Jared and Nick discuss how the January 6th Committee has resorted to TV tricks to get the media and public to engage with the truth of what happened surrounding the events on January 6th. They also discuss the Peter Navarro arrest, Marjorie Taylor Greene's new hire, and don't miss this Friday's Patreon show, as they'll break down the details from the January 6th Committee's pilot episode.
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Reports recently say that this committee, which I think is illegitimate under the House-owned rules and resolution that created it, is now geared towards things like federalizing our election laws or abolishing the Electoral College.
And I think that tells you a lot about what Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats wanted with this committee.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Montgomery Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
I'm here, as always, with Nick Hausman.
Nick, how you doing, buddy?
I'm doing okay.
We had a party at our house yesterday outside in the backyard.
Oh, man, good for you.
It almost felt normal.
But I gotta tell you, Jared, when we do that and you have a good time and you enjoy people's company, you realize for the last two years, we really haven't done a lot of that.
This is what makes life worth living, right?
This is the happiness that we've been missing.
So unfortunately, we had to deal with all the Trump and all the stuff that's going on now politically.
But if we had just had the ability to have these interactions socially, if I were, I would have been a lot happier over the last couple of years, I think.
It turns out that solidarity is built on the joy of others and sometimes we forget that.
And on that note, just give everybody a preview.
The January 6th committee is holding their first public meeting primetime special attempted coup hootenanny boot drag.
On Thursday at 8 p.m.
Eastern, we are going to cover that on the Weekender Edition that comes out on Friday.
If you want to hear our responses to what promises to be, I want to say a hell of a show, but it should be an important moment.
Hopefully it is, hopefully, and we'll talk more about that today.
But if you want to gain access to that, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Do it!
Let's go ahead and give a little bit of a preview of what's to come.
Before we actually get into the January 6th committee meeting on Thursday, a couple of the juicy nuggets have come across the wire over the past couple of days.
Peter Navarro, Trump advisor.
If this doesn't warm your heart, I don't know what to tell you.
Because he wasn't working with the January 6th Commission, they got on an airplane and dragged his ass out.
I was on my way to Nashville today to do a TV appearance with Mike Huckabee Show, right?
And instead of coming to my door where I live, which by the way is right next to the FBI, instead of calling me and saying, hey we need you down at court, We've got a warrant for you.
I would have gladly come.
What did they do?
They intercepted me getting on the plane.
And then they put me in handcuffs.
They bring me here.
They put me in leg irons.
They stick me in a cell.
By the way, just historical note, I was in John Hinckley's cell.
They seem to think that that was like an important historical note.
That's punitive.
What they did to me today violated the Constitution.
So of course, Navarro goes and says, you know, that he was, uh, his constitutional rights were impugned.
And what does he say immediately?
Go out and buy my book.
Because never stop grifting.
You can't stop grifting, Nick.
Hey, respect the hustle.
You have to respect the hustle.
And I guess you probably have to respect the hustle of the Proud Boys, which by the way, that sentence coming out of my mouth felt disgusting.
Yeah.
Uh, Enrique Atario and four other members of the Proud Boys who, uh, for those who, You may not remember, the Proud Boys are a paramilitary, basically white nationalist group that has terrorized people, has beaten the living hell out of people.
And now they're charged with seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States of America, joining their good buddies with the Oath Keepers, including Stuart Rhodes, who were also charged with seditious conspiracy, which means, Nick, tell me if I'm wrong, my My expert opinion is that means that was an attempted overthrow of the United States government.
Oh yeah, and look at Merrick Garland.
He's putting on the chaps and the cowboy hat and making some people pay for some stuff.
Who would have thought?
Let's hold off on the party for Merrick Garland.
Okay, okay.
Well, you know now this this kind of charge in my mind my adult brain I think this was very serious penalties, right?
Is this the kind of thing where you it's like a treason and you get shot is?
Years probably Yeah, that's good But yeah, it's nice to see some sort of formal, you know charge of something that was bad, you know saying somebody saying that was bad.
I It is.
So we'll get into this January 6th meeting, what's happening behind the scenes, what I'm hearing from people.
But before we do, I just gotta say, Nick, one of the things that I really hate about all of this is feeling like these low level cronies.
might very well be the ones that get the punishment.
I mean, I know that we're used to that.
We've seen enough movies, we've lived in the United States of America for long enough, we see the powerful, wealthy, particularly white people often go blameless and aren't held for what they've done.
In this case, it does feel like some of the boots-on-the-ground type people might be the ones to take the fall in all of this.
Well, I'm sure at this very moment they're in a room with a really big mirror in it and, you know, someone's observing them through there and they're grilling them and someone's gonna turn because they don't want to go to prison for 20 years, right?
I mean, that's the traditional way of doing this.
Now, would these crazies be willing to take the fall and not turn And they spend a couple years in jail knowing they'll get a pardon if Trump wins.
Will that happen?
That's an interesting scenario.
Oh man, I gotta tell you.
So when this hearing gets held on Thursday, and supposedly there's going to be some other hearings before this whole thing is said and done, It has come out in small leaks from the January 6 Commission that people like Alex Jones, who has ties to all of these groups, is in constant contact with them, was basically more or less responsible for sort of lifting the Oath Keepers up into the national eye and gaining them recruits and power and influence.
There were possibilities that some of these people have already turned on them.
You know, it's a real Alex Jones or Roger Stone thing to be like, yeah, you know, I was there on January 6th.
And yeah, of course, I was employing people like the Oath Keepers to be my security or the Proud Boys to be my security or rallying with them.
But my God, I never knew that they had any intention to overthrow the United States government.
Yes, and the day before we were just kind of getting a nice tour of the Capitol because we were interested as tourists to see what the layout was of the building, maybe.
Just a normal tourist type thing, am I right?
Yeah, tourist and terrorist are pretty quick, pretty close words in the English language.
It is a quick jump linguistically, I'll say that.
But I have to tell you, again, and we've been talking about this over the past couple of weeks, times are tough.
And things are rough.
And there's like a malaise.
There's like a frustration, an existential dread.
Celebrate small victories.
People like the Proud Boys, people like the Oath Keepers are incredibly dangerous people.
And, you know, we've seen already that basically both groups sort of expected Donald Trump to declare martial law during a worsening crisis.
We know the Oath Keepers particularly were ready to go and get weapons and become sort of a, I don't know, deputized physical force on the ground.
I mean, these are people who have conspired to overthrow the government, to carry out coups, to hurt people, to kill people possibly.
