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May 31, 2022 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
59:41
Will Anything Change After The Uvalde Shooting?

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the timeline of the massacre in Uvalde, and how the Republican response buries deeper into a situation where it's unlikely anything is done to prevent these in the future. 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
You know, a decision was made that this was a barricaded subject situation.
There was time to retrieve the keys and wait for a tactical team with the equipment to go ahead and breach the door and take on the subject at that point.
That was the decision.
That was the thought process at that particular point in time.
Hey, with the benefit of hindsight, where I'm sitting now, of course it was about the right decision.
It was a wrong decision.
Period.
There's no excuse for that.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jerry J. Saxton.
I'm here with Nick Halsman.
I hope you all had a decent Memorial Day weekend.
Of course, we are still tracking the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, and since then, multiple tragedies in the United States of America that have taken place after.
We were talking a little bit last week, Nick.
This story was just developing as we were recording.
The law enforcement response, how do I put this?
Sucked.
And troubling.
Disturbing.
And we're going to get into that as well as some of the sort of underdeveloped topics that are going around this, some of the more disturbing parts of it.
But what's your initial reaction on what we've learned so far?
You know, what was strange to me, I think, was that there was federal response, somewhat quickly, and they just fell in line and listened to the police chief.
And I would have thought that, like, those guys would have just been like, F you, like it was in the movies, we see, excuse me sir, we're taking over now, like, you know, in Die Hard.
You would have thought they would have just been like, you don't know what you're doing, we're going in there, we're gonna do, you know, militarize this thing and take the guy out in five minutes.
So that was strange to me that they decided to fall in line whatever strict code of you know what's that thing where you know higher jurisdiction yeah and and that's I guess that's sort of what's gonna happen in terms of a covering your ass when they pull this whole thing apart but very very strange when this whole thing gets pulled apart the Department of Justice they've pledged to get to the bottom of this Nick and my guess is that a report will come out in I don't know a year or
It'll basically be under the fold in the New York Times if it's even on the first page.
We'll all look at it.
We'll tweet about it.
We'll say, look what happened here.
And that will largely be it.
I don't agree with you, Jared.
It'll take six months.
That's probably true.
It'll be an expedited thing.
And by the way, it will come with a gift wrapped little slogan at the end that's like, We know that law enforcement is trying its hardest and hopefully we'll learn from this in the future when more of our elementary school children are killed.
Right.
Listen, they'd have to fire the entire police force there.
And that doesn't work.
How are you going to... Who's going to replace them?
I don't know.
Yeah, it's... I don't know.
Well, let's figure out what the next solution is going to be.
Yeah.
So just to go ahead and get all get on the same page.
Law enforcement shows up and sticks around.
Just kind of hangs out for a while while, I guess, waiting on a janitor to give them the key.
We've now heard multiple reports.
You know, it's just a bunch of law enforcement people standing around saying, what do you want us to do?
Go in and get shot?
I mean, there's a guy in there with a gun.
Do you want us to go in there and risk our lives?
I mean, is that part of our job?
Meanwhile, we have now seen absolutely horrifying accounts of children calling into 911 while the shooting is ongoing, begging someone to come in and help.
Well, law enforcement largely does nothing.
By the way, just for perpetuity, let's run a quick clip of the governor of Texas saying that many more lives could have possibly been lost if law enforcement didn't act the right way.
It could have been worse.
The reason it was not worse is because law enforcement officials did what they do.
They showed amazing courage by running toward gunfire for the singular purpose of trying to save lives.
And it is a fact that because of their quick response, getting on the scene, being able to respond to the gunman and eliminate the gunman, they were able to save lives.
By the way, Abbott should resign, right?
Can we just go on the record as saying that?
Like, just straight up resign.
Well, you know, it could have been worse.
So, in his mind, it was, you know, it wasn't as bad as it could have been.
If there was anything left of shame in this country, he should resign, correct?
Without question, but you know they all should it's got to be everybody on that stage in that when Beto interrupted them and that goes for Ted Cruz it goes for You know the mayor of Uvalde, you know The Dan Patrick the lieutenant governor they all should just be dismissed summarily.
They should go away I mean there's no way to look at any of this in which they haven't completely failed their constituents and It reminds me of one of the great horrors of this modern condition, Nick, and I'm sure you've seen your fair share of it.
It isn't always in a school shooting.
Sometimes it's much, much smaller, right?
Just some sort of snafu that occurs where it's obvious that leadership has just completely failed.
And it's obvious to everybody that that's what's happened, that everybody refuses to take responsibility.
And that feels like, I mean, we're still in the middle of this terrible pandemic as numbers keep going up and up.
That is the norm in America now.
I don't even think that they failed in this situation.
They enabled the situation.
That's the thing.
And so it's interesting because politically, you would probably want to just play the game and just sort of say, well, we really need to take a look at this stuff.
You know, just like you said with that report, nothing will happen.
But they're kind of supposed to say, well, you know what?
We'll look at the laws and we'll see what we can do.
And maybe we can change something.
Obviously, they won't do any of that.
But they would say that now.
It's all cover your ass.
It's all, well, the cops, and by the way, it was really illuminating when you watch those interviews with the police right away and they hadn't gotten all on the same page and gotten the PR going.
They said it.
They said, well, you know, the cops were worried they were going to get shot.
But, you know, if you go through the training, that is what they have to risk.
That is their whole, you know, training.
It's like you need to go in there and save their innocent kids because they're the ones that are more important than you are.
Now, you know, here's what's the one thing about the timeline that's interesting and that maybe is nothing.
But, you know, he shoots his grandmother in the face and then peels out in this truck.
And the neighbor comes out, and the grandmother comes running out.
Like, I guess it wasn't, obviously, a mortal wound.
They call the cops at that point.
He crashes his truck, though, outside, near the school.
Why?
I would like to know what that is about.
Now, it probably isn't that he was being chased by the cops, because they had called him, and they're looking for a white truck, or whatever it is.
