The Attack On Democracy Was Predictable, If Not Disturbing
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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the latest on John Eastman's coordinated attack on the 2020 election and how many moving, and dumb, parts it included. Plus, they dive into the interest rate hike and what it means to a hyperventilating economy.
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Welcome to Weekender Edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates-Axton.
I'm here with Nick Halseman.
If you, of course, want to get the full version of the show, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
You're not going to want to miss it.
This is going to be an important show.
We are talking about all kinds of things, Nick.
We're talking about treasonous tours of the Capitol.
We're talking about economic decline.
I mean, we're getting into so much stuff.
A lot of stuff.
I don't even know where you want to begin.
Well, I'll tell you where I want to begin, Nick.
You know, as we talk about on the McCraig Podcast, we deal a lot with the milieu of growing authoritarianism, radicalization.
We get really, really deep into ideology.
But I want to change something today.
And I want to start this show off with a little piece of advice, because here's the thing, Nick.
In our profession, it's the support of the people that keeps us going.
Am I wrong?
Absolutely, that support.
And we appreciate them, we believe in them, so I thought today would be a good time to give them a little piece of life advice.
Are you ready?
Please, I could use it too.
Here's the thing.
A wise man once said, find something that you love to do and you'll never work a day in your life.
Have you heard this before?
Yes, it reminds me of a variation of the City Slickers, Curly, you know, One Thing.
So here is the thing, Nick.
What I want to suggest to our listeners is this.
Find something in your life that you love to do half as much as Jenny Thomas and John Eastman love trying to overthrow the government of the United States of America.
And if you do that, you will never work a day in in your life.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Hang on, wait.
Thank God we figured out this guy John Eastman was up to no good, Jared.
If only we were on that!
I love it.
I mean, Trump is he's like, this is we got it.
This guy's got to go to prison.
This guy is crazy.
Right.
Look what he was saying to everybody.
Can you believe this?
This is terrible.
I can't.
This is horrible.
John Eastman, man, he he's five years minimum and disbarred for sure.
I love it.
I love all of it so much, Nick.
And I want to say before we even jump into this terrible morass of Jenny Thomas and John Eastman.
And of course, these crazy kids found each other.
Of course they ended up emailing each other.
What else are you doing in your wild eyed and it's late at night and you've watched me YouTube clips?
No, no, there's magnets.
Don't you know that there's actually magnetic forces that they can't resist each other.
I'm telling you.
It's like iron and magnets and steel, my man.
Wait, are irons attracted by magnets?
It's hard to keep track of magnets.
It's sort of metal.
Magnets are mysterious.
How do they work?
So, we've got to jump into this.
Of course, Jenny Thomas is the wife of Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Justice.
A lot of what the January 6th Commission is uncovering is predictable, if not disturbing.
But Jenny Thomas, I gotta tell you, who has a history in some of the most highly funded and influential groups in the conservative movement and Republican sort of sphere of influence, she got herself a hobby, Nick.
And that hobby was trying to overturn The presidential election of 2020.
And the details that are coming out are, I don't want to say unbelievable, because they're very believable.
It began with this quick... She personally took it upon herself to try and overturn the results in the sovereign state of Arizona.
And I want to read real fast, Nick, this email that she sent out to multiple Republican politicians in Arizona.
It turns out she tried to pressure 29 Arizona Republicans to overturn the election.
I'm going to read this email real fast.
Dear blank, because this is a form email she's sending out to some... You're going to include the sign off on the end of it, right?
I hope you do.
I will.
It's great.
As state lawmakers, you have the constitutional power and authority to protect the integrity of your elections.
And we need you to exercise that power now!
Never before in our nation's history have our elections been so threatened by fraud and unconstitutional procedures.
Somebody, by the way, should tell Jenny about the Civil War, but that's neither here nor there.
Or even the election of 2000.
That's why the nation's eyes are on you!
Before you choose your state's electors, I ask you to do two things.
And Nick, real fast, let's just, let's do a little bit of, um, let's do a bit of role play.
Are you ready?
Yeah.
You are a powerful person emailing other powerful people to overturn an election and fight what you believe to be one of the greatest crimes in the history of your nation.
You ready?