In all of this, this is a...
A reassuring thing.
This is a win.
This is something that we should be happy about.
It does not mean that January 6th that we're going to get to the bottom of it, and we'll talk about some of those concerns in a minute.
But this right here, this is a good thing.
So celebrate this thing, no matter how small.
And if you're wondering how dangerous they are, I mean, in January 6th, we see in the footage that they're the ones who are marching in the military style, single file.
Like they have a little bit of training.
And if they don't, if they hadn't served in the military and just cosplay for them, some of the people who did have it are giving them the information and sort of pseudo training them as well in the military tactics, which is dangerous.
And we saw that like in Michigan, where Gretchen Whitmer was really concerned about this plot, that whether or not we can't quite even figure out exactly what that plot was.
with the militias and wanted to kidnap her or not.
Oh, I'll tell you what that plot was.
The plot was that you had a bunch of right-wing dangerous people who, like, want to overthrow government.
I know, it's a reoccurring picture.
And by the way, the FBI was probably trying to push them to do it because the FBI constantly tries to make people do things so they can make arrests and, you know, basically validate their budget and their power.
Yes, I didn't want to drop the entrapment word.
But yes, it could very well have been part of that as well.
But certainly they were... It's what they do all the time with Muslim men.
I'm just throwing that out there.
I just want to be on the record.
But they just found a Wisconsin judge bound and killed in a way that... and there's militia ties to that murderer.
And this guy, I think he has a list of people he wanted to kill and Whitmer was on that list as well.
So this is real.
These are not people who are just saying stuff.
Or even being entrapped by, you know, federal law enforcement.
Like, these people have these ideas.
They would like to carry them out.
And that's the interesting thing about even being... Well, let's just say you want to have more gun control.
Sorry, not gun control.
Gun safety laws.
Let's say you want to have more gun safety.
You might not want to take that position publicly as a public figure because you're afraid that you will You know get shot at basically by the people who want to protect the second amendment and that that is where we live in this society now Like how do you get people who are heroes?
Basically?
It's not even about like trying to About said gun safety.
I don't care gun safety gun control whatever we want to call it.
It's even just wanting to teach children It's wanting to educate children.
It's it's It's wanting to give people public health advice, you know, during a massive pandemic.
These are the things that these groups feed on these things.
And make no mistake about it, paramilitary groups like this, what do they want to do?
They want to take advantage of declining society.
They want to take advantage of crises and the way that they gain power and influence.
And in this case, I mean, Nick, we both watch with our own eyes as Donald Trump gave orders To the Proud Boys on live national television.
We all saw that.
Stand down.
Give me a name.
Give me a name.
Who would you like me to condemn?
White supremacists and right-wing leftists.
White supremacists and right-wing leftists.
Proud Boys, stand back and stand by, but I'll tell you what.
I'll tell you what.
Somebody's got to do something about Antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem.
His own FBI director.
And so what happens here?
These groups are starting to gain power and influence because the right wing is starting to dissolve things like liberal democracy or at least challenge them and they're creating in an open society or theoretically open society when you're not being shot at and your kids aren't being murdered they're trying to take advantage of that weakness and that disintegration in order to go ahead and use intimidation and violence to carry out what they want to do and
I have to tell you, the only way to stop them is to take them seriously, which nobody wanted to do for a very long time.
They wanted to pretend like, ah, these are just a bunch of jackasses.
Don't worry about them cosplaying, doing whatever.
They are dangerous.
You have to take them seriously.
And when they do stuff like, I don't know, try and overthrow the government, you have to hold them accountable.
Well, I'm glad that you said a long time because, you know, this isn't new.
And a lot of these people have been around for a long time.
We're talking about decades and decades.
This is not like a thing that Trump all of a sudden inspired and everyone joined.
He might have, you know, gotten a few more people to join up off of this.
But I think the key thing that I think Trump did, though, was figure out a way to get these people to actually participate in democracy before, which they hadn't done before.
Well, and that's part of it because they represent paramilitaries and militias that oftentimes have operated on the fringes of society.
We all know that there are white extremists, white terrorists around this country who basically are at war with the government.
They want to create a new civil war.
It just so happens you've heard of the Oath Keepers and you've heard of the Proud Boys Because they've become a more palatable sort of a presentation to people, right?
A lot of these groups, you never hear their names until they try and assassinate somebody, or they carry out a crime, or you know what I mean?
Something along those lines.
These people are in the public eye because the Republican Party has grown so extreme and moved so far to the right that they have now found themselves aligned with the most, quote-unquote, palatable of these groups.
And the only way, again, that you can stop this is to take them seriously and hold them accountable.
Is it safe to say, like, you know, we talk about, you know, I would never want to be in, you know, Ukraine right now because of the possibility you get killed by walking around the wrong corner or whatever, right?
I kind of feel like there are a specific number of places in the United States where I wouldn't want to go, right?
And you wouldn't be really safe to go, depending on who you are, what you say.
Nick, if you want to talk about my state of Georgia, you can just say it.
You don't have to tiptoe around it.
I mean, I was probably even going, you know, there's a whole lot of states that are probably bordered around Georgia.
But I think you could get into Oregon, I think you could get into Michigan, I think there are places there where if you go into... Hell, there are places in California!
Yeah!
You better not ask for mineral water at a gas station in one of these places because that's the signal and they'll know.
You know what I mean, right?
I'm glad you brought that up.
It is well known that mineral water sets these people off.
They can't stand it, it's the bubbles.
No.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny because it's like, it's just like, um, the caste system, like in, you know, Southeast Asian countries where there's a certain language you have to speak to each other depending on what level of hierarchy you are in the, in the culture.
And so you have to sort of figure it out.
You have to say a sentence here and a sentence there and you figure out, oh, where are you from?
What do you do?
What do you work?
And then eventually you figure out how you're supposed to talk to these people.
Well, I feel like that exists here, too, where you kind of throw in a little bit of a sentence about something about, like, you know, Trump, and then the response tells you, OK, all right, now I see where they are.
And then you can slowly figure out whether you have to, like, back out of this area you're in without turning your back on anybody and run, you know, or you can hang out.
So I'm telling you, I think that this country is not what we had thought it was for all this time.
And all these people that we're so frustrated with and who are causing a lot of problems have always been here and always thought the way they think.
No, I think that's right.
And, you know, getting back onto the topic of January 6th, I think, and listen, for some people, that was a moment where they finally looked at this and they said, you know what, we've been calling people who've been warning about this hysterical, you know, that it's overblown or whatever.
