know I said they're gonna go after gay marriage next like we were we were freaking out about whatever that was back then but it's clear that they're rolling back whatever we had gotten the progress especially with gay people and their rights.
I'll say this very quickly just to do a drop-in on that because this this needs context.
The American conservative movement, we talked about national conservatism, right?
You know, it's everything from Tucker Carlson to Josh Hawley, you name it, this gaggle of assholes.
The intellectual wing of the Republican Party started calling for illiberalism and authoritarianism after the passage of gay marriage.
They saw it and they said, oh, we've lost our country.
There's nothing we can do.
And matter of fact, we can't trust.
We can't trust the court.
We can't trust our elections.
We can't leave this up.
They believe in this idea of natural rights.
That there are certain natural phenomenon handed down by God that overstep laws and democracy, right?
And part of it is like gay marriage.
You're exactly right.
Gay marriage happens and they're like, that's it.
We've lost our country.
We now have to regain it at any cost.
And at which point they're like, Orban, Donald Trump, absolutely.
We are Well, they'll march and they'll scream and yell about freedom, this is what this country is about, and yet they won't let anybody else have freedom.
It has to be freedom on their terms, and it's not even like, in my take on it is, it's so triggering, not even just seeing a gay couple walk down the street, let's just say, or whatever, it's probably sitting at home just thinking about it.
That's it!
You're 100% right on that, man, because I want to boil this down very, very quickly.
It's this, it's a psychological problem, this homophobia, and whether or not it's their own personal projection of who they are, which it is a lot of the time, right?
A lot of the time they get pissed off about a scenario that they've imagined.
Right.
And that was like the gay bathroom thing.
They just, they thought that if like, if they made it to where like, you know, there could be transgender bathrooms and there weren't like genital checks on your way into the bathroom, which is how they do in their mind, right?
And real fast, it's like the War on Terror.
9-11 wasn't enough.
They had to imagine, what if it's a nuclear bomb?
What if it's a dirty bomb?
If we don't do it, they're going to do it, right?
And when they thought about the bathrooms, they were like, oh, obviously there's going to be, you know, one assault after another.
You know, it's just going to be, it's, and they're going to prey on our children.
Right.
And now they believe that teachers are grooming their children and they're going after them and they're like hiding behind the shadows.
You're exactly right.
They're imagining something that can legitimize whatever oppression they need to carry out.
I was on my vacation in Mexico and I somehow got involved in an interesting conversation with people who were probably to the right of me.
They posited an idea that young kids, 10, 11, 12, whatever, if you're straight and you're 10, 11, 12 now, you're sort of not cool anymore.
This is a huge asterisk because we're talking about like big cities right because remember it's a lot more fluid now with a lot of kids right which is a wonderful thing where there's no there's less stigma attached to your sexuality which again by the way is not your identity and like this is where it gets kind of confusing to people who are older like me in some respects but the point is they were trying to make it seem like I'm so sorry that is so such horror shit.
Right.
Well, let me just, let me, let me, let me, I'm clear on this.
They wanted to make it seem like, you know, people, the kids are becoming like gay or a member of the LGBTQ community because they want to be cool.
And all I could take from that is I just don't think it works that way.
Right.
I don't think, no, no, no, no.
I think you, who, who you are, what you're attracted to.
And again, we're talking about like the sexual identity.
I don't think it's informed by like the fact that Johnny over there is making fun of me because I like so much, you know what I mean?
It might work the other way.
If you were gay and you were going to be persecuted for that, you might have to hide it or change or whatever, that whole thing.
But the idea that it would actually create more gay people because people want to be like, cool.
I was just kind of looking at him and scratching my head and blinking and I couldn't follow that.
Well, okay.
Man, I'm so glad you brought this up because I actually think there's a couple of really interesting parts to this, that pathology of thought.
So on one hand, I gotta say, just to clear the record, like, the amount of harassment and personal danger that a person takes on, if they even veer a little bit off of the beaten path of what's expected.
I mean, my God, the number of gay and trans people who get either assaulted or murdered, not to mention harassed, is just unbelievable.
It's unfathomable.
But I think, let's go ahead and let's get into the pathology of this.
We've talked a little bit about this, but I want to make it very clear.