You're going to ask them to do two things.
Of course, go ahead.
What do you think those two things are?
If I am a powerful person and I believe that this is a, you know, a fraudulent election.
One of the greatest crimes, if not the greatest crime that's ever been perpetrated in your country.
Yeah, of course you're gonna have to sell them that they can't count these votes.
They have to step, they have to quit probably, right?
What's the first thing that they should do in order to rectify this problem?
Redo the election.
Well, here's what old good Jenny said.
Number one, please watch this two-minute video on YouTube.
Oh, yes.
I had blocked this out, Jared.
I remember this because of course YouTube is a dear friend of mine.
I just love it.
She came in fire and fury.
The nation is in trouble.
I'm going to solve this thing.
Watch this YouTube video.
Yeah.
Hey, there are compelling YouTube videos.
Let's not sell that short.
There are incredibly compelling YouTube videos.
I couldn't agree more.
I've seen all five of them.
I mean, there are.
They're out there.
But by the way, you know the other kind of videos are out there on YouTube?
Bad ones.
Oh, yeah.
The kind that talk about false flag operations and 9-11 conspiracies.
Troubling.
Troubling.
So number two, after you've watched this YouTube video, and then please consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you do not stand up and lead.
Thank you, Jenny Thomas.
First of all, I mean, just incredible work.
The Internet has melted that generation's brains in the conservative sphere.
That's it's just Absolutely incredible that they told everybody that TV was going to just, you know, absolutely decimate the human brain, and the internet just came along and took those same people and just melted them down in record time.
Yeah, I'm looking up because, you know, she has a little signature at the end of her emails, and I believe it was the way they confirmed that these were authentic to her because it's some absolutely ridiculous thing about her being a patriot of, well, I'm trying to find it, I can't find it.
Anyway, it is the brain melt, without question.
You know, Clarence Thomas, I kind of, you know, fuck Clarence Thomas.
Let's just say that.
Oh, no.
For years and years and years, for so many different reasons, fuck Clarence Thomas.
Right.
I mean, because, you know, he never asked a question, you know, for 25 or 30 years.
Never.
Wait, just to make sure, because this is an important anecdote.
I don't know if our listeners know this, but Clarence Thomas, as a justice, has been so inert and so quiet There's this story, he like asked a question, I think it was like a couple of years ago, and it was like everybody in the room was like, what the hell?
Oh god!
Oh god!
You know what it was like?
It was like, remember the movie Seven?
And the guy had been tortured and he's clearly dead, he's on the bed.
And they're like within an inch of his face and all of a sudden he coughs and he's really alive.
That fright, which I'm still scared of to this day, was probably the same reaction.
I want people to know this, because unless you're a complete political sicko, you don't know this.
It literally was a headline in multiple newspapers.
It was a segment on cable news that Clarence Thomas raised his voice in a hearing.
But yes, absolutely fuck him.
And by the way, his wife, Jenny Thomas, who is just running, ragging and all this stuff.
Also, just to remember, she also pushed Mark Meadows, chief of staff under Trump, to overturn the election.
Now all of a sudden, It turns out, obviously, that she's been sharing emails with Jon Eastman.
And Jon Eastman, again, to remind people what's going on, Jon Eastman was the lawyer who has ties to the Claremont Institute, which is the far-right, conservative, nationalist project who want a Caesar installed.
He comes to the White House with a quote unquote legal way of overturning the election who has just been working all over the place.
It turns out the two of them have been going back and forth with emails trying to overturn the election, which for those keeping track at home, if you have your big board up on the wall and you're connecting things with strings, now connects the wife of a Supreme Court justice to a lawyer who is actively trying to overthrow the election.
And Nick, are you ready for this little bit of news?
Well, now it turns out that John Eastman was telling people, I'm sure completely independently of this conversation, that he had inside information that the Supreme Court justices were having an internal argument and debates over what that he had inside information that the Supreme Court justices were having an internal argument and debates over was thrown to the Supreme Court.
Somehow or another, John Eastman, who was emailing hours and hours and hours with Jenny Thomas trying to overturn the election, had inside information that the Supreme Court justices were debating amongst themselves what they would do if the case got to the Supreme Court.