Some people saw it and they recognized, oh, wow, there's like a rot, you know, there's like a deep, deep infection in the body politic.
And they realized something was wrong.
There are still so many people who cannot wrap their heads around this stuff.
They can't understand what has happened.
And so they live in denial of it.
They live in this sort of delusional world.
And I have to tell you, for this presentation on Thursday, particularly, and you only get one first shot.
You only get one first impression.
And I'm old enough to remember when, I don't know, you get a Robert Mueller up on the stand and suddenly you're like, oh, God, this didn't grow great, right?
You only have one opening, you know, initial moment of communication.
Thursday, 8 p.m.
with this primetime spot.
It's set up to go ahead and present to the American public.
And I would make the argument, as importantly, it's for the Democrats and Liz Cheney and Kinzinger to basically make a presentation to not just the American public, but actually, more importantly, the American media.
And to get journalists and networks and publications to pay attention to what actually happened on January 6th, to give them new information, to give this a new narrative frame.
I have to tell you, Nick, and we'll talk about the specifics of this in a minute, I am really disturbed by the fact that that has to happen.
That there has to be a presentation to reframe this thing and remind people what happened to care and wake people up and, you know, shake them out of their complacency.
But that is unfortunately the reality of the time.
I mean, it's the same as we had with Watergate, you know, and people would rush home and watch, you know, the hearings or the highlights of the hearings.
But that happened immediately after it was discovered.
Here we are.
It's like June of 2022.
Like, people are like, ah, January 2021 was so long ago.
Everything's fine now.
Right.
Well, if you're going to make this like a TV show, then you have to have an arc and you have to have suspense and you have to be able to, you know, spread out the information.
So in my mind, what they're probably going to do is they'll put a couple of juicy things up front.
And then they're going to bury all the other really good stuff until like later right closer to the midterms right so we're not going to even get like you know I mean they're going to slowly drag this out and there might be a good you know if I was thinking about what can I do to like have the maximum impact I suppose this would be The best way to do it and drag it out.
But, you know, with our culture, we'd want all eight episodes, you know, so we could binge watch it all in a row.
Yeah, that's exactly what we would want.
And we wouldn't want it to be eight episodes.
Basically, we would want the January 6th Committee to give us like a 30-second presentation.
And I think that speaks more to not just the accelerated nature, but sort of the fickle nature of American detention, which is terrible.
But in this, it has now come out that the January 6th Committee uh, has enlisted the services of a guy named James Goldston, who is the former president of ABC news, worked at nightline, all of this type of stuff basically to try and create a prime time television show.
And listen, I, I have to tell you, I really want people to like pop that in their mouths, chew on it, let it roll around for a minute.
Like that's literally what's happening.
There was an attempted coup in the United States of America to overthrow a duly elected president.
And now we're talking about how to turn this into the best available TV product, which I absolutely agree it's necessary.
It's still disturbing.
Axios has this reporting on Goldston who's coming in to help the committee do this, basically produce it.
This is a couple lines about what the plan is.
Apparently, Goldston has said that he wants to make it "raw enough" so that skeptical journalists will find the material fresh and chew over the disclosures and future coverage.
What the hell is wrong with journalists who don't understand this?
Like, for real.
We can get deeper into it, but what the hell is wrong with you?
I agree.
But again, it's what the hell is wrong with America?
Yes.
Right?
Versus even... I mean, listen, they're doing what they have to do, and they have to try and make it as sexy as they possibly can, but this is not... it's not this.
Let me say this.
Anybody they want to reach as far as people, besides the media, they're not going to watch this.
You know, I can remember telling somebody on that side, who was very well read on the Trump stuff, that I was reading the Mueller Report and I was completely and utterly laughed at in my face.
Laughed at.
And that doesn't happen now.
Oh, by the way, a reminder, and I know that you know this as well as I do and the people listening do as well, the Mueller Report Well, there were a lot of problems in that, but it's that Barr got out ahead of it, released a summary before the actual report was released.
Our media just ran with it.
A bunch of journalists who didn't want to believe that, you know, things were as bad as they were, and they wanted to roll their eyes at people who were concerned about it.
He got out there, he gave a complete bullshit summary of the Miller Report, and that basically defanged the entire thing before it came out.
And why?
Because of what you just said.
It's that there are so many people who don't pay attention to this stuff.
Yeah.
And I know that people are checked out.
In fact, we're going to talk a little bit about why people are checked out and what's happening there.
But there are so many people who, and this is disturbing as hell, they can't even be bothered to care about the fact that there was a coup attempt in their country.
And now we have to somehow or another create a TV show, and it's not necessarily... I'm sorry, but the people who don't pay attention to this are not gonna tune in on Thursday at 8 p.m.
It doesn't matter what time it's on, what channel it's on, any of that stuff.
Maybe a couple people will run across it.
They're not gonna pay attention to it, even if ABC News... Which, by the way, I gotta tell you, ABC News is not the most compelling news package that there is out there.
So maybe they'll come across it, maybe you'll have a couple thousand or a few thousand find it.
Nick, it is basically begging the American media to talk about it and not turn away from it.
Which is a Sisyphean task in this country, to make them focus on anything, to treat it with its appropriate amount of heft and importance.
Like, it is literally about saying, hey guys, why don't you do your jobs?
Or please do your jobs!
Best yet, the Republicans are doing counter-programming.
So they're going to either get, yeah, they're going to either get like, you know, the people that come out and speak for Trump and his surrogates, or I'm not sure exactly how they're going to, you know, somehow wrestle trying time away from the networks, but they're going to get out there And by the way, one of the big talking points is that they feel that people have already had fatigue over this.
They don't want to deal with this anymore.
It's over.
But also, the people that follow these guys, the Republicans, don't even believe it was a seditious act anyway.
They're not going to be convinced no matter what you do.
They're just going to think, oh, it was a little of a riot, oh well, too bad, I got a little unruly, and then they left.
Yeah, it's literally about changing the environment in the conversation and hoping that a few people will come around on this thing.
You're exactly right.
There's nobody who's going to be sitting there in their Let's Go Brandon t-shirt and their Trump 24 hat, you know, like sitting there being like, man, I hadn't thought about all of this.
You know what, honey?
I'm going to sit down and I'm going to watch this January 6th commission.
You know, like that's not what's occurring here.