But, like, is he loading his gun while he's driving, and he crashes?
Like, I don't understand that.
I would like to know, for some reason, what that was about.
Just because it feels like there could be more of a snafu there.
Where they screwed up and could have stopped them.
We'll probably never know.
You know, I was talking with someone a couple days ago.
We never heard anything more about that Las Vegas shooting.
One of the deadliest shootings in the history of the United States of America.
And it just sort of evaporated into the ether like so much vapor, right?
And undoubtedly, and we talked about this on the last episode, I mean this is all just wonderful fare for conspiracy theorists.
I mean, they're obviously going to say that this kid was like an MKUltra victim or he was like motivated by some sort of intelligence program to do all this.
Well, hey, that's a big step forward from negating that actually happened.
Oh, well, that's true.
Like sometimes it's crisis actors.
Other times, you know, it's just like drug mind control, all of this stuff.
And we're not going to find out the answer to that.
Undoubtedly, we're going to probably see and we'll talk more about the political response in a little bit.
We'll see calls for even pushing more and more money into law enforcement.
I just want people to know this in case they haven't run across this yet.
The Uvalde Police Department is responsible for 40 40%.
I want to say that again.
40% of the city's budget.
40% of the city of Uvalde's budget is spent on law enforcement.
We live in a country at this point where we basically have a standing army of law enforcement officers all across the land.
Let's go through some of these numbers, man.
Going back into 1990 with George H.W.
Bush and then with Bill Clinton, there are all of these programs.
It's the 1033 program.
And we live in a country of war.
Let's just go ahead and put that on the table.
We have a military that post-USSR, Basically has all this military hardware that is set up in order to fight World War 3 wherever it could possibly happen.
What do we do?
Under 1033, this program through Bush, through Clinton, $7 billion, $7 billion worth of excess military equipment is sent to all of our law enforcement.
By the way, Nick, is that just helmets?
Is it just, like, belts?
Oh, you can go online and check with your local PD or any kind of law enforcement agency around you and see what they've gotten, line item, and then how much it's worth.
It's really fascinating.
So I did LAPD.
You know, there's a plane in there, there's a helicopter in there, there's rations, too.
I mean, like, there's some really pedestrian stuff, but, like, yeah, there's some serious equipment in there as well.
Well, I'll tell you what, you work up a mighty hunger when you're not going in and saving a bunch of elementary school children from being massacred by a person.
We're talking, and Nick, we're talking tanks.
We're talking armored vehicles.
We're talking automatic weapons.
We're talking grenade launchers.
We're talking the sort of military grade scope type things that, you know, you would expect to find over in Kabul, right?
I mean, that's what we're talking about here.
We're talking about, and this is an amazing figure.
We're talking about 30 million dollars worth of training for mass shooting scenarios.
And you and I both know this, like because we come from places where we kind of see how industries work.
We're talking not just about like, oh you're going to come here and you're going to get trained for the day.
We're talking about people going to locations.
We're talking about people having demonstrations.
Also at these mass shooting sort of training conventions, You have gun manufacturers who are in there advertising to these people.
You have military-style weapon companies that are, you know, going ahead and advertising their wares to these people.
We're talking about such a major lucrative system that tells them if one of these things happens, What's the one way that you save lives?
You go in and you stop the person from shooting.
That is the main way.
You don't stay outside.
You don't wait.
You don't negotiate.
You don't do whatever.
And instead, these people stuck around with their fingers up their ass and allowed this thing to take place.
The door was locked.
Not a door with a lock.
All the doors in schools open inwards, right?
Isn't that the thing?
Like, you're in a school, aren't they all open inwards?
So, obviously, let's go through it.
First of all, how many of their 18, you know, okay, let's go through the timeline, because we brought that up first anyway.
Within two minutes, they had two or three cops engaging him, firing shots at him in the school, right?
So this is what gets infuriating because they could have probably prevented almost all of the murders that he committed.
But a couple of guys get grazed by bullets, by the way.
That's not even – I don't even think they got shot.
They might have gotten grazed or whatever.
So they are afraid that if they burst into the door and they fall into the room right now, they're like going to be open to being shot, right?
That's I guess the whole thing, right?
Like that must be what they're scared of.
But then how many of those 18 officers that are in the hallway for 45 or an hour, how many of those had military service that fought in Iraq or Fallujah or whatever?
I bet you there were, right?
There's gotta be a percentage of those people who had actual military combat.
You don't think?
We'll find out.
That's unclear because I gotta tell you Nick, and this is something I wanted to talk about today.
This is the reason why we have a podcast.
I'm sorry.
We did this because we wanted to talk about the things that nobody wants to talk about, like in the news and in the media and politicians.
Let's talk about who cops are.
Okay.
Like, let's talk about cop mentality.
I know, personally, a lot of people who went on to become law enforcement officers, and I'll go ahead and I'll do the quick little thing of the beginning.
I know a lot of people who did it because they wanted to protect people.
I know a lot of people who went into it because maybe their dad was a cop.
You know, maybe their grandpa was a cop.
All of that stuff.
I also know a lot of people who went into it because they wanted to dominate other people.
I know a lot of people who went into it because they were insecure men who wanted to carry around guns and scream at people and tell them what to do.
I also know that a lot of them are military cosplayers.
People who didn't want to go into the military and actually go in, uh, you know, to go in a fight.
And luckily, 1033 gave them all the weapons and all the uniforms that they needed necessary to pretend like they were that so that they could go out and they could bully poor people and people of color.
There is a problem in this country in that we have, again, a standing army and a lot of these people, and we've talked about on the show before, are white supremacist assholes who are at war with their own country.
And we don't talk enough about that.
Why didn't they go in there and save those kids?
I don't know.
Maybe they think their job is to protect the community from those kids.
That's the bigger problem.
It isn't going in and actually saving people.
It's protecting property, it's protecting the wealthy, it's protecting the powerful from poor people and people that they see as incessant threats.
