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April 26, 2022 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
53:47
Why Elon Musk Buying Twitter Is Like Fascism

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman break down the ramifications of billionaire Elon Musk severely overpaying for Twitter. 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
Well, I'm not going to comment on a specific transaction.
What I can tell you as a general matter, no matter who owns or runs Twitter, the president has long been concerned about the power of large social media platforms.
The power they have over our everyday lives has long argued that tech platforms must be held accountable for the harms Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckery Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
I'm here, as always, with my loyal co-host and partner, Nick Halsman.
Nick, how are you?
Section 230 enacting antitrust reforms, requiring more transparency and more.
And he's encouraged that there's bipartisan interest in Congress.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
I'm here, as always, with my loyal co-host and partner, Nick Housman.
Nick, how are you?
How was your weekend?
It was fine.
You know, just fine and just struggling to keep up with everything that's going on out there in the world and on the NBA landscape.
So, but I'm hanging in there.
Well, the good news is that politics and culture have just pretty much paused.
Nothing's going on.
Everything's great.
It's not like a space mad techno messiah just dropped $44 billion to buy Twitter, which has effectively become the public square of the United States of America.
It's not like that's occurring right now.
No, or that he's talking about boring tunnels underneath the entire United States of America.
Which, by the way, reminds me of this movie that we saw, Don't Look Up, right?
Where this very rich, smart guy convinces everybody he knows what he's doing, and then it completely and utterly is a failure and people die.
Yeah, and almost a one-for-one caricature at that point.
Before we move further, as the Twitter situation is happening, by the way, I looked up just about 20 minutes ago, and within one hour of that being announced that he was buying Twitter, I had watched about 800 followers just go away.
Just because people at this point are like, I want nothing to do with Elon Musk and this app, which I totally understand, we'll get into the implications of.
But before we go further on this story, I just want to go ahead and make the pitch for people.
If you are looking for a place, decent social media, decent people, informed, kind, supportive, intelligent people, go on over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
You know, I made this pitch earlier.
We're all looking for our own lagoons.
We're all looking for our own bays where we can get into this stuff.
I still have to be over on Twitter because I have to reach out to people and tell them about authoritarianism.
If you don't have the stomach for it, come on over, join the Discord, meet some really, really good people who have great conversations and take care of each other.
Is it really going to be that different?
Yes.
Well, I mean, certainly the orange guy will come back and that'll change things.
Well, there's that.
But before we get into the specifics, everybody, this week, Thursday, in order to go over all of this stuff, and this is going to be on April 28th.
That's this Thursday at 7 p.m.
Eastern.
We're going to do a live show with all of our Patreons to record our weekender.
We're going to take questions.
We're going to talk about this and just lament this entire thing.
But I have to tell you right now, Nick, I think that this is going to be a pretty momentous change in a lot of different ways.
I think everybody has kind of missed the meat of this story.
Surprise, surprise.
But let's go ahead and reset it, get talking about what's going on.
Elon Musk is apparently buying Twitter for $44 billion.
Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, is apparently going to walk away with a cool $974 million.
Can't wait for that.
$174 million, can't wait for that. - Well, that's before taxes, Jared. - Before, of course, because these people all pay their fair share.
Elon Musk is going to take Twitter private, which means that regulations and oversight will be pretty much nil.
We'll get into what that means in just a moment.
But Nick, what are your immediate reactions from this pretty nauseating story?
Yeah, well, the immediate one is that they're going to let Trump right back on, but then you realize it's like in the name of, you know, First Amendment, they're going to let, you know, any amount of misinformation on this platform, which to their credit up until now, they've, you know, they've at least tried to govern that to some degree.
And it's kind of made it better to some degree.
Now, we've also seen how the right-wing propaganda, for whatever the algorithms are designed for everywhere across all these algorithms, it seems to benefit no matter what you do, this right-wing propaganda and misinformation stuff.
So, that is the worry, is that like, you know, he's going to, in the name of like tech, in the name of opening and being transparent, it's going to turn into accessible.
Well, so the the algorithms of all of these social media sites, and this has been the case for years at this point.
Again, in basketball terms, this has been a matter of working the refs, screaming at the officiants and all of these major tech corporations and social media sites, telling them you discriminate against right wing voices.
And as a result, all the social media sites turned a little dial over here that said promote And basically gave right wing media a jolt.
And in part that has to do with the fact that, like, you know, they don't want to be seen as biased.
They also didn't want to be attacked for it.
And I want to say that all these sites absolutely trumpeted misinformation and aggressive harassment for years, particularly as a means of profiting.
And then, of course, January 6th happens and then they're like, whoa, we need to do something about this.
And then, of course, you know, had juiced everything they could out of the Trumpist movement.
Well, now maybe we're going back for seconds at this point.
Maybe we're looking at a company that can't ignore the bottom line, which Elon Musk is all about.
And this isn't about free speech.
This isn't about the First Amendment.
This is about control of information, control of the public space.
And there are repercussions that are going to take place here.
He seems to think that there are ways to, I believe the word is unlock Twitter.
and obviously unlocking means you know making more money and how do you do that is you get more people onto the site and how do you do that well you make it welcome to more people and that is the thing and what's what's made it an unwelcome I suppose to certain amount of people are these you know protections against misinformation so It seems pretty clear.
I don't know about you, but when I look at threads now, which I used to love, like your threads, but after one or two of them, they're shoving ads in the middle of these threads now.
And that would definitely be the future and much more, I'm sure, in our face if Musk has anything to do with it.