It's literally about seeding in an environment and hoping, hope against hope, that the media that completely botched and fumbled the ball back in January of 2021 and immediately, and I don't know if you remember this or if you didn't really pay attention to it, almost immediately after January 6th, they were like, Was that really that big of a deal?
I know we watched it and we were horrified, but like, was it really a coup?
Was it really that big of a deal?
It's begging these people to come back around.
And who knows if it's going to work?
We live in the United States of America, which tells me that the odds are against you getting this to work because the media doesn't have great attention span and is really bad about this stuff because they don't want to admit there's a problem in the country.
But I hope.
That's all I'll say.
I hope.
Now, with Watergate, for instance, Woodward and Bernstein get all this fanfare.
Meanwhile, the FBI was on this trail and was slowly putting together the whole case.
By the way, real fast, part of the thing with Watergate is the fact that there were two television channels.
Yeah.
Right?
That was probably the coolest thing that happened.
That was one of the most entertaining things that happened to anybody who was interested in politics.
Well, the point also being that they were on the trail.
They were doing due diligence to try and dig all this stuff up, even though their own editors didn't want them to do it.
Meanwhile, all we're getting now from this is coordinated leaks that are intentionally done from the committee.
Which, by the way, to me kind of means that they got it sealed pretty well, and they're only letting these things leak when they want to, which is basically how journalism works these days, right?
You sit there – I don't know how other people do it.
I'm picturing them sitting there waiting for their phone to ring and then someone just tells them something and they get to write an article about it.
Right?
That's what it – doesn't it feel that way now?
It's probably more on signal nowadays.
Yeah.
That's where I get my scoops, is on The Signal.
Like, you're not going to see... What was the movie where they uncover the whole Archdiocese thing?
Oh, Spotlight.
Spotlight.
It's not like that.
People are not like going door-to-door and knocking and going through the microfiche and finding... No, Taylor Lorenz is doing it to discover the libs of TikTok person.
Oh, okay.
Hey, we can't, we don't tolerate Taylor LeRen's slander.
Oh, there's no slander.
I'm saying that's actual journalistic.
But I do have to tell you, and this is, and listen, I know, I hate to be the person to do this.
I'm so sorry.
I have hopes for what's happening on Thursday.
But I have to tell you, speaking of leaks, Nick, this story, Sheldon Whitehouse, Senator Whitehouse, wrote a story for Salon, basically saying, That they uncovered that there were multiple war games that were happening for months before January 6.
They know, as we've talked about, that there is dark money that paid for this, that pushed the campaigns, that organized people, that transported people.
Undoubtedly it was wealthy right-wing donors.
And funders who want to destroy liberal democracy in order to get further tax cuts, deregulation, you name it, they're calling it shadowy moneyed interest.
White House says, and basically goes ahead and gives the tip off to people like you and me who are paying attention to this in order to translate it to other people, they don't know who it is yet.
That's not probably going to be at this.
We're not going to find out the actual high level people who know more than Trump, who organize more than Trump, And in all of this, what White House ends up saying, and I thought this was fascinating, albeit disturbing, that these political action committees that make all of this possible, there are rules on the books in order to go into their records and find out exactly who is donating there are rules on the books in order to go into their records and find out exactly who
And I have to tell people that this is an absolute necessity to getting this thing under control, figuring out what happened and keeping it from happening in the future.
But on top of that, Democratic politicians and the Democratic Party don't want to do that because they rely on their own PACs and their own shadowy donors who aren't necessarily trying to overthrow a liberal democracy, but they don't want that arms race going back and forth.
And so we have a point here where basically we're going to get these hearings, and we already know that the big fish who caused all of this are not going to be the ones called out.
Maybe.
I mean, you know, Ginny Thomas, the wife of Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court Justice, had been implicated in that, and so they could find out, by the way.
Yeah, but even she is just a ridiculous person forwarding a bunch of email forwards.
I mean, like, she's not the person who's, like, shelling out the big dollars in all of this.
Okay, fair enough.
And so, I mean, listen, I'm fairly confident that, well, first of all, here's what we know, whether they prove it or not, is that yes, a lot of these rich, you know, conservatives pour a lot of money in here as these plans, and by the way, just because it's not organized really well, because this was messy as all hell, right?
They had 10 different ideas and how they wanted to make this all happen, but they all sort of started to culminate together kind of like a You know, a good improv sketch where the ending is all the, you know, scenes together.
So there's no question, like, you could connect all this to Mark Meadows.
Like, they could get that close, right?
Oh, we've talked about this.
I could see Meadows being one of the sacrificial lambs of all of this.
Like, I could see Meadows, like, really catching something on this.
Like, if anything happens from it.
But yeah, Meadows was one of the guys who was running, like, phone numbers and going back and forth.
And trying to coordinate, you just nailed it, Nick.
There were like eight different coup attempts.
It's like eight different people came together and you it's it's almost like when you were a kid and everybody like one person wanted to play football and one person wanted to play baseball and so you played football baseball.
Like it was eight different coup attempts that were all like finagled together which shows like My God, help us if they ever figure out how to get on the same page.
Exactly.
And so that's the only question is, you know, Trump found out pretty quickly that, you know, even like the Records Act, where you're supposed to preserve your records, there isn't any, there's no teeth to this legislation.
There's no teeth to the PACs having to report where they're getting their money from.
So, I mean, you know, at the very least, if you're going to run on something, It's like you could clean up that stuff and it would be pretty innocuous sounding and you would sound like you're trying to clean up the swamp even though you might be a Democrat and say like we need to figure out a way so that these, you know, Trump can't just take boxes of classified documents to Mar-a-Lago and then like somehow they got him back and by the way I will not be surprised if it turns out that they were related to January 6th.
Right?
Because I think the community got those boxes back.
God knows what they've done to them and gotten rid of half of the stuff in there.
But you know what I mean?
I have no doubt that they targeted those because they might have had some evidence that those were related to it.
So all and it's they're just so dumb.
I mean, again, we're so lucky in some respects that Trump is so dumb.
And the people around him get stupider the more they hang around him.
Because the next one, yeah, by default, they'll be just Someone has to be smarter than that if they're in that position.
Yeah, we are.
I don't think you can emphasize that enough.
We are so lucky that Donald Trump is so dumb.
And just, you know, basically was sitting back and just being like, oh, thanks, everybody, for trying to run a coup.
I mean, like, literally.
We are so lucky.
Well, are we lucky that we had Mike Pence?
I mean, I can't believe I'm saying this, but he didn't want to leave.