Well, do you believe that the reason they gave was that the police chief thought it became a barricaded situation and not a hostage situation because they just assumed all the kids had to have been killed in that classroom because he fired, I guess, so many bullets?
Do you believe that that's what happened?
They literally officially said, oh, we can wait him out.
He's barricaded now.
I gotta ask you, Nick.
Can you ever imagine that thought crossing your mind?
Oh, I bet he's went ahead and killed all of them and so we shouldn't try and save it.
We should just assume they're dead.
No.
By the way, are you aware that... It's ass covering.
It's ass covering.
That's all it is.
Did you see... The other thing that surprised me the other day when I was looking at the timeline is he actually shot through windows outside the school on the way in.
Did you see that?
No.
So, there was a little bit of advance warning.
Oh, and by the way...
Did you see how they framed, like, they didn't talk a lot about the cops or what their decision making was or whatever, but they had to make sure in the very beginning of that press conference that they told somebody that, you know, the back door was open because a teacher propped it open and, like, kept it open and then made sure, because it was her fault or his fault, whoever the teacher was, that that back door was open.
Did you see that?
You know what's amazing to me, Nick, is that while teachers are grooming children aggressively, Like, how did they have time to open up doors?
I mean, that's the thing, right?
Because you have to go ahead and do not think for a second that this is about scapegoating.
It's obviously about saying that a teacher made this possible.
Oh, and greedy administrators and anybody else.
I just saw, Nick, I saw this before we got on.
Donald Trump Jr., who I have to assume is up early because he didn't sleep last night because he's working his way through mountains of Colombian white gold at this point, basically said, let's get rid of a few of these public school gender teachers and then, you know, we'll go ahead and replace them with a guard.
That's what this is all about.
We talked about it, if you haven't listened yet, by the way, to the episode from Friday that's unlocked for everybody.
This is about creating a penal system.
In the public school.
It's about going after the public teachers, going ahead and scapegoating them.
Why?
Because the right wing is consistently in lockstep with law enforcement.
They will not admit they did something wrong.
They have to go ahead and move the blame on to somebody else.
Well, let me just tell you, Jared, the closest to a public school that Donald Trump Jr.
has ever gotten is watching The Breakfast Club.
So, like, I don't think he understands anything about what's going on.
But the other thing that's crazy about that is, okay, teachers, groomers, awful!
Let's give them some guns!
You know, like, how is that?
Those two things work together at all.
Again, they keep showing us this ridiculous torque that exists in their brains that must just squeeze out any rational thought, you know.
That's their solution, right?
Like these awful teachers that are creating gay people, or whatever, and pedophiles, and now we gotta give those same people guns so that they can now protect these kids.
We've already gone over that.
I mean, it wasn't that long ago we went over the notion of teachers having guns or not having guns and the value of that.
Let me ask you this, Jared, real quickly.
Is it the Second Amendment, the writing of the Second Amendment, Which is what has gotten all these gun clingers to desire the guns?
Or would they want guns anyway?
Like, you know what I'm saying?
I can't quite wrap my head around the chicken and egg thing.
Well, no, it's not that.
So like one of the larger problems that's happened here is, and we talked about this a little bit last week, Like, everybody now wants to go ahead and say it's the NRA that made this possible, and we talked about it.
Like, the NRA is collapsing.
Like, it just is.
Like, from mismanagement, from corruption, from all of this, it is just absolutely collapsing.
The problem is that we have created a multi-faceted problem in this country.
First of all, this is a white supremacist country.
We, you know, my ancestors and I have to assume your ancestors showed up here and we're like, hey, we kind of like this land.
It just so happens that there's a bunch of native people that we're going to have to massacre in order to take their land.
And on top of that, we're going to go ahead and bring along a bunch of black slaves from Africa.
And oftentimes, they outnumber me, so I'm gonna have to even that out somehow.
Luckily, there's a firearm there that makes it possible.
If you actually go back and you look at colonial times, especially slave-owning states, some of them, including South Carolina, they required people to carry guns, good guys with guns, in case a slave uprising took place.
Meanwhile, Nick, this is something we cover all the time, masculine insecurity.
It's very obvious that men in this country, particularly white men, are very insecure and terrified, and as a result, they go out and buy a ton of guns and perpetuate this really pathetic system of overcompensation, right?
Like, we're going to talk about Daniel Defense in a little bit.
They love this.
They know exactly what they're doing with this.
It's the idea that white men should dress up like military operators Special force operators in order to do all of this stuff.
Meanwhile, Nick, have you looked up the population of Ubaldi?
Yeah, it's 16,000.
Yeah, it's 16,000.
16,000.
16,000.
80% of that population, 80% is Hispanic.
Meanwhile, who owns everything?
Who's the political elite in that community?
White people.
That's not by accident.
That is how the economics of this country have worked.
That's how politics in this country have worked.
And by the way, in all of these counties, all of these cities, all of these places, basically if at any time a minority has taken over the political structure through democratic means, what do they do, Nick?
What did they used to do back in the day?
Wait, sorry, I was looking up, I wanted to see where Ubaldi was.
What do the white people do when?
What the white people do, like, back in the day, whenever, like, a population of color would take over the political and economic structure.
Oh, they'd take away the rights to vote.
They would take away the rights to vote, or they would literally kill them in the streets, and burn down their homes, and take back over the structure through coups.
So now all of a sudden, and I don't think that this is a coincidence, that this took place in this elementary school that is geographically, economically, racially segregated in this town.
The people who arrived on the street and it's important, or arrived on the scene, it's important to remember.
Law enforcement, they've been sold to us since we were children, Nick.
They were there to protect us.
If you ever have a problem, just go up and tell a cop.
Well, that works out well for people with lighter complexions like us.
Well, guess what?
They're there for the wealthy.
They're there for white people.
And meanwhile, they go down there and they look at this and they don't really, they're from outside of it.
You know what I mean?
It's that occupying force mentality takes over.
And you have all of these different Really disturbing trends and cultural flashpoints in America that come together, and it creates a knot.