A lot of the people that you're talking about who believe shit like this They're so out of touch with themselves and who they are.
So, like, a lot of this is, particularly in right-wing circles, it's people playing roles, right?
It's people sitting around, like, dressing up as if they're, you know, militia members or, you know, they're big, tough right-wingers and, yeah, I love going out and shooting a gun and driving a big truck.
No, they're playing characters.
And they're playing characters because they're terrified that someone's gonna think that they're weak or You know that maybe they're gay or whatever and people spend so much time
lost in like a cycle or whirlpool of not knowing if they're doing things because they like them or if they're doing things because it's expected or because they're playing a role that they projected on other people and quite frankly I think they resent people who can be open about themselves and be comfortable with themselves and they almost look at them and they're like how dare you
And as a result, they have to sort of dislike them in order to, I think, save themselves from their own, like, sort of cycle of distaste.
But this ideology that I described, it's an easy jump to go from that to grooming.
Absolutely.
Absolutely it is.
Any kind of discussion about that encourages you toward that.
But then, if you let the imagination run wild, then in their minds, we're not talking from kindergarten through third grade, it's not like they're going to talk about two people being married who are the same sex or anything like that.
But it becomes so much worse and degenerate and awful.
yeah like yeah in their minds they're thinking they're going to just they're gonna have diagrams of gay sex you know or whatever yeah exactly that's what they think right that's what it sounds like that's why they're so triggered um
I can only here's the thing we talked about this before it seems like we're moving if you want to follow like what kids in the big cities now and in like the liberal cities in this wonderful notion of there's no more a closet there's no you know you're free to be who you want to be if that's the model we're going to be moving towards eventually right then then we're gonna end up having like There's no hang-ups, and everyone is fluid to however they want to be, to that level.
That sounds to me a lot more of an open, free society than what we have now.
I suppose that's also what's so triggering to them, because the prejudice is so built in.
That's right, and what ends up happening, this is really sad, we become our own jailer.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Like we perpetuate the abuse that's heaped upon us.
Like you don't end up believing that.
So like for instance, and this is something that I'm really glad we're getting onto because I think it's really, really disturbing and I want to be very clear about something.
Disney right now, the Disney Corporation, is going after this Don't Say Gay Bill in Florida.
I want to make this very clear.
Disney doesn't give a shit about the Don't Say Gay Bill.
They do not care.
They're not in meetings.
They're like, we've got to save the kids.
They're doing it because everyone's like, Disney, are you going to do something?
And then they got in a meeting with an actuary, and the actuary's like, you are going to lose X number of dollars and Y number of marketing opportunities if you do not at least make a stink about this, right?
So they do that in order to try and bolster themselves with this marketing demographic.
Meanwhile, by the way, we now have a bunch of people who are calling them groomers, right?
And QAnon, by the way, totally said that Disney was grooming kids and all this, and they're not.
Disney, by the way, is one of the biggest conservative influencers in American popular culture history.
History.
Probably, maybe number one.
I mean like really, really one of the most, um, probably, would you agree?
It's probably code era Hollywood and Disney.
It's right there together.
We can't forget Walt Disney's ideologies.
Oh no, Walt Disney was a, and by the way, he was part of the coded Hollywood movement in which they said you have to produce propaganda, which by the way is what they want to go back to.
They want to go back to movies, TV shows, all of it that is produced the way that like coded Hollywood did it.
Because they were like, we can't have anything that questions authority or Christianity or whatever.
So anyway, moving forward with this, what they have done is that they are now saying that they are obviously trying to groom an entire generation of kids to be victims.
Of sexual abuse is what is basically what they're saying.
They're turning on the lizard brain of white Americans is what it is, right?
The same people who were their parents probably terrified during the satanic panic that their kids are going to be stolen, that they were going to be abused.
And by the way, if there's an entire movement of people who want to abuse your children, I mean, maybe you should be able to use violence against them.
And maybe you shouldn't trust the election results, even if there's more of them.
It's a cycle.
And these people, they literally psych themselves up to the point where they're like, yeah, I'll kill them.
I don't know if you've ever seen this.
There's a very particular type of online person, but they're also people in real life.
And they'll make up a scenario in their mind in which like a child has been abused or some crime has been committed.
And they're like, oh, I wish I could kill him.