No, don't say that.
OK, so do we even want to talk about the fact that his chief of staff had to go to the Secret Service and say, Trump's guys are going to kill him if you don't protect him better tomorrow.
He had to do that on January 5th.
It's literally incredible.
You know, one of the things that always gets lost in all of this, Nick, and I'm glad you brought this up, It's the fact that, like, I don't know that history or history books will do a proper job of really emphasizing the fact that in a coup attempt, the President of the United States tried basically to get the Vice President of the United States of America, his own Vice President, to get killed.
Yeah, I mean it wasn't this is no joke.
This wasn't even like just a passing thing.
He dropped one of those mafia-style lines.
It'd be a real shame if you don't do what we need you to do tomorrow.
And they ran the Secret Service.
By the way, this has already been reported right away, which was Pence didn't want to leave because he was convinced that the Secret Service would whisk him away to Alaska.
And then they'd have to shove in one of these other idiots as a president of the Senate, and then they would wreak all the havoc.
That could have happened.
Without question, if they got Pence out of there off-premises and they tried to go back and do the count again for the Electoral College, that easily could have happened.
And who knows?
They would have been successful.
So before we start recording on all of this, Nick, you said something.
You were talking about the timing of the January 6th committee and how it's time to wrap up a little bit before midterms.
We have to acknowledge that this is not just a hearing, it's a political messaging opportunity.
We have to call it what it is.
It literally is a matter of political messaging.
And on that note, we have to follow up on a story that we were following last week, which is the desperate need for the Biden administration to change the topic, to change the messaging, the narrative of the moment.
Right now, as this committee hearing is scheduled to come on to prime time and change the narrative, change the idea, What we are seeing and what I've been told from the people that I've talked to is that the new Biden narrative is going to be rolled out.
Are you ready, everybody?
It's the new Biden administration to coincide with the beginning of the January 6th hearings.
We're already seeing, we covered this NBC News I don't know how else to say it.
Just an absolute failure of an article that the administration tried to push in order to retake the narrative.
So we got another one.
Immediately, there was another one that basically said Biden's decided he's going to go out on the road.
He's going to talk to people.
He's going to change the narrative.
I want to read a quick thing from this.
This was from Politico, so you know that it was leaked from them.
The plan now is to put Biden on the road to highlight progress being made.
Which, by the way, Biden needs to be out there.
Like, hardly ever see this guy.
He's really good at retail politics.
Get him out there.
Whatever.
Even incrementally in a meeting, the series of tests with visits this week to California.
Which I think he's got that in the bag, but that's neither here nor there, where he will preside over summit of Western Hemisphere allies as well as New Mexico to push for his climate agenda.
Real fast, Nick, can you, as a person who pays attention to politics and the news as part of your job and your career, can you tell me what Joe Biden's climate agenda is?
Oh, can you sum it up for the folks at home?
That's weird.
That's about it, isn't it?
It doesn't come off the tongue.
Why is that, Nick?
Yeah, they haven't articulated anything about it.
He actually managed to skirt the whole campaign without really doing much beyond a little lip service to something about climate change.
Just an occasional thing.
Well, real fast, Nick, on that climate agenda, I'm just going to read the opening of a New York Times article.
This one's fun, man.
Houston.
When President Biden meets Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, he will be following in the footsteps of presidents like Jimmy Carter, who flew to Tehran in 1977 to exchange toasts with the Shah of Iran on New Year's Eve.
How'd that work out, Nick?
Oh, boy.
Well, you know, are we talking about the hostage situation?
You mean he'll go from start there or, you know, losing his whole presidency?
Whenever you hear, number one, that you're in the same article, in the lead of a story, with Jimmy Carter doing something during his administration, and on top of that it involves the Shah of Iran, things didn't go great.
Can we give a little bit of credit to Biden, though?
In the Build Back Better, there was lots of climate change things being addressed.
That's true.
So there was things in there, as I'm going through my brain.
That is true.
And hopefully, somehow or another, they would have offset all of the new drilling that We're now doing, and all of the pushing of those things.
I will say, and by the way, in case people haven't figured it out, I am very anti-going-to-Saudi-Arabia, where they, I don't know, they kill American citizens, chop them up and get rid of their body.
I am anti-going-to-Saudi-Arabia, hat in hand.
On top of that, the fossil fuel agenda makes fools and hostages and victims of all of us.
It is corrupting and awful.
The list goes on and on and on and on.
The problem in all of this, Nick, there is no broad narrative or plan.
There's not.
And I gotta tell you, we are far down the road of needing to address climate change and getting alternative fuel.
And I know that the gasoline prices are hard politically, but the only thing you can do there without, I don't know, getting in bed with these absolute murderers Is to start saying, hey, guess what?
Here's some hard truths.
America has to do something different.
And that's what needs to happen.
Yeah, well I just want to focus on the actual oil market for a minute, if you would indulge me.
Because I was told, in no uncertain terms, that this is a global market that is affected by supply and demand.
That's why the prices have moved.
The President can't really control them, and OPEC can't really control them.
But meanwhile, I don't know if you remember, but Trump had forced the Saudis to reduce oil production during the pandemic.
Because the prices were going down so low.
And so they made him do that under the threat of no more military aid or less military aid.
He's like, hey, well, I won't be able to control the Congress if they're not going to give me any more money for military.
So they did that.
And then now all of a sudden we're trying to go back and say, no, no, no, you got to open up those pumps.
We need more gas right away.
And of course, in that interim, they're like, shit, we're making so much money now off of how much, you know, why would we ever turn this thing off?
And I think the bottom line is it was never like some sort of world marketplace that is set by supply and demand.
Right.
I think we have figured that one out pretty quickly.
The problem in all of this is and I don't know, I don't know how to emphasize this enough.
America has a problem in which, in all ways, it wants to be the focus of power in the world.
It wants to be the world's richest country, the world's most powerful country, the world's most, like, we're comfortable constantly, we have a consumer paradise.
We want all of those things, and when other countries don't work with that, we're like, why aren't you helping us live better lives, and so you can live worse lives?
I mean, like, literally, like, We always just sort of throw up our hands.
We're like, why are you trying to stop us?
Like, come on, we're the good guys.
We're the heroes of civilization.
And by the way, I wanna make a quick list of the countries that we're talking to, trying to get this oil situation under control.
We're talking to Saudi Arabia, who have already, we covered this, Nick, when Russia invaded Ukraine and we were like, don't work with them.
