Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the latest mass shooting in Highland Park, IL and how the Republicans might want more of them in order to accelerate their progress to an authoritarian regime. Plus, Mitt Romney drops an Op-Ed/presidential announcement and then journalist Justin Glawe joins the discussion to explain the recent rash of Election Deniers running for office in Georgia.
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But Alex, a lot of parents, you know, when I bring this up with them, they just kind of roll their eyes and say, oh, that's you being you, Laura.
Or they'll literally roll their eyes at me and laugh at me.
And I don't care.
I mean, it doesn't bother me one bit.
I cite them to your book or any of the recent studies on this.
But a lot of these shooters, and it looks like this kid as well, were regular pot users.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm JRDH Saxton here with Nick Halsman.
We hope you had a good weekend.
This is a rare Wednesday edition of the Muckrake podcast.
We're so happy that you're here.
Here in a bit, we're going to have independent journalist Justin Glahn to talk about conspiracy believing election officials.
Believe me, it's just as bad as it sounds.
Real fast, before we get into the news of the day, just a quick little note.
We are beginning production of the second episode of A Certain Route to Failure, the audio documentary that we began.
We need your support.
Go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
If you become a patron, you get access to the additional show on Friday.
On top of that, you get to join in with the excellent muckrake community.
So yeah, head on over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
We're very excited about the second episode.
We're going to get into Ronald Wilson Reagan, Nick.
Wait, is that his middle name?
Wilson?
I believe it's Wilson.
Is it not?
I don't know.
It sounds weird to me, but hey, I hate the guy so much that I don't want to know his middle name.
If you told me right now that I'm wrong about that, I might start to believe in the Mandela effect.
I'll be honest with you.
I mean, if we type in Ronald Wilson, what happens?
Yeah, you're right.
It is.
Okay, there we go.
Well, we hope you had a good weekend, a good holiday weekend.
Unfortunately, we have to begin this thing talking about Nick, are you ready for this?
America's 309th mass shooting of 2022.
This took place in an area not too far from a place that is near and dear, I think, to both of us, which is Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago.
A bunch of people just getting together, 4th of July, standing around in a pretty quiet area, pretty peaceful little area.
A guy opened fire with a high-powered rifle, killed eight people, injured nearly 40 at last count, including children and the elderly.
And again, we say this all the time, not unpredictable, but absolutely disgusting.
Yeah, and the guy certainly had no intention of getting caught or killing himself or any kind of blaze of glory.
He was dressed like a woman and he successfully escaped.
Now, what's interesting is how do we pull apart how they found him ultimately, which I think is, you know, a whole other... unfortunately is going to be a probably a new subset of policing.
Right?
Where they need to quickly figure out, it's all social media now, who these perpetrators are.
But, I mean, I grew up not too far away from this.
This is, you know, John Hughes territory for all of his movies.
I mean, shocking isn't the word.
It's awful.
It's absolutely awful.
You know, and I hate that this has become the new norm.
On the subject of figuring out who did this, the alleged shooter, I don't know if you've seen this, has been all over social media in the past.
Filming videos, supposedly, of himself wrapping over disturbing images, telling anyone who will listen that he was planning on carrying out a shooting, using representations of shootings.
This isn't a situation where it's about funding or it's about a surveillance state or a security state.
These people, and by these people I mean law enforcement, whether or not it's local law enforcement, state law enforcement, national law enforcement, the FBI, you name it.
All of these people, they have all the resources that they need to stop things like this.
They're not interested in it.
They're not focused on it.
The only thing they can do at this point is to look up after it's happened and say, who could have ever predicted this?
Meanwhile, you have the greatest surveillance system in the history of the world.
At this point, you have more money than anybody else.
Most of these people have, you know, a lion's share of the local budgets.
And it's just a reminder, again, that the entirety of law enforcement and protection is not set up to actually protect regular people.
And I hate to say this, but shootings at things like Fourth of July parades, they're going to keep happening.
As long as we're allowing people to buy high-powered rifles, as long as we're not taking these things seriously, this is unfortunately the reality that we're damned to live in.
Are you advocating for a surveillance state?
We already have a surveillance state.
Okay.
Okay.
I mean, yeah, right.
Because in theory, it took him four hours to figure out who was doing it by searching Google, I imagine, right?
Or whatever they were doing.
You know, my take on it was, why did they have, you know, a drone?
It would probably be easier to secure, maybe even less cops, if you had a drone or a couple drones, just, you know, somebody monitoring that across.
You certainly would have seen the guy on the rooftop at that point.
But then again, you know, knowing what Highland Park is like, No one's going to think about that.
I mean, I guess your point is that everyone has to think about that, no matter how small, no matter how homogenous the terrain is.
As long as we live in this society, that is something that we have to think about.
And I don't actually think that is by accident.
I think as America continues its decline, And as the authoritarianism, which unfortunately we have to talk about on this episode, as we always do, we have to continue to realize that conditions are going to get worse and worse.
We are.
I mean, that's literally, I mean, atomization in this country is terrible.
Extremism in this country is terrible.
Radicalism is terrible.
This, this, I mean, this guy who did this, allegedly did this, Um, had built an entire career on trying to pretend like he wanted to do this.
You know what I mean?
Like that was part of his shtick.
That was part of this character.
And then he goes out and he does this.
It's not that I'm advocating for a police state.
I'm saying that these people already have everything that they need to stop crimes like this.
They do.
And on top of that, like we, we live now in a time, and I hate to say it, we're not, we're not going to get the guns.