Well, you're leaving out one of the leads here, which was that John Eastman was a clerk for Clarence Thomas.
He was a clerk for Clarence Thomas.
And just so you understand, it's not like he was getting sandwiches and would only go in the office, kind of like in Goodfellas when he's delivering and has to go hide in the corner and say, When you're a clerk, you work extremely closely with the person you're clerking for.
Now, Ginny Thomas even comes out with an interesting quote where she says, like so many married couples, we, me and Clarence, share many of the same ideals, principles, and aspirations for America.
So let's not make it clear like these guys are separate.
This is not, um, Carville and Matlin, right?
You know what I mean?
They're on the same page here.
His was the only vote that said do not release these emails in the first place.
Real fast, just to set the record straight.
Carville and Matlin, like so many of these people, it's like Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Randy Savage, you know?
Yelling at each other on screen and then clanging and banging in the gym.
Like, that's professional wrestling, but that's neither here nor there.
Yeah, I never could understand how that works, but hey, listen, love works in mysterious ways.
And the Clarence Thomas thing, let's put a button on that one, is you know, the idea that he doesn't ask questions was simply because he knew, everybody knew, that he was placed there To rubber stamp every single conservative decision they needed.
He would sleep during the thing and then, oh wait, it's conservative, and then he'd put a stamp on it.
That's all he cared about.
So this is like, you need that context to understand where we're coming from now and then with Ginny Tom is running around here doing all this stuff.
Virginia, by the way, we should call her, let's call her Virginia because, you know, they're going to have to give her the middle name when she goes to prison, right?
Oh, man, I don't see her going to prison, but my God, this needs to stop.
This is a communication that Eastman had been sending to people.
And a reminder that as this thing is happening, there are so many people, and a reminder, the January 6th big live thing, this is about grifting.
Right?
It's about raising as much money as possible in order to, you know, enrich yourself.
But also it's a lot of freelancers who are out there trying very hard to gain power, stature, but also to put into motion this ideology where they want to overthrow democracy.
You know it's funny because all morning long we're watching the testimony from January 6th and what they're methodically and very clearly establishing is that John Eastman didn't believe what he was trying to push.
He didn't care.
Right.
Because like part of me wants to think like Ginny Thomas she probably believed that it was stolen like in her addled mind and there's there's people of color around they're voting too much like I'm sure that all that all that factors into it.
Now listen can we be really straight about this?
Yeah.
Ginny Thomas is obviously not well.
First of all, she married Clarence Thomas.
I want to recommend this.
I sent this to you yesterday.
There was a very good Slate article.
That was an excerpt from an upcoming book that has blanked my mind.
I'll remember it here soon.
But it was about conspiracy theorists who believe that mass shootings are false flags, that kids aren't actually being killed at Sandy Hook or Uvalde or whatever.
And it profiled this really sad woman who has become one of the leading conspiracy theorists in this idea.
And what you notice in this is these people, as we've talked about in the past, they have like an emptiness in them, right?
They don't have a purpose.
Maybe they're disappointed in the world.
Maybe they feel a lack of control.
They fill it up with conspiracy theories and these attacks on democracy and institutions.
Jenny Thomas has obviously, in some way, some shape or form, is filling some sort of a need within her identity or self.
It's the same thing with someone like a Mike Lindell, right?
This thing has brought in so many different types of people who need something.
You know what I mean?
They need to be involved in this thing.
So let's make that clear.
And what's interesting is that, like, you know, Trump obviously needed to win the election because he didn't, you know, he didn't want his status to change.
Well, and I'll tell you what else he needed.
Sweet, sweet cash.
Yeah, right?
Sweet, sweet cash.
And he got it.
You know what?
He probably got more for losing than he would have got for winning.
That's the American way, Nick!
Right, but here's the thing.
Producers!
Ginny Thomas's status does not change with Trump losing because she's still the wife of a Supreme Court Justice who has that role for the rest of his life.
So this is what's interesting that her her stake in this is is some other you know level of adult brain function because you know she wouldn't nothing that wouldn't have changed the status where that would needed to feel that kind of void so you might want to take that jump and think that she just simply believed that this was a fraudulent election and but and she believed because she was watching YouTube videos.
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