And the Second Amendment is just so antiquated, but it has allowed people to hide behind it and also pretend like these other cultural problems and rots simply just don't exist.
So are you trying to say that the police show up and they don't care about people of color and so they don't want to risk their lives?
They would not admit that.
And I have to think in their quieter moments that they wouldn't believe that.
You know what I mean?
We talk about it all the time.
You've got to go to sleep.
If you know that, you're not necessarily going to sleep.
I think that's part of it, man.
And I think when you looked at the BLM protests, you saw a bunch of cops.
And you want to talk about cities.
Most of the cops aren't living in the city.
They're not in the neighborhoods that they're patrolling.
They see themselves as, I mean, it's the blue line.
They literally see themselves as the last defense against marauding hordes of criminals, people of color, poor people, and that they have to come in and fight a war with them.
And I got to tell you that weaponry, that plays into it too.
If you dress someone up as a firefighter for too long, they think they're a firefighter.
It's just the way human nature works.
And I think there are a lot of unconscious class, political and also racial elements to it for sure.
We can pull out a little farther on this, too, because I got into an interesting discussion on Twitter with a veteran.
Is it veteran or veteran?
My son was yelling at me.
I say veteran.
I say veteran.
Anyway, a veteran nudist libertarian who, you know, insists that we need to have guns and not have much regulation at all because of the possibility that you're going to have to fight a fascist state or a tyrannical government.
You know, if you read the entire Constitution, it kind of covers those things and basically makes any kind of insurrection like that illegal.
So they didn't build it in as a fail safe.
I don't think that politicians are like, you know what, we shouldn't do this tyranny because I'm really worried about all these people who might have guns.
But that that is the other like, you know, motivating factor here around the Second Amendment, which they've convinced themselves that, yes, this was the big fail safe.
And it's not.
And whenever you say, well, you know, if the government comes down on you to like take you out, like that, you're not going to last a minute against a tank.
And his response is like, no, no, I'm not talking about just like me.
We're talking about when you have thousands and thousands of people who have their own militia that are armed to the teeth.
But that is what he's talking about.
And that's going to be the uprising, which basically makes them seem like they're the kind of people who are, you know, progressives who can't stand what's going on with what Trump did.
You know, like that's just the same.
There is an argument to be made with that.
I mentioned this on Friday, the idea of the monopoly on violence, right?
The idea that I, and listen, I'll be straight up honest with you, and I've admitted this multiple times on this podcast, I don't think you can get rid of all guns.
I looked this up today.
I decided I wanted to calculate it.
How much money do you think it'd take to buy back every gun in the United States of America?
You know, a few billion, right?
That's about it.
Two to three trillion if you simply calculate with the average price of a gun, and we're not talking about the higher end type things.
Really?
Wow.
Yeah.
It would cost trillions of dollars.
And on top of that, I'm sorry, but if you really made a push to take the Second Amendment out of the Constitution, do you think that would go well?
I mean, I really wonder.
Okay, right, because we have a huge swath of people who want tighter gun safety laws, but I suppose those people wouldn't go that far to say get rid of safety laws.
I have a thing here.
So what percentage of Americans do you think support banning assault-style weapons?
Banning?
Well, I've seen it broken out in Democrat and Republican, but overall it's maybe like 60%?
It's 63% are in favor of that.
That's 63%.
Meanwhile, you want to talk about, and we can talk about the mental illness thing in a second, because I actually think that that's a slippery little bit of a slope, and we'll talk about that in a minute.
That's over 80%.
I mean, like, so if you start talking about all of this, you can talk about it, but I gotta tell you, to go ahead and go down, like, the road that you were talking about in a second, let's talk about a fascist-style government that comes in and just cracks down on people.
You're not going to defeat it with guns.
Like, what would happen if you really want to talk about, like, toppling a fascist-style government, you actually do more by, and this is terrible to admit, By defying it and the anger and the outrage from the violence that occurs as a result, changing public opinion and changing political and social tides.
The idea that just by going out and getting an AR-15 with a scope and a bump stock, I mean, maybe you and your family can go out and live in the woods and survive for a couple of weeks, but you're not taking down this government that way.
But I think getting rid of the Second Amendment are just sort of like cutting it out of the Constitution.
I think especially where we're at right now and considering the myriad problems we have and the radicalization we have, I mean, that's a recipe for blood in the streets.
I guess.
I'm all for it though.
I would get rid of every gun.
And by the way, it's the misinterpretation of the Second Amendment, which is really what frustrates me to an nth degree.
But again, for as smart as they were, and I guess the language written the way it was then, it's not a well-written amendment.
And we need to rewrite it anyway.
I'm kind of curious if people maybe will respond in the in the discord.
I want to, I'm working on like getting a lawyer, I'd like to have a constitutional lawyer come in and really just parse a little bit of the language there just to prove, at least to me, that the well-regulated militia part means for everybody there needs to be well-regulated regulations across the board on gun ownership, that the well-regulated militia part means for everybody there needs to be well-regulated regulations across the board on gun ownership, which is what we're not having right now. - Well, and I mean, let's Let's be honest, the Constitution really, first of all, problematic already.
They didn't have the authority to write it in the first place, but that's neither here nor there.
The Constitution at this point, it really doesn't matter how you parse out how it's written because the Republican Party doesn't care.
They literally do not care.
There's no sort of like, I mean, they created originalism out of thin air in order to just basically take over the government and the Supreme Court, which, congratulations, you did it, guys.
All of this is a recipe for more violence.
I'm sorry, but if Roe v. Wade gets overturned the way that we all expect it to, I mean, just going ahead and allowing everybody to have concealed carry probably doesn't hurt because there's going to be a wave of outrage and violence and possibly protest.
We've already seen that Americans are more than happy to go out in the streets and kill each other and then celebrate the people who do that.
So, I mean, There are problems that run even deeper before you start taking on the institutional problems, right?
I mean, there is a fever in this country that has to be it has to be taken down.
The fever has to break in some way, shape or form before we can start actually figuring out the bigger institutional problems, which I have to tell you.