That's not going to happen.
There is no movement for the government to do it.
There's no momentum there.
I don't, and I haven't seen anything that tells me that any gun laws would have stopped him at this point, any existing gun laws.
Meanwhile, we just keep living this atomized, terrorized, in this terrorized society, and the wealthy are going to be away from this.
They're not going to be at things like this, and they're going to have private security.
They're going to have just wall-to-wall security taking care of them.
And the rest of us are just, you know, kind of living in this little hell.
It's awful.
Well, but wait, but wait, you know, he bought an AR-15 legally, and so if you can make AR-15s illegal, then that probably wouldn't have happened.
I had gotten into this kind of conversation a few weeks ago with somebody who clearly watches alternative versions for information.
But, you know, bad guys will get guns no matter what.
and it's this weird fatalistic take to say well so we so we can't have these laws because they're going to get in anyway when they won't listen to the notion that we can reduce mass shootings by 20 percent 25 percent i'll listen that's Horrible.
This is, it's almost a Republican version of how you would look at this, but I would take that.
I would take 25% less deaths if we could do that.
Let's do that, right?
Off the top of the bat.
Let's, might as well get that done.
Then we can kind of figure out how to get the other 75 out of there.
But at the very least, uh, oh, so that's the point.
I guess I made this before was masks don't work because it's not a hundred percent stopping you from getting COVID.
These gun laws don't work because it's not a hundred 100% infallible in stopping murders from guns.
And it's like, what are we doing here?
Why can't we save as many people as possible with the laws that we can create and have?
Well, because our government is not constructed at this moment to think about any of this.
There was no momentum whatsoever to get rid of AR-15s.
None.
We've seen that after Yuvaldi.
There was simply no movement there.
We reached this quote-unquote bipartisan consensus in which, you know, the Republicans were given literally everything and the Democrats didn't really travel for it.
There were only a couple of people out there actually talking about getting rid of AR-15s.
And by the way, hats off to Beto O'Rourke, one of the few people who was actually out there saying to get rid of it.
There was no momentum to it whatsoever.
There wasn't a possibility of it happening.
There wasn't any sort of possibility of legislation going through there.
We have regressed since the semi-automatic ban.
We have regressed to the point where that's not even on the table.
And at this point, this is going to become more and more a regular part of living in this country.
So is it safe to say, I'm racking my hard drive in my brain right now to remember exactly what the situation was, but the AR-15 ban, the semi-automatic weapon ban they had when Clinton was in the White House in 1994, I think, was it the only reason why they got in there?
Because they snuck it in the crime bill, like a much bigger omnibus bill, and they snuck that in there and maybe didn't quite catch it in time?
Is that the explanation for that?
I think at that point there was still sort of a bipartisan sort of okay with that.
You know what I mean?
It wasn't everyone wasn't thrilled about it, but I think the way that that crime bill was was Achieved it was the idea.
We don't need guns of war out on the street Threatening our police which is absolutely true by the way while we're on the subject of it this old idea good guys with guns there were good guys with guns there you know it is Preposterous and and meanwhile the only way that we could get to any moment whatsoever in which we could see a possible Semi-automatic ban is if the police finally say guess what we don't want to be shot.
I think that's it I think that's literally the only way but I think the gun lobby and the energies in this country at this point are so far So far askew and so far off the overdone window that I don't even know if that's a possibility at this point.
I say that.
I don't like it.
I hate saying this, but this thing is going to continue to get worse and worse until there's no such thing as a public space.
I mean, we've talked about this before.
If there's ever a moment where we're thinking about going to something, whether it's an event or a protest, You always have in the back of your mind, is it safe to do so?
I mean, even going to a movie at this point, you're still thinking about the possibility of something like this deteriorating.
I mean, we are watching the public sphere that's going to start to Deteriorate.
And as that happens, people are going to want to buy more guns.
And there's going to be more atomization.
I mean, it is it is a really bad road that we're down.
Yeah.
I mean, living in L.A., there are strict gun laws.
And so I think there's a false sense of security here as well.
You know, if something were to happen at the mall that near my house, the main one that, you know, the Caruso owns, who just ran for mayor and tried to buy the mayoral shit race, you know, there might be one security guard there.
And it's a it's a big outdoor mall.
It might be one, maybe two, and maybe they're armed.
But, yeah, you wouldn't stop any of this.
That is what's this, you know.
And then, listen, I would be lying if I didn't say.
I've thought about, okay, like, how the hell am I going to get out of here?
How can I get my kids out first or whatever?
You know, did you watch the video at all of the shootings?
It's like, you know, nothing.
At least there's nothing that you'll see visually of people getting killed.
Thank God, at least I've seen it.
But you can listen to the amount of bullets that are being shot and how quickly that is.
I mean, he got off, I think, 75 rounds in probably about a minute.
And that's with a reload, right?
There's a pause where I'm assuming he's reloading, and that's that quickly.
This is ridiculous.
Like, there's just no way.
Why would 30 bullet magazines be available?
It might be 35.
It makes no sense how this can't possibly be legislated out of it, taxed out of it.
I don't know.
You know, something that they can inch forward after doing this other bill they just signed for, you know, background checks.
Yeah, and you know, real fast before we move on, a friend of the pod, a friend of mine named Jake, who is actually running for office around here, I mean, he sent me a proposal which is exactly, it's outside the box thinking, which is the idea of starting to tax ammunition and or like, you know, the way that they took care of gangsters back in, you know, prohibition times.