You know what I mean?
Like they wish that they could literally murder them themselves and they've just psyched themselves up to a point of violence and extra legal activity and that's the people that we're talking about.
If you sit in that mindset long enough then you really don't you start to lose the notion of any repercussions or why that might be morally wrong.
You know it's funny it's for some reason I'm thinking about Will Smith.
He had 25 steps in between the time he got up and by the time he got to Chris Rock to think about what he was going to do and maybe maybe decide not to just slap the shit out of him you know like he did and then he still did it uh and I found that interesting but I think there's a moment there's an amount of time that can sit with you especially now this goes into generation to generations where you lose the sense of what morally is correct uh and ethically correct and and you end up just you're so sold on this ideology they can't break out of it it's like a cult
I recently saw, and I'm sure you've seen this too, I mean you've been in sports, of course you've seen this, I was at a thing not too long ago and I saw a guy bump into another guy, like there was a crowd of people and he bumped into him and the one guy who got bumped into like shoved him like really really hard and I mean like if you shove a person with intent a person could fall and die like that's you know what I mean like it's very easy for something like that to happen
But this guy who got bumped into completely by accident started talking about how he wanted to murder this person.
You know?
And he got that stare.
You know what I'm talking about?
That people had to like get him away before he committed violence.
Would have went to jail and God knows what he would have done.
And that rage that that guy felt In large part, Nick is based on his own conception of who he is, right?
I'm the type of guy who will murder you if you bump into me.
And he had a moment to think about it.
and consider it and cool down and think about what he was doing.
But the persona that he had and the character that he played didn't back down.
So it goes back to exactly what you're saying.
Like somebody going up and slapping somebody in front of millions of people, they have to think to themselves, I am somebody who does this.
That's what people expect of me.
Yeah.
And by the way, getting back to even thinking about Trump's chances in 2024 and how Orban somewhat surprisingly won convincingly, like, you know, the one reason why Trump won't run or won't win is because a guy like Ron DeSantis has now positioned himself with these kind of bills in Florida To take on that mantle, and as a guy who's not deficient mentally, would probably represent better for the Republican Party.
We've already heard some of the guys, you know, who want Trump out, don't want him to actually be part of this, and that was the big thing we've been ringing the bell for a long time, because we knew that Trump was one, you know, version of this, but someone else is going to come along who's more competent and create this, an Orban-like, you know, government, and that's DeSantis could easily be that guy.
And I gotta tell you, and I'll go ahead and say this, because there is a feeling, and I think you felt it too, there is a little bit of a feeling like maybe things have moved a little beyond Trump.
You know what I mean?
He gets out, he does his little traveling show, he says his stupid shit, but there's a lot of really competent and wealthy people who are ready to build off of what he did.
DeSantis is a really good candidate.
You're exactly right.
And I hate to predict this and I hate to say it.
If someone like Ron DeSantis starts challenging Trump or gaining momentum and starts to move into place to gain the nomination, we're going to see a lot of media people.
We're going to start being like, oh, what a refreshing thing this is not to have Trump.
And you know, like he's really problematic.
Well, no, that's not true.
They won't say problematic.
They'll say controversial.
Yeah, he's very controversial in some of these things.
And you'll see a lot of people start spinning a narrative that he's very rational and very reasonable.
And what will happen is exactly what you're talking about.
We'll start seeing this urbanistic type thing start to develop around him because he's not Trump.
But he'll be carrying out the exact same thing that like Trump has definitely wanted from him.
And at the very least we're already seeing the seeds laid right now in the media about describing him and he's fresh and he's all those things you described without the comparison to Trump.
He's the golden boy right now.
Somehow he's figured this out.
He studied it, he looked at what Trump was doing, and is recreating it in a much better way without the tweets.
You know, again, if Trump had been kicked off of Twitter a lot longer ago, then he might have won again in 2020.
So, this is what the blueprint has been laid, and DeSantis is now, there's nobody else.
He's got the one thing, like guys like Hawley don't have it.
Certainly Ted Cruz does not have it.
You know, he's got enough of the ability to speak in front of people and kind of sell that authoritarian look enough that he's the guy and it's frightening.
And that's one of the things that I, listen, I don't like to be the guy who has to keep talking about this, but it's like this Ukraine situation, it's not over.