And I don't know what your feeling on this has been.
I thought the I thought I think the response from the administration so far has been piss poor.
I think the past few days have just shown us more and more that, and I can't tell you, Nick, the administration refused to put anybody on TV over the weekend.
Congress went to recess.
We'll get to that in just a second.
Biden, of course, went down to Uvalde and was met with choruses of people chanting, do something, do something.
Do something!
And meanwhile, I don't know if it's the media not being willing to carry a narrative or whatever.
I don't know if it has more to do with perception.
But so far it's been really, really lackluster.
I mean, Biden has said basically the same thing he says after every one of these shootings.
It breaks his heart.
We'll do something to fix it.
Vice President Harris called for the ban of semi-automatic weapons.
I don't know if the White House gave her the heads up for that or gave her the thumbs up for that.
I can't imagine they did.
There's a rivalry going on there that we can talk about another time.
But so far, pretty distressing.
Well, let's pull this apart a little bit because it's part of the whole, you know, fight against fascism and it's part of the fight, you know, to get to, for more gun control or, sorry, gun rights.
Or gun, I'm sorry, gun safety.
Here's the thing.
Who, what body is in charge of enacting laws to get rid of guns or to protect abortion?
And by the way, the answer, of course, is the government, but it reminds me a lot of somebody who's like at a job and they're like, I'm not even supposed to be here.
Yeah, but wait, but it's not even the government's almost too general.
It's it's Congress.
They're the ones who didn't do anything for all these years for Roe v. Wade.
They could have actually done a federal law that got in place.
And again, they're going to say, well, we can't do that.
So there's we we're here to trace back the origins of all these issues.
Right.
Because there is an origin.
At some point, I mean, I think the answer is white supremacy, right?
But the bottom line here is, okay, so the Biden administration, like, they had the bully pulpit and they could try and pressure people.
I still think executive order is something they could do.
Now, let's actually go back because in 1994, when Bill Clinton passed with the assault weapons ban was actually part of the crime bill, if we remember that one.
Now the crime bill, It wasn't such a great bill, right?
Part of the reason we have military-style hardware with police, and a standing army of police in the country.
Yeah, and it gave some interesting grist to the campaign when you had Kamala Harris and Joe Biden on the stage, and Kamala, I think, was trying to drag him over the coals for that.
But out of that, at least a little section of what the assault weapons ban really did do well, so it's like, You know, Clinton gets all the credit for doing that in 94, but it was Congress that had to actually pass it, and then the Senate had to pass it.
So it's like, I kind of get a little bit why Biden feels like this has to be put on Congress.
But this is really the issue here, and I'm going to throw this out there.
Democrats constantly play prevent defense.
Prevent defense.
While Republicans play in outrage politics.
So this just sounds like another example of the Biden administration not wanting to say anything that would upset anybody.
And they're just going to run the clock out and be sort of trying to be, stay out of bounds on this thing, right?
That's what it feels like to me.
But in reality, it's like, yeah, we need to get assholes in Congress that, you know, there's already a bill that's been waiting for the Senate to sign that they won't look at.
But those are the assholes that need to actually do something and get something on paper and get signed.
So something that became, you know, it's like one of those lightbulb moments and it's something that I sort of knew, but I hadn't been able to like articulate in my own brain for a while.
It really came to the forefront this weekend when I was thinking about Biden's response.
Biden, of course, was vice president of the United States of America for eight years, a role that he was, you know, he was a little bit uncomfortable with.
You know, he sort of stepped outside of Obama's sort of direction a couple of times.
But for much, much longer than that, he was in the Senate.
And I think deep down in his heart, Joe Biden is still sort of senatorially minded.
Because one of the things that you're finding if you're actually following the conversation right now, Biden has, you know, gone out and he's done the ceremonial stuff.
You know, he's gone out and he's met with the people or whatever.
And by the way, the president of the United States of America has largely become a mascot role.
We've talked about this and that's by design, right?
But there is also the bully pulpit that is there.
Biden has not used the bully pulpit very effectively in his presidency.
Instead, he is allowing the Senate to negotiate behind the scenes.
Which is what's happening right now, basically.
And tell me if you've seen this movie before.
Senate Democrats, who are unwilling to end the filibuster in order to actually make necessary changes for progress and reform, are trying desperately to talk to Republicans of conscience.
Right?
The decent-minded Republicans, the moderate Republicans, right?
Your Romney's, your Collins, your Murkowski's, all of these people who, by the way, have done absolutely shit all and only care about like carrying out the whims of the wealthy.
Meanwhile, they're trying to discuss something.
Democrats want to do one thing all the time, which is to never appear weak on crime.
That has been, and you can insert it's crime or communism or whatever.
The Democratic Party, since FDR, since World War II, has been terrified to be on the wrong issue of anything that makes them look weak.
As a result, what are we likely to see?
Money for law enforcement.
I mean, really, that's what we're talking about.
More money to train law enforcement, possibly new weapons, those types of things.
The things that are on the table, and I have to tell you, I am deeply skeptical that any of this will go anywhere.
They're discussing possibly expanded background checks.
These red flag laws.
But I have to tell you, Nick, None of those things would have prevented the Yovaldi shooting.
None of them.
They are supposed to look like getting something done without actually addressing the problem and the larger problem is that the federal government has been depowered by design.
They're there to give the veneer of popular representation while not really addressing any of these problems.
Well, let's get clear what the red flag laws do.
So the red flag law where, let's say you have a cousin or a kid who is acting really, really dangerously, you can put them on a list that says they are not allowed to buy a gun and that list should circulate and they won't have a hard time.
Or take their guns.
Or take their guns.
That's temporary, by the way.
It's not only just temporary.
I want to point out, Nick, this is something that nobody wants to talk about in any of this.
This guy, this guy who shot up this school, with sending multiple messages to people saying, I'm going to go get a gun.
Just wait till you see what I do with it.
Just randomly reaching out to people.
Do you notice nobody reported it until after the fact?