And it's exactly right.
There has to be something that is done, but I have to tell you, and I say this, I'm not glad to say this, it's not on the agenda.
It's not a priority.
What is?
Well, right, and by the way, that's part of the problem, is it's maintaining the economy.
It's maintaining this state of extraction and exploitation.
So here, before we move forward, we need to have a big conversation, Nick, about who's responsible for the current decline in the United States of America.
And I've got these two articles that unfortunately we have to talk about.
And the reason that we have to talk about these two articles, and they take place in the New York Times and they take place in the Atlantic, two of the largest publications in the United States of America, correct?
Yes.
OK, are these like crazy right wing institutions?
Some people might feel that way a little bit.
I mean, the New York Times has its moments, particularly when they want to set off illegal wars in the Middle East.
And you know, the Atlantic is where a lot of the national security folks go to pass each other notes in the hallway.
But I wanted to talk about these things today, not only because they're ludicrous, Nick, but because in the past couple of weeks, as things have gotten worse and worse with the Supreme Court, and as we've watched the Democratic Party not respond to it in the way that it It calls for.
I will say this, and I don't know what your opinion has been, and then we'll get to these pieces.
Nick, I'm starting to get the feeling that we are being prepared to live in this environment.
That it's not going to change, that there's not going to be some sort of a major push.
Yeah, you can vote November.
I'm not telling you not to.
But it does feel as if our institutions and the major places that communicate are preparing us to live not just in a post-Rose society, but in an America that Not only looks the way that we're looking at it right now, but it's going to get worse and worse.
Do you get that suspicion at this point?
Yeah.
I mean, I guess the alternative or the solution would be is you need to get a movement going that says, we will not vote for you unless you are completely and utterly clear that you want to get rid of semi-automatic weapons from the streets.
Right.
Or make them illegal.
Right.
Like that needs to be the only voting issue.
I suppose you want to throw Roe v. Wade on there, too.
And then, you know, how about money in politics and wrap it all up in a nice Listen, gay marriage, sodomy laws, these are the things that are going to be under attack too.
But here's the thing, the Republicans in 1973 laid it all out.
They made it very clear, it took them a long time, but they knew this was their issue that they were going to be focused on and stay in lockstep together for all these years.
It was clear what the platform was, what they wanted to do.
The Democrats do not have this.
Right?
They do not have a way of explaining exactly.
And by the way, it should be very easy.
I am running for the, you know, 4th Judicial District of California and I'm going to make sure that we get rid of semi-automatic weapons.
I'm going to make sure that gay marriage is protected.
I'm going to make sure that Roe v. Wade is codified.
Like, that shouldn't be hard.
But I don't, we're not hearing that, right?
We're not hearing people cogently expressing these thoughts and rallying everybody, 70% of the country plus, to vote for people like that.
It's bizarre.
And I'm glad that you said it the way you did because you're absolutely right.
Like, gay rights are next, but I want to point out there's something that's happening in the conversation right now.
Which is, and we've covered this in the past Nick, it's the idea that, you know what, Republicans are terrible, but they wouldn't be so bad and we'd be able to manage them.
If you just shut up about like gay rights and trans rights and you're just making it worse and You know, this article came out this weekend, Nick.
I literally set a psychic fire with my mind.
I was so pissed off about this.
This was by Pamela Paul.
By the way, do you know who Pamela Paul is, Nick?
Do you?
But I don't trust anybody with two first names.
That's not a bad move.
Pamela Paul formerly worked with the New York Times in book reviews, also a former spouse of Bret Stephens.
You don't say.
I do say.
And I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to read from an article, which has the not provocative at all title.
And by the way, a reminder, when these come out from the New York Times, Washington Post or whatever, do not share them.
They're going to piss you off.
Don't share them and say, New York Times, what are you doing?
Washington Post, what are you doing?
Don't share them.
They don't care if you like or hate them.
It's the exact same thing.
This article is called The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing.
Women don't Count.
So let's go ahead and see why things are in the place that they are, Nick.
Why America is in the situation it is.
Let's begin.
Pamela Paul.
Perhaps it makes sense that women, those supposedly compliant, agreeable, self-sacrificing, and everything nice creatures, what the hell is going on already?
We're the ones to finally bring our polarized country together, because the far right and the far left have found the one thing they can agree on.
Women don't count.
Nick, who is the far left?
Bernie Bros?
Like, who are we talking about here?
They're not even far left!
They're center left!
Nick, I think our show is the far left.
I think they're talking about us.
And we're not out marching around the square with, like, red flags.
Well, you gotta explain now what the crux of the matter here, what the far left is doing, because people might still be confused.
Two Supreme Court justices who have been credibly accused of abusive behavior towards women.
The overthrow of Roe v. Wade.
Let's go ahead and just get into it.
Far more bewildering has been the fringe left jumping in with its own perhaps unintentionally but effectively misogynist agenda.
There was a time when campus groups and activist organizations advocated strenuously on behalf of women.
Women's rights were human rights and something to fight for.
But today, a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations, and medical organizations are working toward an opposite end to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.
Nick, why are these two things in opposition to one another?
Jared, what's the definition of a woman?
There are many definitions of a woman.
By the way, it would have been awesome if she just would have said, you know what, I might not know the exact definition, but I'm a woman.
If Kintanji Jackson-Brown would have said something like that and just shut him up, it would have been great.
I hear ya!