Well, so all of these models of privatization, they always sort of follow the same paths.
You know what I mean?
For any of our listeners in Philadelphia or some of these East Coast states, you know how these toll roads work.
You know, you get in there and you go ahead and you pay the toll.
You make sure that you're privatizing the entire time.
Then, by the way, at some point, Nick, you have to put in an extra lane, where if you pay just a little bit extra, you can go faster.
You have less traffic.
You have all this.
I have to assume that a large part of the business model that he's talking about, or envisioning, is about making Twitter just a completely unnavigable cesspool in which you are harassed by people constantly, misinformation is everywhere.
But maybe, for a certain fee, you can enjoy a cleaned up Twitter.
Maybe if you have a little bit of money, you might be able to sink that in there and you can go ahead and maybe the algorithm will be turned on for you.
And of course, it would promote your tweets, but it would also make sure to clean up some of that.
Meanwhile, everybody else outside of that lane, everybody outside of those walls, which is how privatization always works, is basically subject to ceaseless harassment.
And I need to remind people, and I think for some of our listeners who have been with us for a while, they experience this.
Life on Twitter was very different in 2016, 2017, 2018.
Now that it's been quote-unquote cleaned up a little bit, a lot of people don't remember that it was basically constant harassment, daily death threats, people doxing one another.
I mean, for me at the height of awful Twitter, It was one person after another threatening everybody in my life and like stalking me and sending out death threats.
And I'm like a white cisgender male reporter.
You know, I mean, life on there for women and people of color was really, really rough.
And I got to tell you that those floodgates are going to get opened.
And that's only, I personally, I think that's only the beginning of the troubles.
Sure.
And don't forget, like in Chicago, when they do toll roads, they open them up only to pay for that highway.
Well, as soon as they pay for the highway and that toll, those tolls don't go away.
They're like, oh crap, we're still making money from this.
This is great.
But I remember, you know, I've been on Twitter since 2010.
And if we go back then, we might remember that it was actually a pleasant place where it was useful and it was cool and you could actually have interactions before it became accessible.
And I think that what happens with capitalism is that every single good idea Just gets burned to the ground.
So I would imagine if they do what you describe and make it some sort of pay-per-play thing where you're going to be able to get your own unique experience based on some fee per month and people go to that, the non-paying will disappear.
It'll dry up.
I don't think people will, you know, it won't be cool or worthwhile anymore.
And then I suspect the other version will be shitty too.
So what you're probably going to imagine is that Twitter just kind of becomes this like, like Facebook, right?
Facebook is not that useful to people anymore, I don't think.
Well, I want to point out something real fast.
You and I are talking about one part of the experience, the user experience, right?
So as everybody's talking about this, we're, and again, this is like what our media does and what our quoted, like, brightest minds wrap their heads around.
It's just, their stories are, can Elon Musk make Twitter profitable?
Will he do this in the, you know, in chasing free speech or whatever?
And here's the thing that we haven't even discussed yet.
You've been on Twitter since 2010.
I think I've been, you know, I can't remember.
It's either 2011 or 2014, one or the other.
You and I got on Twitter, and I'm sure that a lot of our listeners got on Twitter, in a time when Elon Musk didn't own Twitter.
It was just a corporation that seemed friendly, inviting, and a place where you could talk to people.
Part of the genius of all of this is the Trojan horse concept of what Twitter now represents.
So like if Elon Musk created a social media site, I don't know, idiot, right?
And would you would you automatically get on idiot as sponsored by Elon Musk and give out all of your data and sell it to the corporation for free?
No.
Did you have to go there?
No, you wouldn't!
Would you have private conversations via DMs with other people on something that was owned by Elon Musk?
Yeah, gosh.
Well, since you put it... You know what?
You spend a lot more time really thinking about this than I have, Jared.
Because here's the thing, man.
I gotta tell you, everybody is valuing Twitter on a certain level for advertising purposes, for data purposes, and, you know, in order maybe making a subscription.
Nick, the amount of information that Elon Musk bought today is priceless.
I want you to think about every major journalist, politician, critic, organizer, reformer in the world who has used that website Not only to post things, but to like things.
Also, by the way, I hate to tell people this, but literally everything that you view while you are on Twitter, but also because of cookies and tracking devices, everything you look on before you go to Twitter, everything that you look at after you go to Twitter, every DM that people have sent, location information, all of that about every major journalist, politician, public figure, critic, revolutionary, reformer, public figure, You name it.
Is now.
Property of Elon Musk.
That happened.
Yeah.
And by the way that just that alone if that's what ends up happening is and which will happen I suppose this means that you know people will go off Twitter.
I mean that's are you going to stay on Twitter?
I'm going to stay on for right now because it's I don't know it's almost like radio free Europe man.
You got to you got to send a broadcast out there and see what happens.
But I've been having conversations with people all morning and I'm talking about other journalists I'm talking about other authoritarian experts and every single one of them is like I cannot believe that it's almost like you go into a city and then all of a sudden the door gets blocked off.
I mean, someone should just invent another version.
They can't.
But I mean, at the same time, I got to tell you, like the easiest thing here is to have an iron fist inside of a velvet glove.
That's the easiest thing here.
It's to not only give it back to Trump, but also to go ahead and turn this into a space where You have a person who is more or less trying to become, they're already the most wealthy person in the world, but they're also trying to direct the future progress of the human race.
What's going to end up happening?
This is now the commodified public space of conversation in the world, more or less.