Why?
Because there's a problem in this society of individualization in which we're just keeping our heads down, taking care of ourselves, going out, trying to make our money, stay afloat.
Meanwhile, it's becoming more and more unhinged.
Like in red flag laws, and I want to point this out, in the statistics I was telling you Nick, 87% of Americans right now support the idea of restrictions and gun ownership for mental illness.
We've talked about this.
How loaded of a term is mental illness?
Oh, it is loaded.
Nick, are you mentally ill?
I am.
I'm mentally ill.
That list is a long list.
We all have some issues.
Yeah, me too!
But you know what?
I'm all for more mental health awareness and treatment.
Absolutely!
Yeah, and on top of that, one of the things that you need to know is that reactionary movements and authoritarian movements, one of the first things that they do, they take liberals, they take progressives, they take leftists, and then they say, they're mentally ill, they're unwell, take their kids, take their weapons, take their possessions, put them in camps, eliminate them, imprison them.
Like, this type of stuff, it does not fix the problem.
In fact, it can compound the problem if it isn't done the right way.
Absolutely.
And they've been setting this up for decades now because they use those terms to describe liberals.
You know, there's something wrong with them.
They're mentally ill.
And that's what's so weird about it because, again, from my perspective, you're talking about a platform that wants to include people and treat people with humanity and dignity and allow them the pursuit of happiness.
And to the right, that is mental illness.
You know, and that is what's so disarming about this thing.
And that has been growing for years and years and years to the point now where we never feel like we can get anything done.
But the red flag law, you know, certainly the kid was living with the grandparents because, well, you know, the parents couldn't handle him, right?
Well, that's not all of it.
This is, I'm glad you opened this door because this is something that we really don't want to discuss.
This kid, or man, whatever we want to call them, right?
Like, we don't want to do that thing or whatever.
This person was basically emblematic of larger problems in the United States of America, right?
We're talking about failures in education.
We're talking about failure within the family.
We're talking about addiction.
We're talking about problems.
We're talking about a lot of things that just fester and fester and fester.
And then we look up in this country of exploitation and cruelty and loneliness and radicalization.
Something like this happens and someone says, how could this happen?
It's like, well, how could it not happen?
This country is squeezed to the point of like just awful things happening constantly and people like we talk about all the time.
Why do people get radicalized?
They're lonely.
They feel powerless.
They figure out a way to become less lonely and more powerful.
And I got to tell you, guns.
This is a country that tells you there's an answer in all of it, which is guns and gun violence and violence.
And you're exactly right.
This is a situation where this shooter, I think, is emblematic of a lot of America's rot, to be honest with you.
I mean, what's interesting to me is that The evidence that we have across the world of free and open societies that don't allow guns and don't have mass shootings, that evidence, and that is what that is, exactly what it is, has no influence on these gun clingers that don't want to change any of our laws, right?
It's weird to me that that doesn't, you know, and we've said this before, like with the Trump thing, you could give them evidence in front of their face, video of Trump Saying to Putin, thank you for fixing the election in 2016 or whatever.
And they wouldn't believe it, right?
They wouldn't accept it.
And it's the same kind of thing here where it's like, here is all this evidence.
It works.
Gun laws work.
And they refuse to acknowledge that.
Nick, I was traveling this weekend and I have to tell you, so I was traveling in like some back roads and some smaller towns, stuff like that.
Donald Trump lost the presidential election in November of 2020.
It is, according to my watch, May of 2022.
And I gotta tell you, there is no end To the amount of Trump iconography, cult materials, I mean, signs that are like, Trump 2024, no more bullshit, cutouts of him, billboards that are like, Donald Trump works with God against godless Democrats.
I mean, like, it doesn't end.
It really, truly doesn't.
That's not because Donald Trump was especially charismatic.
It's not because he was particularly magnetic.
It wasn't his words.
We all know that he can barely string together a sentence.
He's not talented, he's a complete and utter failure, a total buffoon.
It's because there's a deeper problem in the country, right, that Trump obviously recognized, took advantage of, and profited off of, which is the larger part is how many grifters in this country, particularly Republicans, but also corporations and the wealthy that they represent, are taking advantage of a larger epidemic within the country, which is Frustration, anger, alienation, mental illness as a result of all of that.
And all of this stuff has just absolutely festered together.
I mean, listen, I live down the road from Daniel Defense.
Daniel Defense is the weapons manufacturer that created one of the weapons that was used in this massacre and has been used in other massacres as well.
That's their entire thing, man.
Their entire thing is advertising The world is more dangerous than ever, and we need to sell you our increasingly powerful and deadly weapons in order to secure your life and the life of your family.
Actually, let's go ahead and let's listen to this ad real fast.
My family's safety is my highest priority.
I am responsible for their protection.
And no one has the right to tell me how to defend them.
So I've chosen the most effective tool for the job.
Daniel Defense.
Defending your nation.
Defending your home.
So, break that down man.
The psychology of the ad is literally, you're a man.
You're responsible for the safety of your family.
And what happens if you don't have the right gun at the right time?
Your family will be slaughtered.
Meanwhile, we're told that America is increasingly dangerous from crime.
It's not.
It's dangerous from people going out with guns and shooting one another in all types of public spheres.
But here we have a psychological appeal, which the Republicans use, corporations use, and the wealthy people use.
They are using the people's fear and alienation against them in order to profit and build a political base.
The irony is that the title of this company is Daniel Defense because they're they're making it seem like yeah, it's just defense It's all you defend yourself from the intruders that we all know what these intruders look like in their minds When in reality what these heinous things are all offensive, you know attacks going out and preemptively doing these things right the guy in Buffalo
You know, was such a racist, you know, whatever, asshole, that he felt like he had to go and shoot these people because they were black, right?
Like, that's basically what he was thinking, because they're taking over.
It all goes hand in hand, so Daniel Defense has to rely on 4chan.
Or 8chan?
4chan?
4chan, right?
There, yeah, either or.
Oh, either or, okay.