You know, it's a war on, like, semantics or something weird that, like, you know, what's... Please keep going.
Well, Nick, by the way, if that was the case, you would be 100% right.
If it was semantics, it'd be one thing, but let's see what old Pamela has to say about this.
When Pamela talks about it, she says, and I quote, it's a moral issue.
A moral issue.
The noble intent behind omitting the word women is to make room for a relatively tiny number of transgender men and people identifying as non-binary retain aspects of female biological function and can conceive, give birth, or breastfeed.
Women, of course, have been accommodating.
They've welcomed transgender women into their organizations.
They've learned that to propose any space just for biological women in situa- By the way, Nick, can you- Like, that's where we're going.
They love talking about transgender women in sports, don't they?
Oh, yeah.
It's really... I'm afraid I'm going to say something.
It's so, so infuriating.
If there are other marginalized people to fight for, it's assumed women will be the ones to serve other people's agendas rather than to promote their own.
But, but, but, can you blame the sisterhood for feeling a little nervous?
for wincing at the presumption of acquiescence, for worrying about the broader implications, for wondering what kind of message we're sending to young girls about feeling good in their bodies, pride in their sex, and prospects of womanhood for essentially ceding to another backlash.
It's also a question of moral harm.
Nick, there is no reason for these two things to be next to each other whatsoever.
So are you gleaning that being trans, a trans woman, is morally harmful?
Is that what you're gleaning from what she's trying to say?
Well, basically, basically what good old Pamela here is saying, without saying it, wink wink, nudge nudge, is that this is degenerate.
That this is something bad that has happened because people are selfish.
And by the way, if she was giving some sort of a talk, I assume she would eventually talk about, like, the effect of religion and how we've moved away from religious, concrete foundations.
I mean, that's what her and good old Brett are always talking about.
It's literally saying we've strayed too far and that we've become too sexually liberated, we've become too individually liberated, and as a result, we have moved beyond God's grace, right?
And that this is what's causing the problem.
This unnatural way of living has so thrown us off our moorings.
And by the way, who decides, Nick, at this point?
It's the center, right?
The far right, the far left, they are just... I mean, there is no far left.
It doesn't exist.
And we know the far right does exist, and so they're trying to make some sort of moral equivalency as well, which is ridiculous.
I believe she even spotlights women who don't want to recognize trans women as who they are, as if that's a thing as well, right?
Am I correct in reading that?
Yes, absolutely.
And by the way, real fast, go ahead and take that equivocation.
I mean, let's go ahead.
This is amazing.
Those on the right who are threatened by women's equality have always fought fiercely to put women back in their place.
What has been disheartening is that some on the fringe left have been equally dismissive, resorting to bullying, threats of violence, public shaming, and other scare tactics when women try to assert that right.
She's talking about social media!
The idea that standing up for trans rights on social media is the equivalent of literally taking away a woman's right to choose, or beating her, or murdering her, or raping her.
These people, and we talk about it all the time, their fantasy of what's online and what's real is so off base.
And this is literally, this is in the New York Times, Nick.
This is what defines the public conversation, particularly among the middle class.
Yeah, it's interesting.
It's the hand-wringing of the silent majority.
The silent majority hasn't gone away.
This is who they are now.
By the way, it's almost like I'm now waiting for, at the end of this article, To suddenly start talking about like illegal aliens coming up from the border.
I swear just like because it's the checklist it just sort of keeps going from there and I just keep imagining all these awful things you know happening where like they just want to fold everything into it and it's all just an example of why we have to change and get religion back into our society and refocus on going backwards.
Can't we all just use words that people would prefer to be called?
Why does this have to be a triggering event?
Because you have to put the blame somewhere.
That's the problem.
And here's what's happening, and I hate to tell you this, people, but this is where this thing is going.
You are watching right now, I'm talking about the middle class, I'm talking about the wealth class, I'm talking about the commentariat, I'm talking about the political bodies, Nick.
They are at a point where they're saying, listen, we don't like what happened with Roe v. Wade.
But guess what?
We need these other people to shut up.
They're the reasons why things have so fallen apart, and we need them to shut up.
And if some of their rights go away, well, so be it, because they are symptoms of a larger moral decay.
So guess what?
If you want a reactionary, religious-based, oppressive regime, well, I understand.
I don't like it, right?
But meanwhile, their wealth is protected, their power is protected, their property is protected.
And I hate to tell you this, We've seen this before in a few places, particularly in the 1920s and the 1930s.
We're talking about Germany.
We're talking about Italy.
What always happens is you reach a point of societal, economic, and political crisis.
Someone comes along and says, those people over there are to blame.
Always a vulnerable minority.
And the middle class, the commentariat, The political class, they all say, OK, take them.
Take them.
That's fine.
Get rid of them.
If you restore order, if things get better, we may not like the way you do it.
And maybe we'll even say, well, we don't like how people are being abused.
But I still get to live a pretty comfortable life.
That's the discussion we're seeing start to bubble up now.
Yeah, it is frightening.
And you would think that maybe with, like, for instance, the semi-automatic laws, which are obviously not going to be passed by Republicans, that this group that we're talking about would at least have some moral sense of, you know, standing up to that at least.
But I guess in their minds it's like, no, like we need, they've been convinced that we can't fuck with any of those gun laws because I'm going to need it when they come to my home and I'm going to have to kill people.
Well, and I'll tell you the way that these things work is that for right now as this crisis is playing out, you are absolutely going to want to destabilize the political and public sphere.