Saudi Arabia's like, I'm sorry, new phone, who this?
Like really, that's what happened.
Then on top of that, and I don't know if you've been seeing this in the past couple of weeks, the conservative opinion columnist and writers and journalists, they are tired of war in Ukraine, supporting Ukraine and opposing Russia, Dauphet, We've talked with Venezuela.
from talking about sex robots to basically say, are we always going to be anti-Russian in this war?
Because we got to think about that in terms of gas and other things.
Like we've talked with Venezuela.
We've talked with Iran.
But meanwhile, every day there's a new article.
It's like, Iran is so close to nuclear weapons.
We kind of need to go to war.
I mean, this is what happens when you have to have all of your power, you have to have your cake and eat it too, and on top of that, you're addicted to a fuel source that breeds corruption and is literally destroying human civilization.
We could get more gas from Venezuela, for instance, if we ever had any normal relations with them.
But we don't.
If we could try and overthrow their government every couple of days.
Yeah.
So, like, that's the other problem.
But again, if you want to have a solution to the energy problem and it deals with drilling more, I don't want to hear it.
I do not want to hear any more solutions that deal with anything about drilling into the ground for more oil.
That is over.
And even if you want to say it's over now, it's a billion-dollar industry, whatever.
You know, whenever it will be over, it will be over and you'd be better off getting it off of that now versus whenever it happens.
Can I can I share just real fast?
So when when we're researching these episodes, we're reading all this stuff and diving deep into the research.
Every now and then I'll find a quote, Nick, that makes me laugh and cry simultaneously and have to go for a walk around the neighborhood.
This is from like the deep dive into Biden going to Saudi Arabia.
This is a quote.
I'm going to give you the quote and then I'm going to give you the person saying the quote.
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
A president has to try in regards to gas prices.
Unfortunately, there are only bad options, and any alternative options are probably worse than asking the Saudis to increase production.
Oh, interesting take, Bill Richardson.
Okay.
Bill Richardson.
I don't know if people remember this about Bill Richardson.
Not only one of the most corrupt politicians in modern American history was absolutely linked to Jeffrey Epstein.
Why is he appearing in articles, particularly in the New York Times?
Who calls him for an article?
My God!
He was on TV sometime in the past.
Is that enough?
This cancel culture is out of control, Nick.
I swear to God, it's so bad.
But I have to say, in the midst of all of this, and this came across, we both saw this, It comes out also today that after the child tax credit ended following the collapse of the Build Back Better agenda, that nearly 50% of all families with children can't afford food right now and aren't able to get enough food.
There's so much disturbing stuff coming out.
that people are having to change the food that they consume.
45% are having to use food banks.
We've got 45% of parents who have to skip meals so their children can eat.
Almost 10% who have to skip meals in order to eat, in order to afford their life, including their medicine, their housing, all of that.
The problem isn't as the Biden administration keeps saying people like Pfeiffer keeps saying in all their articles and pushes that people like the messaging just isn't getting across.
It's not that people are so stupid that they can't understand plans.
It's that there are problems that aren't being addressed.
You need a president who says, hey, this is actually where we are in this country.
This is how bad things actually are.
We need a major change.
You can't keep footsieing around the parameters of these of this thing.
Like, it is massive.
It is really, really problematic.
We all know it.
We all feel it.
And unless you're able to start talking about that, and if you don't stop seeding the conversation to these absolutely insane Republicans, like, you're not going to get anywhere.
You have to start addressing the fact that we are facing an actual massive crisis of massive proportions.
Well, the other problem is, is that, you know, oftentimes the president gets like way too much credit for the economy and also then way too much blame for the economy.
And so, but they want the credit, right?
They want to do whatever they can to get the credit for this.
So obviously that really helped.
It got kids out of poverty when they were giving tax credits like that.
And then also money just, you know, on a monthly basis for a little while.
But people want to then point to that is what created the inflation that we have now.
Which is part of it, I suppose, but it's also what's going on in Ukraine.
Oh, and also corporations gouging people.
Yeah, and that's another thing.
And they did pass some legislation, or they're trying to pass some legislation to stop, you know, price gouging from happening on the gas pump.
But either way, it's sort of out of the control of the President to some degree.
No, the President has become a mascot for the economy.
You probably don't get these in California.
I have to assume our listeners have seen this.
When you stop and get gas now, over half the time now, there's a sticker by the gas price that has a picture of Biden that says, I did that.
Like, that is the explanation.
I understand Joe Biden can't come to your town and lower gas prices.
I get that.
But, you're right.
Everything gets pinned on the president, who, more or less, a president has become sort of the mayor of a podunk town, where everything's great, and so he walks around with a sash and the key of the city, or, if things are bad, he gets put in the dunk tank.
In all of this, you are not communicating how bad things are.
We talk about the economy.
They keep saying the economy's good or whatever.
That doesn't help people who are having to cut their pills in half or aren't eating so their children can eat.
That doesn't translate.
I know.
The Republicans are so good at it.
They're like, first of all, unemployment is as low as it's ever been.
The stock market's doing okay.
Those are all the things that the Republicans would be crowing about and convincing people how well they're doing on this economy thing.
Whereas when you realize it doesn't always have anything to do with exactly what they're doing.
And then their policies make everything worse anyway for the middle class and people who we're talking about are struggling.
Now, obviously, you know, if you have a job and you didn't have one before and you're actually making money, it doesn't stretch as far because of inflation.
And again, it feels to me in this the way we've moved towards with this version of of our democracy and our in the economy, the price gouging isn't price gouging.
It's not really that anymore.
It's simply like they get to set whatever price they want whenever they want.
What's the big deal?
Like, that's what we do.
And if you really want to have this kind of an economy, like, I don't know how you're supposed to regulate that.
Well, and that's along with it, man, is it's like, you know, these businesses and the wealthy, They're getting off completely scot-free.
They're not getting taxed.
They're getting constant corporate welfare, is what they're getting.
It's just, it's constant.
All of the laws of this country are in their favor.
All of the systems are in their favor.
All of this stuff is happening, and they have to, and we talked about this before too, you have to constantly increase profits.
It's not enough to have record profits.
You have to have now record profits.
It just grows and grows and grows.
Meanwhile, listen, Biden and the Democrats, every couple of weeks, they'll be like, Hey, I think maybe you should tax these people.
And nothing comes from it.
We hear, oh, they're having a conversation about taxing people.
They're having a conversation about closing loopholes and getting this assistance.
All people see is that the agenda has stalled, right?