The moment, and by the way, one of the few weaknesses that Orban had going into this election is that everybody knew that him and Putin were best buds, you know, and they, he had to come out and say, I don't support the invasion, but I'm not going to send weapons.
You know, I'm not, I'm not going to give that aid to the Ukrainians.
First person congratulated on Sunday night, Vladimir Putin.
And then immediately comes out and goes after Zelensky.
And then he says, he not only calls it a mandate, he says, and this is a quote, and I think people need to remember this for the future, quote, we are telling Europe that this is not the past.
This is the future.
The future that these people want is they literally want to rewind time, the way that we talk about all the time.
And now that Orban has this new lease, this new term, and now that this movement is building up around the world, I'm telling you, this is going to be what we deal with.
This is it.
We're on the path.
Right.
And when Trump used to joke about how, you know, they're going to make these presidential terms, you know, six years, eight years or, you know, they never end.
It's been floated out there.
It's been said, oh, he's just kidding.
Whatever.
Again, it's not going to be a joke at some point.
And then, you know, go figure how Putin had term limits.
Right.
And then here he is.
He took on a couple of different jobs.
Oh, right, right.
He cycled through and then took it back.
So, this is exactly how that starts.
And because of the destruction of the norms so far, and once that has opened, it's really hard to go back.
And I just pray, I just saw someone who thought, like, you know, the midterms are actually, somebody thinks that the Democrats are still going to hold them midterms.
And I'm like, oh boy, this is a guy who's like, you know who it is on Twitter?
It was some guy who weighs in all the time, Angry Staffer.
You ever see that guy?
He's a former staffer in the White House who supposedly knows some things.
Anyway, the point being that it sounds good, but it's such a nefarious approach to politics that it's like, how do you lose?
You know what I mean?
It's almost like, how are you going to eventually lose if you play that way long enough?
I, you know, and the thing is right now, and I just want to go ahead and spotlight this because, you know, we like to call balls and strikes on this podcast.
We give criticism where criticism is due and we give praise where it's due.
The Democrats have no idea how to sell themselves going into midterms.
We've talked about that.
They have no narrative because they're unwilling to go after Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema.
They can't explain that.
They can't talk about corruption.
They can't talk about Citizens United.
They can't talk about any of that stuff.
I'll tell you the one person I'm seeing something from, that's Raphael Warnock.
And Warnock is basically, his entire re-election campaign is, insulin is too expensive, it shouldn't be expensive, I'm working to lower the price of insulin.
And I have to tell you, that's a winning message.
That actually is.
Here is one thing that would actually make a difference to everybody.
The only problem in all of this, and this is what the Democrats lack, they say insulin's too expensive, but then they never say why.
Is insulin too expensive?
They never say, who is benefiting from insulin being too expensive?
And that's what the Democrats lack.
They have no ability whatsoever to go ahead and point out the corruption and the inequality that happens to create these scenarios.
And when they don't do that, that's when you lose points.
Absolutely.
Well, hopefully they'll figure that out and get that next sentence and just say, your insulin's too expensive because that asshole running against me caused it that way and vote for me instead.
That would be the good thing.
Don't vote for the asshole crossing out for me.
So, well, Jerry, I think we made it through.
I think your voice held up well enough to make your points.
I appreciate that.
I'm now going to go rest it as a professional broadcaster.
And here's the thing, Nick, I'm going to be honest with you.
I'm going to level with the audience my man.
I think I took it for granted.
These honey-sweet pipes that pay the bills, I think I took them for granted until today.
Never again.
Okay, then you really have to not talk for a while now.
That's a problem for me, but I'll do what I can.
Alright, well, thanks so much for everyone to be here and listen to this excellent episode.
And Jared, you know, rest those pipes.
I will make sure to keep mine flexible and sweet-sounding.
Please be safe, everybody out there.
Make sure that you call someone you love and let them know that you love them because it's important these days.
And we will be back with our Weekender episode of this Friday.
And if you want to subscribe to that, you can always go to patreon.com slash muckravepodcast.
If you want to find Jared on Twitter before that, you can always find him at jysexton.
Please tweet to me, I don't hear enough from people on Twitter, at canyouhearmesnh.
And thanks everyone for being here and stay safe out there.
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