So you're going to allow guns and stuff like that.
Eventually, when this reactionary sort of movement takes over, then all of a sudden, guess what?
They don't have to worry about super majorities.
All of a sudden, they don't have to worry about that.
Suddenly, it's some people can't have.
AR-15s.
Some people can't have weapons.
We need order!
We need to restore order from chaos!
So then all of a sudden you'll start to see a switch there.
But it's politically advantageous right now, and people like this are the ones who are going to welcome it.
So, it's incredibly cynical if I'm understanding what you're saying.
It kind of feels like, in the long game, of which the GOP is amazing at playing, they can plan this out decades ahead, they want and need more mass shootings to get to this critical mass which is like you think we've already been there by now but they're not quite aligned politically to get to the authoritarianism part yet.
So in some respects they don't mind these things they want this to be accepted whatever until they can get to that critical mass of authoritarianism and then only then they can kind of start to shut down those things so that they can control the government without any fear of an uprising because no one else will have those weapons anymore.
Right, so basically you need to accelerate things to a point of chaos so that people will be asking for someone to resubmit order.
There's a reason the SA and Nazis were out and fascists were out in the streets busting heads.
Eventually you say, hey, I don't want you to bust my head and things are out of control.
We need things to be under control.
And what do you do?
You bargain.
You take vulnerable people in Nazi Germany was the Jews and gay people right and and and gypsies.
Now all of a sudden you're saying I mean it's trans people who by the way have been under attack.
And basically marginalized forever.
And then you take gay people, the exact same thing.
And then you start bargaining and bargaining and bargaining.
And that's where this conversation is already happening.
We're already blaming the overturn of Roe v. Wade on trans people.
That's an incredible invention that's already taken place.
Well, you know, rather than get so upset about this, what you've just described and laid out and seems like true, I guess we can say, well, that won't happen because at least we have Mitt Romney on the scene.
Well, thank God, good old Mittens is in here ready to talk about this.
And we're going to jump into this.
This was on The Atlantic.
And I love, by the way, Nick, I love That something like this comes out in the Atlantic frames and it's like, hey, look, here's a sensible Republican.
And everyone's like, good job.
Well, let's actually look at what Mitt Romney published in the Atlantic.
Like, let's go ahead and start off.
So even the this is the opening, and I love where this goes.
And just to go ahead and telegraph it.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
we watch the reservoirs and lakes of the west go dry absolutely problem we keep watering our lawns soaking our golf courses and growing water thirsty crops he's right absolutely he's absolutely right as inflation mounts on the national debt balloons progressive politicians vote for even more spending what what They snuck that one in there.
Dead doesn't matter, by the way.
I don't know if people know that.
As the ice caps melt, yes, and record temperatures make the evening news, yes, we figure that buying a Prius and recycling the boxes from our daily Amazon deliveries will suffice.
They won't, and good for you, Romney.
That's exactly right.
That's accurate, correct?
Absolutely.
We literally are talking about not having water and having the environment kill us.
Meanwhile, he's comparing that to national debt and then saying, when TV news outlets broadcast video after video of people illegally crossing the nation's southern border, many of us changed the channel.
How are these things even related?
That's exactly what I mentioned when I said that earlier.
It's like, they need to just fold in stuff.
Fear!
Anger!
Hurry!
I can't go, you know, it's like a comedian who, you know, when they're writing their monologues, they can't go like more than about 90 seconds without a joke.
They can't go more than two sentences without mentioning something like that, so yeah.
Now, I want to remind everybody, I am getting ready to read something that, and by the way, Romney writes his own stuff.
This was literally written by Mitt Romney.
This is a senator in the United States Senate.
This is a man who is considered a reasonable Republican.
This is a man who was the Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States of America.
What accounts for the blind dismissal of potentially cataclysmic threats?
The left thinks the right is at fault for ignoring climate change and the attacks on our political system.
The right thinks the left is the problem for ignoring illegal immigration and the national debt.
But wishful thinking happens across the political spectrum.
Nick, who thinks this?
Well, listen... What reasonable, intelligent person literally thinks that that's what's happening in America right now?
That that is the main two problems?
Oh, well, I mean, right, he's taking problem, he's taking correct analysis, but he's not necessarily, but he's blowing these things up into, you know, right, it's not a war between these two things and these two things.
But, you know, listen, the right thinks the left is the problem for ignoring legal immigration and national debt.
That's a fact, right?
Well, that's part of it, but they also are absolutely pilled to the gills on conspiracy theories, white supremacist lies.
I mean, like, that doesn't even begin to cover the actual problem.
Right.
Ignoring climate change and attacks on our political system is a very nice way of putting all of the things the left have issues with on the right.
Oh my God!
And let's go ahead, by the way, this reasonable Republican, let's go ahead and take a look at where he stands.
President Joe Biden is a genuinely good man.
Oh, good for you, Romney.
But he has yet been unable to break through our national malady of denial, deceit, and distrust.
Oh, okay.
Nice alliteration, I suppose.
A return of Donald Trump would feed the sickness, probably rendering it incurable.
That's interesting.
How about we hear from Romney and see what he thinks about Donald Trump.
Here's what I know.
Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud.
His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University.
He's playing the members of the American public for suckers.
He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat.
Okay, and real fast, let's just take a look at what happened when Mitt Romney saw an opportunity to possibly work With President-elect Donald Trump.
What an unbelievable asshole and hypocrite.
I just want to say that.
And on that note, let's bring this around.