And on top of that, you have more than enough blackmail material for literally everybody on the planet.
I mean, it really boggles the mind when you start putting the pieces together.
Yeah, and some of the things you're discussing are, okay, Trump gets back in the White House, somebody blows the whistle on something, he demands that Musk give us the information from that DM, and Musk says, sure, here it is, because I don't have these, you know, standards of whatever, our code.
Well, Nick, it's not like our major tech companies weren't already They love this stuff.
It just so happens that Musk is more ideological than a lot of them.
Well, they're also banking on the fact that most people might say, fine, let China look through my cameras and see what I'm doing.
I don't have anything to hide.
I mean, in theory, right?
But obviously, what they're missing is, it's like, your bank accounts are also accessible that way.
And through these gateways, you can get things that you don't want people to find out.
And that might not occur to people necessarily, or they think that it won't happen.
But, I mean, imagine that.
Again, like you saw, you read the show Mr. Robot, right?
So Mr. Robot, when they ultimately destroyed this one company, everyone's debt was wiped out.
Which, by the way, I would have no problem with if anyone wants to do that.
But that was a good example of just how these singular companies can completely permeate every part of our lives and completely take away anything you might have had and built up for years.
Well, and that's one company.
At this point, we're looking at concentrated capital to the point where we're looking at roughly, I don't know, four or five people on the face of the earth who are more or less at the top of that food chain.
And Elon Musk is definitely at the top of that.
And there's a big question about where he's getting the financing as well for this because He was on bankruptcy's door not that long ago where he was trying to make Tesla wasn't going as well as they hoped and he had sunk a lot of money into different projects so there are I don't know if that's gonna be transparent or not like who are his partners who are part of this and how are they going to ultimately influence this thing I would hope that we have some you know guardrails against this in the over in the government I got bad news for you.
We do not.
We do not.
And I'm glad you brought up the government because no conversation about this is complete and no conversation or coverage of this takes place in our media that brings this up.
The only reason that Elon Musk is in a position to do something like this is because the government has subsidized his wealth and his businesses.
That's it.
Tesla, SpaceX, literally billions of dollars have been put forward by the U.S.
government in order to keep someone like Elon Musk to continue to do his projects and grow and grow and grow.
Meanwhile, gets out of paying taxes, gets out of putting forth his fair share, and this is incredibly A reflection of what we saw with the robber barons.
A bunch of people who were given government subsidies, monies, loans.
They were given tax dollars in order to build the infrastructure of industrialization.
Musk and all these people were given government funds, tax monies, in order to push the digitalization, the new industrialization.
And that is how something like this happens.
Now, this is an anti-government ideologue who now traffics with right-wing ideologues.
And is going to use what he was able to purchase because of government investment and support in order to dismantle government and dismantle any impediment to future profits.
This is a cycle that continues over and over again.
We've seen it before and we're seeing it again.
However, to show you how far we've come, I'm old enough to remember the AT&T-Bell breakup in 1984, which happened to happen under...
Ronald Reagan okay the most industrial capitalistic you know president we've had up until that point and even then they realized you know this is a bit of a monopoly and we probably should make this a little bit more fair and actually improve the lie or you know make prices better for the actual consumers.
So even in that era we had a you know a watchdog that would want to make sure that consumers were protected.
I mean I can't imagine that ever happening now Well, and think about this for a second.
Why would the U.S.
government go after Elon Musk?
screwing the customers and we have no other choices to turn to when we have to pay these exorbitant fees.
Netflix is another one of those examples.
They're going to start charging because they can't stand people sharing their passwords around town.
Well, and think about this for a second.
Why would the US government go after Elon Musk?
He's their partner in the space program.
Right.
Like to literally go after the person who you are partnering with.
That's how wealthy he is.
That's how established he is.
Also, while we're at it, why would the government go after Google, Apple, Amazon?
Those people run their national security systems.
They literally do!
All of the surveillance systems, all of the government websites, all of the government systems in general.
They're not going to go after any of these people and rein them in.
Hang on for one second though.
They didn't need to hire those specific people to do all those things for them.
That's right.
Those people made sure that they got hired to do those things because now they're in that position where they're infallible and they're not going to be under scrutiny.
What's the word for this?
A kleptocracy, I guess.
It's a kleptocracy.
And I want to talk, and this is an important thing, I want to talk about the evolution of this and where we're at because when all this is happening, and I saw people left and right today, and I'm sure you did too, they were all over Twitter and they're like, I never could have imagined something like this would happen.
What a strange moment this is.
One of the ways in which we're able to talk about what's getting ready to happen is by simply extrapolating what's currently happening, where trends are, and also looking at history.
We're now reaching a new point where that kleptocracy that you're talking about, that symbiosis between government and corporations, and the corporations having this type of power.
Elon Musk, by the way, read the writing on the wall, which is, you have to be friends with the right.
You have to be, quote-unquote, anti-woke.
You have to have all these conspiracy theories, all this stuff.
Meanwhile, the new Republican Party is starting to completely turn its back on its old school, quote-unquote, principles.
Right?
The old ideas of small government, and exactly.
It was all bullshit to begin with, but now they are aggressively turning away from it.
And why?
Because we suddenly have a new environment.
And the new environment is where corporations and corporate power and wealth are more powerful than government.
Now, all of a sudden, as we've covered, government in certain sectors is starting to punch back a little bit, right, to try and jostle their way into a little bit of authority over corporations.
A lot of the time, this is good.