You know what I mean?
It's almost like these guys, I'm not going to say they work together, but like, business-wise, they do.
Like, this is all sort of the plan, and then without those, you know, the free speech, so I can say what I want to say, then we can't develop the kind of ideology that's going to want to buy the guns, you know what I mean?
And then, and if you try and, you know, police that, oh, well now you're, this is the thought police here, we can't have that, we can't have people And I want to throw this out there.
This is something that hasn't appeared in any of this coverage in any of the discussions.
One of the problems in all of this, and I want people to remember back in the day.
I grew up in the 1980s and I was in a family where people smoked.
Thank God they stopped.
But I'll tell you what was ubiquitous in my family.
Joe Camel.
Cartoon Camel.
Just smoking, making it seem like it's great or whatever.
And guess what ends up happening with the tobacco companies?
They are eventually told you cannot advertise to children, you can't sell them flavored, you can't sell them cartoon characters, any of that stuff.
Daniel Defense and other firearm manufacturers are, and this is what corporations do, we all know this, when they think about how to secure the future profits of their company, they are told by marketers and analysts constantly, you get the next generation.
You have to make sure that you set them up in order to make the market choices, in order to make the consumer choices.
And what are they doing?
We've seen it all over social media.
It's families Where the Patriarch and the Matriarch are standing there with guns next to their Christmas tree.
And who's around them?
Children.
Oh!
I shared the video yesterday.
He couldn't have been four.
Maybe he was four.
And he knew exactly how to load and unload a magazine on an M16.
Or whatever.
Maybe it was an AR-15.
And they are praising him like he aced, you know, a math test.
Yes, and like even days before this shooting Daniel Defense had put out a meme out into the culture which had a child holding a disassembled semi-automatic rifle who obviously and there was like an adult finger talent, you know telling him what to do with the caption train up a child in the way he should go which by the way is biblical the entire idea of And let's go back to the idea that the Republican Party is spreading, that the wealthy are spreading in order to take over, you know, sectors like public education and the government.
The idea is that you should indoctrinate your children.
And a reminder, these are people screaming that their children are being indoctrinated in schools and they're being groomed in schools.
Meanwhile, they're being groomed by their families and culture and political leaders into radicalization.
And we've seen this happen, by the way, in other countries.
And around the world, where basically you were brought up as a child to believe you're getting ready to fight a civil war.
And guess what happens, Nick, when you get older?
Civil war.
You fight a civil war.
In all of this, they are literally advertising, like tobacco companies in the 1980s, they are literally advertising to children to go ahead and get them hooked on their product.
And do not get me wrong, there are people who are listening right now who know this, but I can tell you from my own experience, The people we're dealing with are hooked on guns.
They're hooked on gun culture.
They're hooked on pretending like they're military operators, buying these big trucks, wearing the gear.
If you look at Daniel Defense ads, it's all of these military war on terror special operators carrying their weapons.
And what does it say?
Much like Nike did back in the day.
Wear Michael Jordan's shoes and you can be like Mike.
In all of this, the idea of masculinity is now being supplemented by these special operators who you are now supposed to, you're supposed to grow the beard, you're supposed to wear the clothes and the gear and buy all the stuff and use all your disposable income in order to surround yourself with military hardware while you have an entire political movement that says a civil war is coming.
You're going to need to fight in it.
Well, here's my thing.
I think that they might themselves say, we're never going to fight a civil war because all those glasses wearing professors, they're just too much of a sissy to ever fight.
They're just going to back down and we're going to, you know, celebrate in the streets and wave their guns in their faces.
You know, as a glasses wearing professor, I have to say I have, I have my own cache of firearms, but also on top of that, I have to say, and I will go ahead and put this out there.
I have guns, Nick, because I live in deep, deep red Georgia.
I have neo-Nazis and white supremacists and radical, radicalized groups showing up at my door, sending death threats, you know, capturing my movements, all this stuff.
I don't identify myself as a gun owner.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's it.
I wish that I didn't have to have them.
I wish that I didn't have them.
It's not my personality.
I don't have, like on the back of my car, I don't have a sticker that has like, My family listed out as like semi-automatics, you know?
Have you seen these, by the way?
Yeah.
It's people who are desperate for some type of a personality or some sort of a consumer identity.
This isn't just that the guns are the problem.
The guns are actually, if you actually think about it, they are a product.
They are.
But the product has its own sort of psychological implications that are being used in this consumer appeal.
So I think what's going on here is it's not the Second Amendment that is forcing or is inspiring these people to have this ideology.
It's the marketing because of consumerism and because of capitalism, right?
And the inherent white supremacy that the marketing appeals play upon.
Right.
So the gun companies can take advantage of the Second Amendment being like, oh, so it's legal, we can do this, but we now need to create the environment and the culture that people are going to want all this stuff, and it's not patriotic in a way to me, right?
Well, or is it?
Well, okay, so real fast, like this is a side thing that I think is incredibly relevant.
So, you know, people who move out the suburbs, right, one of the appeals that like a new Suburb.
You know what I mean?
Like a development that takes place outside the big city.
How do they appeal to people to come and live at the suburb?
They're like, yeah, the restaurants are good or whatever, but what is the appeal?
It's quiet.
It's not as dirty.
It's not as, you know, traffic is less, you know, all that stuff.
And why would you take your family to live in that suburb, in that development?
You're safer.
Oh, it's always weird whenever those advertisements always show a gate.
Right?
And an armed security guard like waving as you come in.
The appeal of the American suburbs.
was all based on desegregation.
It was all based on the movement of African Americans as they moved out into the country.
Like, as that occurred, all of a sudden, white people, and by the way, these aren't white people who necessarily were, like, court-carrying KKK members, right?
And a large part of those KKK members were people who were still left in the places where, like, they couldn't get away financially or whatever, right?
And some of them were business leaders who didn't want to leave their places.
The suburban phenomenon in America was a consumerist appeal that played upon inherent white supremacy that even the people who had it didn't understand.