And that's because of Democrats themselves.
They've got power.
So meanwhile, you have people who are going around saying, oh, you just have to remind people how bad things will be with Republicans.
Yeah.
Right.
But people, and some of these people we're talking about who can't afford food after the tax credits have stopped, they don't give a shit about the Republicans being racist or sexist or full of conspiracy theories or extremist.
They want someone to tell them, "I'll fix the problem." That's what they want.
And here's what's happening, here's the problem.
X and Y is how I'm going to fix it.
It happens to be that the Republicans, as we were talking about before we recorded, are like, the problem is personal pan reading programs at Pizza Hut.
Right.
Right.
Or Mr. Potato Head.
Or you name it.
And we'll stop it.
And when they say we'll stop it, that's better than every now and then hearing the Democrats are considering working groups to figure out how to possibly means test a new program that will die in a committee or be struck down by someone like Joe Manchin.
Well, you put it that way.
I mean, we need Clinton.
Bill Clinton was the best at what you were saying.
Here's the problem.
Here's the solution.
Okay, but isn't the explanation that you want, like a leader who can explain what the problem is very quickly and simply, and then explain the solution in a very rational manner?
It was like, yes, this is what we need.
And then, you know, whether or not he ever got any of this stuff done, I don't know.
But he certainly was able to present that.
And Biden can't do that.
It was the communication of it.
And the problem in all of this is that the Democratic Party has grown so far away from a lot of the electorate.
Like, you know, when you get specialists like Ben Pfeiffer, who's out there talking about, like, how to communicate, like, it's talking about, like, oh, let's get into the weeds about it.
And Democrats really, I'm talking about politicians, they truly, honestly believe that the problem is that people just don't understand.
Right?
They don't understand what's going on, and if they can just make the right rational argument to them, it will figure itself out.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are lizard brain.
They're coming for you.
Right?
And guess what?
They'll get you.
Who's they?
The people who will get you if we're not elected.
And those two sides, like, for some people, it's not a contest.
I mean, we gotta talk about... Nick, I'm so sorry.
We have to talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene.
That's not a strong enough apology.
I am so sorry, but there's a lot happening in the Marjorie Taylor Greene universe that is instructive and problematic.
We gotta touch on it.
Like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick, I...
I would be shocked if she could explain to you how water comes to her house through pipes.
This is a person, this is not a serious person.
Meanwhile, what is she good at?
She's really, really good at just saying a bunch of shit that gets people afraid.
And that's it.
It overrides any sort of thought or whatever.
It gets to the heart of paranoia, racism, and sexism that's there.
And meanwhile, Nick, she's come out full force for Christian nationalism.
If Christian nationalism is something to be scared of, they're lying to you.
And they're lying to you on purpose because that is exactly the temperature change that is happening in America today, and they can't control it.
They can't control it, and that's what terrifies them the most.
You see, if we're going to label it Christian nationalism, this movement will actually be the movement that stops the school shootings.
This will be the movement that stops the crime in our streets.
This will be the movement that stops the sexual immorality and teaches children and brings them up in traditional families and loving homes.
This will be the movement that protects kids' innocence and nurtures them into responsible adults And I want to remind people what Christian nationalism is.
And let's try and boil this down as easily as possible.
It is the belief That America has been chosen by God as the champion.
The Christian God, by the way.
That needs to be very clear.
The Christian God has chosen America as his champion in the world.
Which, by the way, has a lot of white supremacist undertones.
And if you believe that, then you believe the people you oppose are satanic, evil, they go after children, they want to hurt you.
And which means anything that you need to do to destroy them, Is necessary, including violence, coup attempts, you name it.
This is an incredibly dangerous thing.
But the fact that the Republican Party is moving further and further in this direction should really worry everybody.
Well, absolutely.
And it's funny, the solution to the people you describe who, you know, are having a hard time recognizing what the truth is or being rational.
You know, I think that the public school system was supposed to fix that when it first came.
We needed to have a democracy, a functioning democracy.
We need to have an electorate of people, you know, who could think and who could process these things.
We've known for all the time, everybody hates school, right?
And we know that a lot of these schools are rated poorly, whatever.
No one wants to ever go.
They don't remember anything from high school, right?
Whatever we're doing is probably not great anyway in the methodology of how we teach.
Well, wait, time out, time out.
I'm so sorry, Nick.
I have to say something about the ratings.
The ratings were created by Republicans in order to start destroying public schools.
No child left behind.
No child left behind.
And we don't talk about this enough as a culture.
One of the most destructive ideas.
Like, really.
I mean, like, you want to talk about Iraq War, Katrina, the financial collapse of Bush.
No child left behind is up there.
It really truly is, and it allowed them to start taking money away from these programs and to start streamlining and going after critical thinking, humanities, you name it.
In all of this, you're exactly right, though.
That is supposed to be the place where we can start running our heads around that and making decisions based on information.
Instead, now, we have a bunch of people who are like, no, God told me that things are bad.
Yeah.
And in the gamification of all this, because it's a team and they have to cheer for it, it's a mascot that they'll never ever switch allegiances to, right?
You're always going to be a... what are you, a Cubs fan?
What are you?
What are you, an asshole?
I'm a Cubs fan.
Listen, we're all assholes for being Cubs fans.
That's the thing.
I mean, I'm not really a Cubs fan.
I don't really pay attention to it anymore.
But in the cockles of my heart, at some point, like when they won the World Series in 2016, it felt good.
And I'm never going to not want to maybe cheer for the Cubs if they do well.
I think that's what we've gotten to here.
There's nothing that you can do.
And because we haven't And what we're seeing in a lot of it, though, is in the absence of actual communication about what's going on in this country.
And here's the thing.
and one of the three branches of government and no one has any idea what it is, right?
Instead of saying to yourself, geez, they kind of made fun of me and maybe I should learn this.
I won't get made fun of again.
Instead, it just hardens them.
And they get more obscene. - And what we're seeing in a lot of it though is in the absence of actual communication about what's going on in this country.
And here's the thing, this isn't about being stupid.
It's really not.
It's not about people not having the intellect.
And we need to go ahead and get rid of these classist and regionalist ideas that these people are stupid.
It's not that they are.
There's not any sort of an explanation given to them that they can start to wrap their heads around.
And you know, we can talk about this stuff because we're in it all the time.
The only reason I have a podcast and I write books is because I've had the time to study it, right?