But, Nick, we've been spending so much time in Florida on this podcast, I mean, we might as well come up with, like, Florida Gator Hour, because it is They're cooking down there in the sunshine.
I gotta tell you though, if you really want to take on Disney and you're a politician, good luck winning an election.
Disney, right, they employed so many people and the family is connected to those people who, if they were upset with somebody for punishing Disney, would not vote for you.
I'm impressed that this is what they're, that the Tantus is actually trying to do this.
So, Ronnie DeSantis, again, just up there in the leaderboard in terms of the GOP nomination 2024.
Ron DeSantis has escalated his war against Mickey Mouse.
This is an actual quote from from a governor of Florida, from a governor of Florida, quote unquote.
You're a corporation based in Burbank, California, and you're going to marshal your economic might to attack the parents of my state.
We view that as a provocation, and we're going to fight back against that.
Well, so what did DeSantis and the Republicans of Florida do?
And by the way, all of this is like wildly unconstitutional.
It's not like people care.
They have now signed a bill just this past week to destroy this bizarre, kind of disturbing economic situation that Disney had in Florida.
We'll get into the particulars of that.
But that was literally the governor of the state of Florida, more or less, just declaring economic war against Disney.
But he also characterized it as an attack, that Disney attacked parents.
All they did, and correct me if I'm wrong, Jerry, was put out a statement that simply supported People, you know, being who they like to be in their lives, right?
That was really one statement from the CEO.
Maybe, I know, maybe the workers have another, you know, got upset, whatever.
But, like, that's all that was.
This is not an attack.
They don't have any kind of legislative agenda that they can enforce on people in the state of Florida.
But, again, it's this anger and outrage they need to stir up, or he needs to stir up to, you know, get any kind of voice out there.
So the communist woke corporation that is the Disney company.
Nick, if I asked you how much money do you think that forces associated with Disney donated to super PACs associated with Donald Trump, what would you be your guess on that?
I mean, it's got to get into, I don't know the numbers, like when you say six figures, seven figures, because when you get to like 100 million, is that like nine figures?
I don't know.
But let's just say it's like... I'll just tell you this.
It's under 100 million.
It's under 100.
OK, so I'll go with like 50.
It's 10 million dollars, which I listen I know for high rollers like you and you and me like 10 million Yeah, it's a piddling amount.
You know, are you gonna do by Twitter with that and Again just to state for the record Disney is not Ideologically left it is not woke.
It has no ideology beyond profit.
In fact, if it has any ideology it has always been a conservative reactionary philosophy and In this case, you had a CEO who, again, talked to some actuaries, looked at the landscape, and said, my God, we're going to lose money if we don't speak out against this bill that we originally supported, by the way.
We're in trouble.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party, which is moving closer and closer into national conservatism, they are not interested in free market principles.
I want to read these tweets from our friend of the show, Nick, Ben Shapiro.
Here are three quick tweets from good friend of the show.
We should get him on.
Best friend of the show.
The Buckrake Podcast's best friend, Ben Shapiro.
I'll call him up.
We all meet every week, you know.
I love it.
So I'm going to read these tweets from Ben Shapiro.
And by the way, Nick, would you characterize Ben Shapiro as publicly a free market guy?
Uh, yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so here's what our good friend Ben Shapiro said.
If corporations choose to exit the free market by seeking media and legal dispensation from anti-market leftists pushing radical social values, don't count on those of us who love free markets to defend you.
Fuck around and find out.
Did he spell the F word?
No, he put, like an asshole, he put asterisks instead because, you know, it hurt his family values.
Is that free market principles?
F around and find out.
It's financial culture.
Wow!
If you go against my political ideology and my worldview, I don't believe that you have free market.
Privileges.
But by the way, so Disney, you know, in terms of the rule of, you know, free markets, needs to encompass as many people as possible to continue making money, right?
Yes!
So, they obviously did the calculation where more people will come if they made that statement versus people who won't come because they're anti-woke, right?
Like, those numbers are clear to them, which is why they had to do that.
In fact, the non-woke people who might hate Disney for saying that are still going to go to Disney anyway, I would think, and still watch Disney Plus and do all that shit.
Listen, I want to put this out there, and I want to make it very obvious, and I don't want to mince words.
Nobody gives a shit where Disney stands on any of these issues.
Disney is a fantasy.
People go to Disney in order not to think about this stuff.
This was a momentary blip on the screen.
And by the way, a bunch of people are now going to go to Disney and buy Disney products and stream stuff because they think Disney shares their inherent ideology.
Meanwhile, they're not going to watch any of their things and think about that ideology.
They're going to go ahead and import it.
This whole thing is about marketing.
It was never actually about politics until it was made about politics.
All right, so in order to talk about the politics of this, I want to get everybody up to speed.
And by the way, for the record, Nick doesn't know the specifics of what I'm getting ready to detail, and I can't wait to tell you about this.
So the actual legislation that the Republican GOPs pushed, it got rid of something called the Reedy Creek Improvement District.
And basically, and again, all of this is unconstitutional, but also, let's not sit here and pretend like this thing that they got rid of was a decent thing, okay?
So this was a special economic group of privileges for Disney to come to Florida, set up Disney World.
Nick, are you ready to hear about the Reedy Creek Improvement District?
Oh, I'm all ears.
Basically what happened here is the state of Florida, as the quote-unquote state, Granted Disney autonomy, basically, and said, guess what, corporation?
You now have special powers to basically create a state within a state, right?