Nick, are you ready for this paragraph?
Because let's talk about how to solve this problem.
Are you ready?
Oh, bring the train home.
I can't wait.
I can't wait to read this to you and to our audience and to actually show what's happening in this article.
I hope for a president who can rise above the din to unite us behind the truth.
Several contenders with experience and smart stand within the wings.
We intently watch to see if they also possess the requisite character and ability to bring the nation together in confronting our common reality.
While we wait, leadership must come from fathers and mothers, teachers and nurses, priests and rabbis, businessmen and businesswomen, journalists and pundits.
That will require us all to rise above ourselves, above our grievances and resentments and grasp the mantle of leadership our country so badly needs.
The answer, Nick Halseman, the muckrake community is Mitt Romney for president, everybody.
Oh yeah, this is exactly what he's doing.
Is it weird he chose the Atlantic to do this?
No, because who is he trying to talk to?
It's these moderate assholes.
Wow.
That's what it is!
He's going to run for the Republican nomination trying to get moderate Democrat votes!
That's what he wants!
And that's his plan!
And you know what?
It could work.
It's going to work, maybe to an extent.
He's not going to get the Republican nomination, but Jesus God, it's not going to be the most ineffective strategy because these assholes want him so bad.
Yeah.
Well, listen, you know who he sounds like, right, in this article?
It's very, very eerie, and I'm sure he must have calculated this, right?
Your friend and mine, and truly your friend and mine, Jimmy Carter.
He sounds just like Jimmy Carter, who in our, you know, whatever we call our Patreon show, Certain Role to Failure, he laid this out in a very similar way.
He told the country some of the serious issues it had, and it completely backfired on him, unfortunately.
So let's be very clear about this.
Moderate Democrats right now are Republicans.
They are.
That's what it is.
They've been absorbed within the Democratic Party.
And now, because they were anti-Trump and they felt like they were, quote-unquote, betrayed by their party, even though they were all licking their lips at the possibility of working within the administration, and they're like, hey, I kind of like his takes on China and labor and all that, they literally came over to the Democratic Party, they started pushing their weight around, and they have gotten to a point now where they're like, guess what, guys?
You've gone too far left.
Let's go ahead and do a Republican Party within the Democratic Party.
And they did all of this through the Lincoln Project, through appeals, through articles like this.
People saying, Liz Cheney, I stan you!
Like, I mean, like, that's literally where we're at at this point.
Wow.
You know, you're the only guy I've heard who's sort of described the scenario, and it definitely makes a lot of sense that they're going to try and eat the Democratic Party from within, from the, from the, yeah.
I got bad news, man.
They already did it.
Well, there's a lot of Democrats who like these never-Trumper Republican people because they feel like, oh, they make sense.
They get it.
They're willing to criticize Trump and stand against Trump.
They must be good people.
But like with Liz Cheney, we can't forget that her politics suck.
Terrible!
Yeah.
Even though she's doing an amazing job, and I'm really glad that she's running the January 6th committee and whatever, and she's making a stand that's honorable.
But yes, her politics suck and are unpopular and mirror everything that Trump wanted anyway.
Yep, that's exactly right.
It just so happens, like Mitt Romney, it's not as repulsive.
It doesn't have the aesthetics of grotesquerie.
And by the way, speaking of the Republican Party and the rottenness of it, we're now going to go talk to independent journalist Justin Warren.
All right, everybody, we are here again, the second time on the podcast.
Justin Glaugh, who is an independent journalist.
who currently writes over on Substack at Where Do We Go From Here, a really good newsletter and has appeared in publications around the world.
Justin, I'm so appreciative of the work that you are doing.
Right now, you have been focusing on, I don't know how else to say it, Some really dangerous kooks working within the elections in Georgia in particularly.
You've been finding one after another believers of the big lie, people who openly embrace conspiracy theories, who are responsible for carrying out the elections in the state of Georgia.
Can you go ahead and give our listeners a little bit of an idea of what you've come across?
Sure.
I started this back in January.
The first piece of the investigation went out in a Guardian story back in May.
At that point, I had found... So I guess to step back for a second, there's 159 counties in Georgia, which is the second most of any state in the country outside, I think, Texas.
And each county has a board of elections.
And In almost all of those counties, that's appointed positions.
And usually the way that it works is each party, Republican and Democrat, gets two people that they appoint to the board.
And then there's a nonpartisan tie-breaking vote that is chosen by various means.
Sometimes it's the appointment of a Superior Court judge who's allegedly nonpartisan.
In the aftermath of 2020, there was a I don't see any way that this could ever go bad.
This seems like a great system.
that started to try to deal with Republicans trying to insert people into that fifth position.
So let's just start with that universe.
So we got a hundred- Well, Justin, I just want to say real fast, Nick, I don't know how you feel about this.
I don't see any way that this could ever go bad.
This seems like a great system.
Easy to find nonpartisan people, isn't it?
In one case, when they couldn't decide on the fifth vote, because in that county, it was up to the four board members to try to choose the fifth person.
And in the event where they came to a tie, they would flip a coin. - Interesting.
Literally, a coin flip.
And so, it's the county that's at the center of my investigation.
But again, to give your listeners an idea of the universe.
So 159 counties, up to five people, at least three people per county.
And so that means at least two to three probably Republicans on each board.
So this is the universe of people that I have been looking into.
And, you know, they're not always listed.