I was given, I was able to accrue student debt, I was able to spend time with it, and that's why I'm able to come on here and talk about neoliberalism, the destruction of liberal democracy ideology.
In the midst of all of this, Nick, we're already seeing what the GOP is doing.
Instead of getting into the nuts and bolts of how to get rid of inequality, or how to make the economy actually work for people, or to end the scourge of gun violence, Instead of talking about that, the Republicans have now just completely fallen back on saying, it's Satan!
Which is a tradition that has happened in America and around the world so often.
You basically end up, as somebody like Green will say, it is about degeneracy.
The reason why we have violence, the reason why we have strife, the reason why things aren't going well is because America turned its back on God and now God is punishing it or Satan is taking over.
It's literally, I saw Goody Proctor with the devil.
And that's what she's pushing.
And I want to point something out because this just came across the wire before we started recording.
She literally, Marjorie Taylor Greene, just hired Milo Yiannopoulos.
And for anybody who doesn't remember Milo Yiannopoulos, I just want to present you with a real quick clip.
Him talking about the age of consent.
There are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age.
He went on to describe in graphic detail his sexual relationship with a priest at the age of 14.
So what we're talking about here is that Marjorie Taylor Greene of the Republican Party, both who talk about groomers and pedophiles, she literally hired a right-wing ideologue provocateur who I've been in the room with and I have to tell you this is a dangerous evil person.
This person, who now claims that he's no longer gay, conversion therapy made him straight, which by the way, here's a quick quote from Marjorie Taylor Greene, that he has quote-unquote turned his life back to Jesus and church.
Which what's that say about gay people, Nick?
They're Satan.
They're Satanists.
They're Satan.
She has hired this person who has in public and had his entire career sort of destroyed because he talked about lowering the age of consent or about how people under the age of consent maybe can make their own sexual choices.
That person has now been hired.
Also, Nick, fun fact, he's the one that got her at AFPAC with Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist Holocaust denier.
That is now who she has turned to because she's in a battle with Satan.
And look, he embraced Jesus in the church, so obviously now he's no longer gay or dangerous.
I mean, that's the mindfuck that we're dealing with.
Well, she's really in a battle to, you know, stay in the news, right?
Remember, every couple of weeks... That's a chunk of it.
And I'll tell you who's good at that, Milo Yiannopoulos.
Yeah.
Well, here's the thing, though, is every couple of weeks, you know, if they start to fall out of the news, they gotta do something and say something to get back in, right?
And this is like clockwork.
Although, Gates has been lagging.
Matt, where are you?
You gotta say something stupid so you get back in the news.
Matt basically has, like, a side passport that he's ready to go and run out of the country at any given moment if there's, like, a knock on the door.
So he's giving it all to, you know, Bober will be next.
She'll say something stupid in the next couple days, book it, and you'll know.
But when you get to Milo Yiannopoulos, this is like Spinal Tap performing alongside The Puppet Show.
It's Puppet Show and Spinal Tap.
Yeah.
If I told him once, told him a thousand times, Spinal Tap before The Puppet Show.
And this is where we're at.
That's literally what we're doing here.
And the only reason I want to talk about this is because it's a literal Rosetta Stone into what's happening.
It's literally saying that they are quote-unquote fighting Satan, which by the way, like, if you want to, like, not actually address the problems of a country, and you don't want to actually address problems, all you have to do is attribute it to supernatural evil.
Oh, we solved it!
Okay, well, and meanwhile, oh, religion says, by the way, that everybody that disagrees with us is evil, and so we can't have democracy.
That's what we're talking about, and now we're talking about the idea that you can even bring in people who are talking about grooming, literally grooming, not like what is supposedly happening in public education, or what Democrats are, or Disney, or whatever.
A literal person who's on the record talking about this It is such incredible projection.
Hypocrisy doesn't even begin to cover it.
It's something worse.
It's something more insidious than hypocrisy.
They want to even cancel something like Pizza Hut.
Are you aware of this book club that they have?
It's the Book It Program, which is one of the fondest memories I have of childhood, which is reading books and getting a personal pan pizza at the Honey Creek Mall in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Just an incredible Saturday all the way around.
Yeah, I mean, what better way to entice young kids to read than to promise them a personal pan pizza if you read X amount of books.
So, of course, they find one book in there That's about a kid that likes to dress in drag and has a wig that he puts on.
And the wig is kind of a magic wig.
And if other kids put the wig on, they become empowered.
They feel powerful and talented and good about themselves.
This is what we're dealing with here.
And it's outrage.
It's almost to the point where maybe they're just doing it.
They know that they're going to outrage the left and they just do this kind of stuff.
But I have a feeling people are going to go to Papa John's now instead of Pizza Hut, which is really the chef's kiss.
Well, I just say I think.
I think Papa John's won over a lot of them whenever Papa John himself was, you know, just willy-nilly dropping the N-word all over a bunch of conference calls.
I think that cemented Papa John's.
And that being said, I think Papa John's makes a decent pizza, but man, that's a grotesque company.
I'm sorry, you can't see it listening to the podcast.
That gave Nick a shiver, but that's neither here nor there.
You know what?
I think it also, because I had a Papa John's moment like in the early, mid-2000s, where I was getting a lot of Papa John's, because it was like, they'd come in like 20 minutes, it was down the street.
So um I just I'm kind of that's my reaction.
It was probably pretty good.
Like talking about all this shit and all these toys and and and all these childish like sort of deals going after Disney talking about all this stuff it's literally these culture wars are leading to a point and Marjorie Taylor Greene by the way like we talk about The Republican Party and right-wing media relies on people like her and conspiracy theorists to just throw shit at the wall and see what works.
She's not talking about Christian nationalism because it just popped up into her brain.
It's the direction of the country.
This is exactly the right wing in the United States.
It's the same thing that happened in Russia.
It's the same thing that happened in Hungary.
It's part of a larger plan to say that America is degenerate And that it's fallen under satanic influence and the only thing that will make it better is to go ahead and get rid of liberal democracy and basically give Republicans and white evangelicals all of the power that they can possibly muster.
Alright everybody, a reminder on Friday for the Weekender episode, Nick and I are going to be covering the Thursday hearing of the January 6th committee.
If you want access to that, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
A reminder, we depend on your support.
We don't have ads because we want to remain independent.
We don't want anybody telling us what to talk about, what not to talk about.
We depend on that.
That's patreon.com slash mcraigpodcast.
You get the weekender edition.
Here are our thoughts on Thursday's January 6th committee hearings.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