And in order to have this Reedy Creek Improvement District, Nick, this is what they had autonomy for.
Very lame stuff to start with.
Construction projects, right?
Basically, Disney gets to approve and turn down construction projects within this autonomous zone.
Also, we're talking about zoning laws.
We're talking about also the ability to levy taxes.
The corporation can levy taxes.
We're not even done yet.
Also, to have their own law enforcement.
And by the way, if you think that other corporations out there aren't licking their chops wanting to levy their own taxes and have their own law enforcement, you're crazy.
Here's the coup de grace.
Are you ready for this?
It also gave Disney the right, though they never used it, to construct and operate and maintain their own nuclear power plant.
Wow.
Hey, look at that.
This was passed in 1967 by... Nick, don't look at any notes.
What party do you think passed this?
Oh, in 67?
Probably the Democrats, right?
You are wrong, my friend.
The Republican Party passed this in 1967.
Oh, shit.
Wait, well, okay, but it's the local Republicans in Florida, is what you're saying.
Yes, it was the local Floridian Republicans in 1967, and gave these powers specifically to a corporation to entice them to come and create this hub in Florida.
How does that pair of pants fit you?
How do you feel about those privileges?
Well, listen, Jared, you know, when you're competing to bring a corporation like this into your state, and it's billions and billions of dollars, and it changes your entire economy, I get it.
You gotta lure them.
But here's the thing.
No!
Were they competing against anybody else to get Disney to go?
Because think about this.
They had Disneyland on the west coast, right?
Sure.
So they're gonna do it on the east coast, right?
And so there's only, what, the the 13 states in the original amendment of Florida, whatever.
Not a lot to choose from.
And then you're gonna build it in Maine?
No, right?
So you're gonna choose a warm kind of warm weather state, and no offense to your state, you know, Jared, I'm so glad it's not in Georgia.
I just want to point that out.
Yeah.
But like if you go any farther north, you're going to deal with like hurricanes and shit all year long or a big stretch of the time.
That won't work.
So in reality, they were negotiating against like themselves, I suppose, because you know that Disney might have driven a hard bargain to get some of those things.
But the bottom line was they didn't need to because, of course, they were going to do it in Florida.
There was no other choice.
So here's the thing.
And listen, let's get this straight.
Walt Disney basically created a bunch of shell companies that went down to Florida and bought up all this land, swampland more or less.
And by the way, it's $27,000.
27,000 acres!
Wait, you're gonna need to like plot that over the map of New York so we can figure out the scale.
That's right, man.
So they go in with all these shell companies and basically at some point are like, hey, guess what?
We'd really like to have autonomy.
And they gave it to them.
And I want people to take a second, because right now we're talking about Florida, DeSantis, Disney World, all this.
I want you to understand that this is very well our future.
They're talking about this out in Las Vegas right now, is turning in these autonomous zones where corporations have control over several thousand acres.
This is what corporations dream of.
It's also what the original corporations did.
The Empires gave them, like, India.
You basically had, like, an entire corporation that went in and operated India.
And were able to create their own army, their own laws, their own taxes.
I mean, they didn't have nuclear power plants, thank God.
But, that's what the corporation is always looking for.
And I want to point this out.
I do not think that Disney should have this.
I also still think it's wrong that you now have like a political party that is punishing corporations for not agreeing with them politically.
It's like King Kong and Godzilla coming together.
Let them fight.
You can understand that both sides are terrible, but also understand the specifics of what's going on.
All right, does that make us Mothra, I suppose?
I don't know, but yes.
I loved Mothra.
Yeah, you know, listen, I have incredible sympathy for those monsters.
I really do.
You know, anyway, picturing them being cattle prodded with those, you know, electric shock things to get them in the frame and to behave properly on camera.
But listen, it's a huge, if they're really going to do this, then all of a sudden they're going to look at their, you know, their bottom line in Florida and say, you know, we're going to, we're missing a whole bunch of money now.
Well, have you seen the consequences of this?
Tell me.
The surrounding areas, there's a possibility that the people in the surrounding areas, their taxes are going to go up by 20%.
Which, last time I checked, that's a lot.
Also, on top of that, and this is the chef's kiss of the situation.
Economists are now saying that by revoking this privilege, that by the way should have never been given to Disney in the first place, that it will transfer a billion dollars in debt from Disney to the state of Florida.
Also Ron DeSantis can stand up there and pose and act tough and the Republicans can pretend.
I mean, it's literally professional wrestling and it's going to cost the state probably in excess of a billion dollars.
Yeah, and he's looking in the mirror right now.
Smiling at himself, feeling really good about it.
Yeah.
It's truly amazing.
I don't think we ever would have thought we would get to the point where you have the captain of the ship gets to sink it in order to, you know, I don't know, float in a life vest for the rest of his life.
Well, no doubt.
And I mean, look at what's happening in Texas, man.
Abbot over in Texas basically stopped all shipping in and out of the country, cost tens of billions of dollars.
Like, who even knows what the ramifications of this thing are?
And I want to make this clear, and this goes in line with what we're talking about with Musk.
We're entering a new economic and political phase.
And we have to stop talking about free market principles and going, ah, we got the Republicans.
We got them.
They're being hypocrites.
Check it out.
Look at how they're not living up their principles.
It's not real.
And with national conservatism, it's not free markets.
They are much more of a fascistic ideology, which is where the business and the economy and politics are all merged towards a single goal.
That's where this thing is going.
And this is not going to be the end.