They didn't think that they were racist.
They just thought that they were in danger.
Why would you live in a city?
You need to get away from it.
You need to be around your own kind, but you don't think you're racist.
The problem is this knot of identities.
White supremacy, white supremacist conspiracism, this conspiracy paranoia, it all leads to only one solution, which is I have to protect myself.
I I have to be safe.
I have to take care of my family.
It's an evolutionary appeal that Republicans, the wealthy, manufacturers, all of them, they have figured out.
And it overwhelms people.
Right.
And I can't stop to think, you know, we mentioned this last time, of, you know, these pictures of all these families and they're going around, you know, with all their guns splayed out.
And it's like hundreds of guns, maybe more.
And they're probably, almost like it's their new Christmas tree, like as they're standing around them.
And I can't help but think this is the fever pitch dream of like in the Matrix, where they need to protect themselves from the hordes that are becoming, and it's from climate change, right?
Like, at some point it's going to be a thing where we have a lot of water, we have a lot of food, and we're living behind some sort of gate, and everybody else who doesn't have that, because they were too poor to be able to amass that, are going to be banging on this gate to get in, and we're going to have to need these weapons to propel them away.
And I'll tell you what I think one of the most important and telling moments in recent history was, but it kind of got laughed off as a joke.
It was that couple in St.
Louis.
Yeah.
They came out of their houses when the protesters were coming through.
And by the way, they weren't coming to take their things.
They went into their gated off community and immediately they went outside.
She was carrying a handgun and he was carrying a big semi-automatic rifle.
So that appeal is what sells it to those people.
But on top of it, It's also about accumulated capital.
Americans have hobbies in which they hoard a bunch of things because they have to do something with their money.
Right?
Because some people buy cars.
I don't know.
Some people have coin collections.
White people Especially people who have this inherent fear of what you're saying.
And by the way, they're raised in an environment.
I was raised in the environment where I was told eventually civil war was going to come, Satanist minions were going to square off for a big major battle.
And my family, meanwhile, was hoarding weapons because they expected populations of color.
And I come from a town that had like, I don't know, Nick, like you could count the number of people of color on like two hands, you know, or at least you could back then.
There was a fear they were gonna show up, there was gonna be a showdown, and then eventually you're gonna have to fight Satan.
They were hoarding weapons because they thought they were gonna fight an actual war.
These people, the pictures you're talking about, which are disturbing as shit, these are people who do think they're gonna fight a war, but it's also collecting.
It's also their consumer identity.
I'm a person who has a lot of guns.
Hey, that's Jeff over there.
Jeff has 85 AR-15s.
And that's literally who they become and what they do with their excess money.
And meanwhile, the kids, you know, kill themselves by playing with them.
And even though they think that they're all locked up and, you know, it's like those are the statistics that you can't you can't hide from and have no again, it has no impact on on these people.
They don't even want to recognize that like, Hey, you know, the biggest cause of gun deaths right now is when you fucking leave it unlocked and the kid plays with it and shoots himself or a friend.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
The leading cause in deaths of children.
I mean, like, I don't know how you can sit around and pretend like this is like a civilized society or a healthy society.
It's not.
I mean, these are all everything that we're seeing these deaths of despair, the gun violence, these mass shootings.
It is symptomatic of a larger rot.
And whenever we have all these conversations, whenever the politicians are having debates or whatever, when news media is like boiling it down, nobody ever talks about where that rot is from.
And it comes from the very beginning of the country and this entire exploitation, domination by capitalism, and also white supremacist radicalization as a result.
And it's all a bigger, larger knot.
Alright, we'll come back and we'll cover this later.
Nick, I'm pissed.
I'm just mad.
I just hate looking at all of it.
All the time.
I feel broken.
I'm not even mad anymore.
What's that?
I'm not even mad anymore.
I'm just deflated.
Yeah, again, I know I have to be the person that says this all the time.
I know that I sort of have this mantle as almost a prophet of doom.
I think it's going to work out, but I don't know how.
Do you know what I mean?
I just don't know because the political representation is so broken and it's so co-opted by the wealthy.
I don't know how it gets fixed and we're having all kinds of side conversations.
It would have to be an event.
so heinous that they would have to do something and you know it would have to probably be related directly to the senators like they you know that's how horrible would have to be the senators families members would have to be killed with guns January 6th might have been a moment where suddenly they might take it seriously because they were put in danger But their ability, I mean, they, the Republicans were back in Congress within a couple of hours just continuing.
I mean, it couldn't, that couldn't be stopped.
I just, I don't know what does it.
I just know that what we have right now is so inadequate and incapable of actually dealing with the problem.
Right.
I mean, the whole thing about, you know, needing guns to fight a, you know, tyrannical government, No, the way to fight the tyrannical government was supposed to be at the ballot box, right?
That was always the thing.
They put in those safeguards and they barely held on after January 6th.
But that's supposed to be the nonviolent way you can actually have effect change.
I firmly believe that whatever the answer is, it has to be grassroots outside of the government.
It has to be.
And maybe it's a national strike.
Maybe it's literally a popular movement that says, hey, we want this thing taken care of.
We want money out of politics.
We need this to end.
And that happens.
Like it doesn't happen in America.
I mean, there have been moments where Americans have sort of tiptoed up to the edge of that.
But we've seen that around the world.
Like there are moments where the people can bring this type of stuff to its knees.
But it's going to take a lot more than what we've got right now.
Yeah, no, I like that.
Attacking at the capitalistic level.
Of literally just having businesses being shut down for a day or whatever it is to make that point.
That sounds good to me.
That might be a good start.
All right.
Well, we'll keep chopping at this tree.
We will be back later in the week.
Reminder, go over to patreon.com slash mcgregg podcast in order to gain access to the weekender edition on Fridays.
It is what we lean on for the support of this show.
Again, that's why we don't have commercials.
That's why we remain editorially independent.
We can keep having these tough conversations other people don't want to have.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
SMH.
You can find me at J.Y.
Saxton.
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