On the county's website, so I'll have to call the county, figure out who the members of the election board are, and from there, really what I've been doing is I've been just scraping Facebook for these folks, and finding their Facebook profiles, and in at least, I think I'm up to like about a dozen so far, that are like, I have quantified as confirmed election deniers, in that they have posted publicly
About, you know, election conspiracies and, you know, they post all the links that I'm sure your listeners are familiar with from all the election denier, influencer, grifter type people that are out there, the Mike Lindells, the Rudy Giuliani's, or not Rudy Giuliani, but other folks like that.
And then in Georgia, there's also sort of like a sub grifter world of state level people that these folks are posting about too.
Out of the 159 counties, out of more than, you know, potentially like three or four hundred people, so far I've been able to identify about a dozen, and that has been the result of looking into, I think I've gone through about 25 counties so far, and that's taken a lot of time to do that, to go through that.
So that's what we know so far, as far as the confirmed election deniers that are currently working at boards of elections throughout Georgia.
Is that, is 12 a cause for concern?
Do you feel like you can just extrapolate that out to the rest of the number of counties and make a, you know, we're all in math class at some point.
Can you do that?
Do you think it's a straight line, clearly, that's going to continue to grow?
Oh yeah, no, it's going to grow for sure.
Absolutely.
I think that it's probably, I don't know what that equation would look like.
I'm terrible at math.
I think that like if you were going to try to extrapolate it out, I think that 12 or that I think that the number is going to continue to grow and it's going to grow along the lines of what, so if we take, if we say I've identified 12 from 25 counties, if you multiply for 159 counties, I think you're going to find a very similar number.
And the reason that I say that is because outside of Chatham County, where I live, Savannah, which is sort of a liberal enclave, you know, Fulton, Gwinnett, DeKalb, the counties outside Atlanta.
We're dealing with a lot of rural, very, very Republican, Trumpy places.
And so I don't think that number is going to, you know, I think it's going to grow along the lines of what I've already found, because what I've already found are these election diners, they're not working in the Atlanta metro area.
Now, there is one or two that are.
They're often, you know, Coffee County and, you know, these places that are out in the sticks that are very, very red.
You know, Justin, I think it seems to me like maybe there are poisonous consequences of an entire party being overtaken by conspiracy theories and fascistic energies.
I don't know.
I don't want to sound hysterical here.
Well, I mean, you know, these are Since I started this work, I've had people here that I know personally, separate from my work as a reporter and a researcher, that like, I just know from the community here, and I've had a couple people reach out and be like, you know, sort of like, say they believe this stuff.
And so like, you know, it is interesting, like, these folks aren't all just... I think we get a little bit sort of...
Inert to it by being online as much as people like myself are but like these are real people that are members of our communities that are our neighbors and and friends and associates and acquaintances and things like that that really truly believe these things and believe fervently that they are fighting the good fight and helping to secure democracy in the exact same way that people on the left
I think that by exposing these people or by fighting against them, they also are working to secure democracy.
So it really is like a Rorschach test.
You know what I mean?
Depending on what lens you view it through, both sides are working for the same goal, to secure elections and to ensure that we have a democratic free society.
They're just going at it from the complete opposite direction because We don't really have shared facts anymore.
You know what I mean?
Especially around the election stuff and voting stuff.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think the only one side can be right in this equation.
And I think it's clear which one that is.
Have you seen today's announcement that certain big ticket item name people have gotten subpoenaed by the Fulton County District Attorney?
I did see that.
And, you know, I I think that's important.
I don't hold too much faith that Anybody, especially Donald Trump, is ever going to be held accountable for the clear and obvious breaches of, in this case, election law that they committed.
Yeah, that's interesting to me.
I think it's important that we get to the bottom of it.
We know what the bottom of it is.
I mean, the phone call of him pressing Raffensperger to find votes has been out for the better part of two years now.
I don't really know what else there is to get to the bottom to, um, of, um, but you know, what, what I would like to see is, and this is something that I wrote down before the call to, to remind myself to say is that, you know, these January 6 hearings and you know, that Fulton County thing I think is related to them.
I think there's also been some, like some movement on some DOJ cases as a result of the hearings.
Like, I think all of the hearings and all of this sort of associated stuff is important for people to really understand that all these people around Trump, they either believed it or they were willing to support his wrong beliefs to try to overturn the election.
But what I don't think and what I'm trying to do through my work is impress upon people that there's like many Trumps all over the country right now.
I'm not talking about the people that are running for Secretary of State that are well covered, that are election buyers.
I'm talking about our neighbors and friends that are sitting on election boards right now, implementing policies that deal directly with access to polls, voting rights, voter registration, voter rolls, all that nitty gritty stuff that believe in election lies.
And so, you know, the hearings and all that other stuff that's important, but you know, all this stuff Everything is local and like, I love that Fulton County is going after these people.
I think it's important.
I would love to see Fulton County go after the people in their midst.
Now they really can't because they don't have, off the top of my head, I don't think there's any election lawyers working for the Fulton County Board of Elections, but I would love to see law enforcement people like the Georgia AG go after some of these people that are right now Supporting these beliefs and implementing policies based on them.
And I think, not to be too long winded here, but I think in the case of Coffey County, we're going to see that eventually.
I think the AG is pursuing charges there.
They basically let election conspiracy theorists in to inspect voting machines because they believe the Dominion conspiracy.
So I hope that somebody in the AG's office is paying attention to all of this, including my work, because I don't think anybody else is out there doing this right now.
Well, you know, I read your article on The Guardian.