Well, I have a question for you, Jared, because I can't understand this.
I think the political landscape that was created in this country was such that it would kind of guarantee, if you did what Abbott did, which was hold up shipping into the country for weeks, and then that way they found a whole lot of nothing looking through all these containers and whatnot, but that's supposed to end his reign.
It's supposed to end his thing right then and there, and yet It won't even affect the polling for him.
Meanwhile, you come over to California, they want to have a recall vote because our governor didn't wear a mask at a restaurant, you know, up near San Francisco one night.
That's literally where we are and no one can get him?
They can't even get a petition going against him?
Like, what is going on?
I, first of all, uh, the, the ballad of Gavin Newsom.
What a, what a, what a fun time y'all are having with that guy.
I love it.
It's so good.
No, it's, it's, it's a different thing.
They, they literally have created basically these little fiefdoms.
And I keep saying this, like the Republican states are going to be cut off from the, the quote unquote blue Democrat states.
That's where this thing is going.
You're basically going to say, Guess what, honey?
We're getting in the car.
We're heading to Texas.
No more Newsome, you know, mask land wearing.
Like, we're gonna go down to Austin where techno messiah Elon Musk is ruling with Alex Jones by his side.
I mean, that's what we're talking about.
Wait, is Alex Jones in Austin?
Yeah!
Keep Austin weird.
Because Austin is still, like, the island in the middle of Texas, isn't it?
No, he's... I was hanging out last night.
I shouldn't tell you who I was with, Elon Musk.
I mean, that's literally what's happening down in Austin right now, because it's basically being turned into this new libertarian tech ideology.
It's a nightmare.
But these states, it literally isn't going to matter if the leaders, Abbott, Or DeSantis cost their states billions as long as they do these rituals of persecution, right?
There's a group of people that we hate.
We're going to make their lives worse.
That's all that matters.
It's not about making anybody's life better at any given point.
It's about attacking the people that we don't like and that's more than enough to keep them in power.
Well, the thing with what Texas is doing in abortion and other states want to emulate this is that they're going to make it illegal.
Oh, the new one is if you conceive of the child in that state, then you cannot have an abortion anywhere else.
So if you look at it in that respect, you're not...
hyperbolic when you're saying that these states could be closed off from each other.
Like literally, you might end up having, if it's a blue state next to a red state, they might ultimately say, yeah, you cannot go there, right?
Like that doesn't seem so far-fetched anymore.
Even though it is, I can't believe I'm even saying it, but it could happen.
Nick, those, and just to prognosticate a little bit, Those moments are going to happen when climate change squeezes our borders.
It's when all of a sudden it's like, oh, guess what?
Your state's underwater?
Well, don't know what to tell you.
I hope you as a climate refugee can find another state to go into.
I mean, we literally could be looking at armed borders at some point or another.
And by the way, the only way to fix that would be the federal government would have to come in and make sure that they establish areas where people can migrate towards.
They would have to say something!
Yeah, and that won't fly either because we're seeing all these red states trying to insist that the federal government does not have any power over them.
And I've got to tell you, and I'd be interested to hear what you've noticed, Biden, and I'm not sure if this is, and I've talked about it on the podcast, Biden's communications office is piss poor.
It's bad.
It's a really, really, really bad situation.
I don't know if it's that or simply the fact that the federal government's been so depowered.
Like every now and then it's like, oh, Biden gave a speech?
Oh, I didn't even know he was giving a speech.
Oh, he said what about what?
Meanwhile, the plethora of topics and issues that aren't being discussed at all, that don't come up, that aren't addressed, all of these red states that are going so far over, you know, the limit of what can be considered even reasonable.
And maybe it's about the midterms.
I'm not sure, but they're not touching it.
It's not even coming up.
It's not even like getting any type of pushback.
And maybe it's the focus on Ukraine, where basically all of our money is now being spent in terms of weapons.
I mean, it just feels like the federal government has more or less, as by design by people like Elon Musk and the people around him, has been more or less neutralized at this point.
Well, for the comms department stuff, it does feel a little bit like... Remember when Hillary was running and she was up and it seemed like she was going to win for those several months?
And they kind of just played defense.
They were so afraid to say anything that would get anybody upset about anything.
They really just wouldn't engage or do anything for all that time.
It kind of feels the same way here.
I mean, they're so afraid of even pushing back on the mask mandate for the CDC to reinstall it, have the Department of Justice litigate that.
They're so afraid of that, even, that they're not going to get ahead of these things.
It's really interesting, and I think that's what we're missing.
We need that leadership, and he's not up for it.
Well, and I've got to tell you, to go along with that, and I think you just brought up a really good point, That centeredness, you know what I mean?
The Democratic Party, which has gone further and further towards the center and towards the right in the past few decades, even if they believe in that still, and they should not, this is not advice I want them to take, there's still room on all of this stuff to make that argument.
What's happening in Florida, literally, if you want to move towards the center or towards the right, you can make the free market argument, which is, why are you punishing a corporation you don't agree with?
Let the market decide.
And if you're a centrist Democrat, that is the argument that you think you should be making.
They're not even making that argument.
I think they should be moving left, and they should be talking about the power of corporations, and on top of that, the power of states such as Florida and people like Ron DeSantis.
I think that's the argument they should be making.
But if you're a centrist, you at least make that argument.
That's not being made now.
It's just a gaseous vacuum.
It's prevent-defense.
They're just backing up, backing up, giving them more space, more space.
They don't want to bend, but don't break.
I mean, here's the thing.
From our perspective, if you're moving to the center, you're moving right.
Yeah, that's the thing.
So, you know, it's not like they're kind of trying to get into the centrist area.
They are moving to the right as they're doing that.
And that's the problem here.
And that's what's, you know, that's why all these young people are not gravitating towards this.
It might not mean that the young people aren't going to vote Democrat in the midterms or even for Biden later, but like they certainly, the enthusiasm or all those early metrics that you see, you know, in April for a November midterm, They're not there, and it's certainly going to make everyone wring their hands.
I still have hope that people are going to get back on the board and still commit to that vote anyway, but it doesn't feel great.
Well, you've got to give them something to do, whether or not it's, I don't know, protecting a woman's right to choose or people's right to vote.
It's not happening.
And concurrently, you know, the thing we were talking about a little bit with Kevin McCarthy being exposed for, like, And by the way, I can't believe those receipts came due, like these recordings of him saying all that shit.
And by the way, that's not going to be the end of his career.
It might mean that if the Republicans win the House, he might not be the Speaker.
But I got to tell you, the next up is Jim Jordan.
And if you think Jim Jordan as Speaker of the House isn't terrifying, or, I don't know, installing Donald Trump, which has been like the brain palace fantasy of a lot of these people, like, this is going further right.
And the trend, Nick, we were talking about this before we started recording.
People are out there saying, look at Emmanuel Macron.
He got reelected in France.
The liberal democracy.
Man, first of all, Emmanuel Macron sucks.
Absolutely sucks.
Second of all, Marine Le Pen got over 40% of the vote in France.
A fascist, an absolute fascist, who is not only backed by Putin and Orban, is funded openly by Putin and Orban.
Got over 40%.
I hate to tell people, but the momentum right now is on the right.
It's with the authoritarians and it's because they are the only people who are giving an alternative to this bullshit.
They're the only people talking and everybody else is reacting.
That's what's happening right now.
And the other problem is the political landscape, if you want to get into this arena, isn't really conducive to someone who actually has principles.
So what we're seeing now are people that really, really want to get into politics, especially if you're on the right, is because you want to profit.
Right.
That's what you're doing.
And over and over again, this is what we're seeing.
People are just making money off of this, which is the most ridiculous thing and never should be that way.
You know, and then we have guys like Jared Kushner, you know, they're kind of screwed up.
It's almost like you kind of need to wait a little bit longer after you're out of the White House to like close all these billion dollar deals.
But like Kushner, No, absolutely.
pitched the Saudi hedge fund basically for investment.
And against their own research department, they're gonna give the guy $2 billion to start another company that will probably fail. - No, absolutely.
And I mean, listen, I still think it's one of the most farcical things ever that Jared Kushner was not only part of the Trump administration.
Nick, you might remember this.
He was put in charge of solving the Israeli-Palestinian situation.
That was his thing.
He was put in charge of solving the coronavirus pandemic.
Like, that's what he was put in charge of.
And meanwhile, what did he use it for?
He didn't make any inroads on any of that.
All he did was create an environment of stealing money, first of all.
Democide, in trying to keep blue states just ravaged with coronavirus so more people would die for political advantage.
And he has now cashed in for billions of dollars from a dictatorship that we just can't quit, and all of it was about the grift.
All of them.
That's nothing.
I mean, we've had very credible reports while he was representing the White House on these, you know, tours across the world, he was just pitching his own business, which is like, again, should have been fair.
Now, remember, he didn't get an investment from Qatar, so he fucking sanctioned them.
I know.
That's like that's they're not gonna dispute that.
It's it's like and I'm sure you've been in this situation like you're hanging out with a buddy or is it's like man I haven't seen you in forever he's like yeah yeah yeah it's great it's great hey I have a really good investment opportunity for you.
And you're like, Oh, God, you're sinking down in your seats.
It's like, Oh, I remember why you haven't seen the guy in a long time either.
Are we doing a timeshare here?
Or like a new phloby for the hair?
What are we doing?
And it's just that you're exactly right.
The Trump administration was a grift in every way, shape and form.
And I got to tell you, when we look back on it in history, Kushner might be the one who makes out the best money-wise.
You know what I mean?
Like he's going to make a ton of money out of that project. - But it's the vacuousness of him.
I mean, he literally makes the robot in Ex Machina look human compared to him.
And they, like, he has words, right?
He seems to have gone to schools that have taught him words that, like, you know, sound okay.
We saw, like, Ivanka try and with the heads of states you know it stayed in that meeting try and pretend to like butt in and try and talk and they kind of were laughing at her but like the deck they actually released the pitch deck that he sent over to the Saudis to get this two billion dollar investment and it was like the Vanity Fair article talks about it And it was like, I'm going to tell you, it goes, they quoted it.
Affinity, which is the name of this company, carries out a thorough and in-depth assessment of potential investments and examines a range of quantitative and qualitative factors, reads one slide.
Wait, timeout, timeout, timeout.
I'm in.
Oh, hey.
Do you need my PIN number?
Do you need my social security?
What do you need?
But it also hilariously noting that, quote, weekly investment discussions are one of the key parts of the Affinity Investment System.
Now, this sounds a lot like what Trump would do with the stakes and all the other shit, but actually with the competent, you know, writing, like they could, you know.
I would be surprised if the Dex didn't have like clip art on them, you know, from like an old Mac somewhere.
But it worked because they didn't, it was a stacked negotiation to begin with.