I highly recommend people read it because I think what you're dealing with here is like getting down into the nitty and the gritty part of politics that most people take for granted.
You know, they sort of look at the people who are in these roles, who are down in these offices, and they kind of just imagine, you know, these are, they almost imagine they're just automated drones almost.
You know what I mean?
Who are just doing their best.
And really, when that article came out, I immediately thought in the past, Those people would have resigned.
That would have happened almost immediately.
It would have been a large scandal and people would have had to have resigned.
But I think the Rubicon here, the really, really troubling part in all of it, is that the people that you're talking about are not hiding this.
They've made it very public on social media, and they've actually made this public in order to tell people, I'm out there fighting for what's right.
And that's actually part of the impulse behind their appeal to other people at this point, right?
Yeah, there's an incentive to do this.
There's a political incentive to do this, which is that, again, going back to the rural, these are rural places that specifically that I'm ending up focusing on.
I'm not purposely doing that, but Georgia's a rural place.
You know, outside Atlanta and Savannah and a couple other places.
So, but yes, in those places, there's a political incentive to do this because a lot of people agree with them.
A lot of people believe the election lies and conspiracy theories.
And so, you know, when some liberal reporter from Savannah comes parachuting in writing for the Guardian, there's no incentive for them to have to be, hold their head in shame because they got busted.
Because in their mind, they didn't get busted for anything.
They didn't do anything wrong.
And in the minds of a lot of the people there, they didn't do anything wrong either.
What I think is more a little bit disturbing to me is the fact that people in those communities who don't hold those beliefs are surprised when I'm coming out and I'm showing them, here's this person in your community who sits on this board of elections that believes this stuff.
And they're like, wow, I had no idea.
Well, one last question, Justin, because I felt like your coverage of this has been very level-headed.
I think you've been a very good voice in going after this story.
But I do have to ask, because I think the implications of everything that we're talking about are this.
We're heading into 2024.
We're heading into a situation where Georgia is more and more a purple state.
I think a lot of people don't really fully understand that.
They don't understand that the Georgia political situation is really tenuous.
Yes, I don't think it's as top-down as some people would like to believe.
what's rotting there you've seen what's going on do you feel like right now there's momentum happening that not just to be concerned about but basically a machine is being built here yes I don't think it's top-down and some people would like to it's top-down in that the all of the election conspiracy and live stuff came from Trump right And filtered down through all these various ecosystems of Republican power.
It's not like the Georgia GOP, as far as I can tell, is organizing to get all these people onto these boards.
It's top down from a belief system standpoint.
And yes, we already saw in 2020 a handful of these people that I've already reported on refusing to certify election results.
We know what that looks like and what that means.
When you've got a board that's got two or three people on it that believe this stuff and they refuse to certify it, multiply that by a couple counties and we've got a major, major problem.
I have a question for you because here's a scenario that I've been thinking about in terms of the subpoenas that have gone out.
Giuliani's gotten one.
Lindsey Graham has gotten one.
So let's just say they're not going to honor the subpoenas, right?
So they're probably not going to be able to have them serve jail time for not honoring subpoenas.
But what if they get the evidence and they actually find a crime and they are able to indict Lindsey Graham?
Is he even going to acknowledge it?
Can you have one state prosecute another person from another state, especially if it's a senator, and does that even have any teeth?
Or does that lead to a civil war or something?
I mean, for one thing, what it's definitely going to lead to is more calls about how this is a witch hunt.
And especially in Georgia, you know, anything that comes out of Fulton County, I mean, my God, that's where all the election conspiracy theories and the entire, like they all root back to Fulton County.
It's a heavily black area.
It's a heavily Democrat area.
And so anything that's coming out of there is going to be seen as politically motivated, whether it is or not, you know, it doesn't matter if it's a white male Republican prosecutor or not, it's going to be seen as politically motivated.
I mean, I can't speak to what, how all the ins and outs of those indictments work, but You know, people in the Voter GA Facebook group that I'm in, you know, on Facebook, that are pushing this stuff all the time, they're going to see that as, well, this is just part of a witch hunt, and they're trying to cover up and, you know, all the same old stuff over and over and over again.
And it's continuing.
You know, the last election that we had, there's all sorts of conspiracies about that already, all over again.
And it's just going to continue and get worse.
But like Jared was saying about these midterms, Looking under the floorboards, what you see when you pull them up is people putting in place the machinations in their little area to call into question election results, call for audits and investigations that aren't necessary because there's no proof of widespread voter fraud, and decertifying election results in their county.
And that's going to cause major problems.
Yeah, I can't wait for the Supreme Court to take this on either in the next session.
Well, Justin Glawe, thank you for coming on, but also for doing the work.
A reminder, the Substack is where do we go from here, and that is at justinglawe.substack.com.
Justin, where can the good people find you?
Just Google me.
Last name is G-L-A-W-E.
I'm on Twitter.
You can follow me on Substack.
That's where I'm publishing the results of my investigation as we keep moving forward.
Still got a lot of other counties to go, so there'll be a lot more Deniers to kind of put out there for people to read about.
Well, thank you for the hard work.
It's really important, man.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me on.
Appreciate it, guys.
Thanks, Justin.
All right, everybody.
That was Justin Glaw, and that is our program for this week.
A reminder, if you want access to the additional Weekender episode on Friday, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
We depend on your support, not just to keep this show ad-free and editorially independent, but in order to create things like this audio documentary, A Certain Route to Failure, where we're really excited about this and feel good about it.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