Absolutely it was.
And just to go ahead and bring this thing full circle, I gotta tell you that this is exactly what is happening at this point.
We have a ton of people, and Elon Musk and Jared Kushner are cut from the same cloth.
Honest to God they are.
They're people of privilege.
who have used the system, its loopholes and its corruption to go ahead and enrich themselves, despite the fact that they don't do anything.
I mean, like literally they just like Elon Musk just creates things that break and don't work.
And Jared Kushner is nothing.
Those words mean nothing, Nick.
Like, do you know as a writer, like what it feels like to have somebody read those words to me?
Like it's, it's, it's like watching a loved one in pain.
Or it's like reading a resume that somebody is trying to write.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
By the way, Kushner, there's one person who can give him a run for the money who makes more money than Kushner did since they got out, it's Mnuchin.
So that guy was a grift and a grift times ten while he was doing his shit too.
So let's not pretend, you know, all these guys are doing it.
All these guys looked at this as a great opportunity and was willing to put up with the trumpet, you know, experience just because they knew they'd make billions afterwards.
It reminds me, this whole thing very much reminds me of like a restaurant or a bar.
Do you ever watch like Bar Rescue?
No.
Have you never seen Bar Rescue?
What is it?
Bar Rescue.
Wow.
I can't believe I'm getting ready to explain Bar Rescue on this podcast.
It's like this bar guy.
It's a reality show.
he goes into a bar that's failing and you basically watch why it's failing and then he fixes it.
Yeah.
I mean, once you say reality TV, it's like, yeah, I'm not, well, okay.
So bar rescue used to be like a really good Saturday or Sunday, you know, afternoon sort of binge show when you'd want to think like a human.
Anyway, it reminds me of like a failing, like a bar where like there are people who like they go into the bar and they go, this place isn't working great and I'm going to take advantage of it.
I'm going to get extra pours.
I'm going to steal stuff.
I'm not going to pay for what I'm doing.
I'm going to rob this place like completely before it shuts down.
Well, before you burn it down and collect the insurance money.
Right.
And in the United States of America, a lot of what we're watching right now is the fruition of all of these laws, all of these handouts, all of these bad types of governance and planning that have reached their near conclusion.
Right?
All of these massive grifts that make up the United States of America, the check is coming due for them.
Right?
And the gravy train is about done.
Meanwhile, now it's about fighting over who controls, who burns it down and collects the check, and who just walks away basically, you know, and disappears into the mist.
And that's where we are right now.
All these stories that we're talking about today are about the decline of America and the people who are taking advantage of it and are using it for their own political power and profit.
And that's, yeah, that's the fall of every civilization.
It kind of follows the same path every time.
But the solution, the solution, I guess, needs to be that we need to put better laws into place, but you can't do this kind of shit while you're serving the government.
And then, you know, I know there are, aren't there laws that will prohibit you?
There's a, what's it called?
There's a cooling off period after enough time where you can't get, there's a lobbyist law, right, where you can't get a lobbying job after X amount of time.
That's all gone.
Just give that a nice pageant wave.
That's done.
Have you heard anybody talking about regulation or possibly blocking Elon buying Twitter?
Have you heard anything about the federal government at all?
No.
Have you heard anything about the federal government challenging what's happening in Florida?
No.
Have you heard anything about an investigation into Jared Kushner getting $2 billion from the Saudis?
Yeah, no.
You haven't heard any of that?
There's not even a cursory mention of it.
You know what I mean?
It's over there.
It's been so depowered and de-emphasized at this point that this stuff just happens without any check or even a consideration of a check.
Well, yeah, but then again, the things you mentioned are sort of legal, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
In a way.
No one ever thought, hey, maybe we should actually have some punishments for these things.
Because by the way, some of the things that are illegal, they realize, oh shit, we never really said what will happen if you violate this law.
So, yeah, but that's where we are.
Elon Musk, literally every single day, with his Twitter account.
I want to make this very clear.
Every single day, Elon Musk uses his Twitter account, not just to spread disinformation, but to pump his stocks.
He manipulates the economy of the United States of America every single day with his tweets.
Well, he did get in trouble once for that.
He got in trouble.
They waved a finger at him, right?
But again, any fine he might pay for that, it dwarfed in comparison with the money he made from those.
It's incredible.
It's absolutely incredible.
And that's the whole point here.
We have a badly run bar.
Well yeah, but you know, let's not pretend that we wouldn't do the same thing if we had all that money too.
No, I don't think so.
I think I would enjoy life.
I think I would go have some good dinners.
I would see the world.
I would try and end world hunger if I possibly could.
I would try my damnedest to fight back against climate change.
I don't know.
I would try and do something.
Love it.
I would try and get every gun off the face of the earth.
That's what I would do.
Well, there we go.
I'm glad we've already spent our $44 billion.
That's great.
That's wonderful.
Well, we will be talking about this and so much more on our live show this Thursday, April 28th at 7 p.m.
Eastern.
All you got to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
You'll get to join the Muckrake community.
I promise you get on that discord.
It is a great, great community.
If you're looking to get it off of Twitter, go and do that.
Come and join us Thursday at 7 p.m.
Eastern.
We're going to be taking questions during the taping.
We'll send out a call for questions, all that good stuff.
We hope we see you there, 7 p.m.
Eastern, this Thursday, April 28th.
In the meantime, if you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me, SMH.
You can find me at J.Y.
Sexton.
I just realized that those are both Twitter handles, and my God, what a time.
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