This is an abbreviated version of our weekly Patreon show. To access the full-episode and support the pod, head on over to http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the latest in the Department of Justice's investigation of Donald Trump's mishandling of classified documents, plus the historical significance of Mikhail Gorbachev. Not to be forgotten is the trainwreck of a campaign run by Blake Masters.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Buckrake Podcast.
We hope you've had a good week.
We hope you're going to have a good weekend.
Nick, how are we doing, buddy?
I'm doing well.
I'm doing well.
I'm trying to stay out of the heat and trying to conserve energy, at least in California.
They're pretty big on, you know, turning the thermostat up a little bit.
Maybe not charging your cars between 4 and 9 p.m.
Easy, easy peasy.
I'm hearing that out of California real fast before we begin with very serious matters, because again, we have an absolute jam-packed episode.
I think the people are clamoring to know, Nick, what temperature is your house set at usually?
What's the resting?
That's the weird thing.
Our thermostats are strange, and so if we had it at 72, we'd be like frigid in an icebox.
There's something weird with the calibration.
So we keep it at like 74, 75, and that's really nice.
In my office, I keep it at 77, and that's nice too.
Again, it's a smaller office with probably way too much power to come in here to cool it down.
So, you know, I keep it 77.
I have my charging for my car, my electric car, you know, it already is set to charge at certain times of the day.
So I try and keep the grid, you know, relatively... By the way, you know, the California by 2035 wants to have every single car, new car sold, be electric.
That's very exciting.
Yeah, that's ambitious.
I'm a 72 man in the summer.
I can go up to a 74.
In the winter, I'll let it get down to 60.
I'm a Jimmy Carter guy in that way.
I'll throw a cardigan on.
I'll get all cozied up.
But this is the hard-hitting political podcast, everybody.
A quick little bit of housecleaning.
A reminder that we are going to take Labor Day off next week.
Which means there will not be an episode on Tuesday.
I will post a solo podcast on Patreon on Friday of next week.
So, you know, just make sure that you go over to patreon.com slash schmuckrakepodcast to not only get access to that, but if you're listening right now to the free preview of this episode, listen.
You're going to want the whole thing.
Stop dipping the toe in the water.
Jump in.
Be an American, goddammit.
Be an American, because today we gotta talk, man, we gotta talk about Mikhail Gorbachev dying.
We gotta talk about Trump tweeting out his own admission to crimes one after another.
We gotta talk about friend of the show, Blake Masters, just absolutely eating it.
So again, that is patreon.com slash mcraigpodcast to not only get the rest of this episode, but the bonus episode next week.
And as I said, Nick, Mikhail Gorbachev has died on Tuesday at the age of 91.
The former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the last Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, died at 91.
We need to talk a little bit about the actual story of Gorbachev, how it differed.
Oh, I figured, you know, let's get into the mood.
Of course, Gorbachev, well known as a reformer, well known as ushering in the era of glasnost or openness in which citizens were allowed to criticize the Soviet Union.
Which led to major dissident movements and eventually the collapse of the Communist Party itself, but there's a lot of economic reasons behind that.
You know, a lot of people like to just sort of paint Gorbachev as this hero.
He was not.
He was a complicated figure.
We'll talk a little bit more about the history of it.
But Nick, before we dive any deeper, what are your personal thoughts on Gorbachev?
I mean, I think that, you know, there was something about the summit between him and Reagan that might have made us all feel a little bit better in the middle of the 80s.
Well, because Reagan was a raving lunatic when he got in office.
Right.
And, and by the way, uh, I don't think much had changed throughout his whole administration until in through until 88, but, but he did the right, he knew how to play the right notes and certainly, uh, In the way that Trump kind of does, too, in the spectacle of the thing, he knew how important it would be to have both of these guys walking together and having the big shake of the hands and having this summit.
So, you know, that part was good, but I guess, you know, we have to History is going to be battling for who gets the credit for Russia moving away from being the Soviet Union back to Russia and maybe, quote unquote, opening up and not westernizing, but making it a little bit less oppressive for their people.
You know, glasnost is always a nice phrase to use when you're thinking about Gorbachev, but I don't know.
I will rely on your take just to figure out how he fits into that puzzle.
Well, to go ahead and start with Reagan, when Reagan got into office, and listen, everybody wants to pretend Reagan was just like this, you know, red, white and blue, normal avatar of a president or whatever.
When he got into office, man, his stance on Russia was absolute lunatic bullshit.
He got into office basically telling everybody that the world could end at any minute, that they were a satanic empire.
That the United States was backed by God.
I mean, listen, the story of Reagan is a cult through and through.
Eventually, of course, Gorbachev made some inroads with Reagan, tried really hard to move to a point where we could get beyond nuclear weapons.
Of course, Reagan doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on that.
A lot of the spending on Cold War machinery and weaponry is what drove the Soviet Union particularly into the ditch.
But, you know, in American minds, we always sort of think about the Soviet Union as sort of a straight line, like that, you know, it was just from beginning to end, it was the exact same thing.
And if you actually want to talk about who Gorbachev was, you have to understand that the Soviet Union had these ruptures, these splinter moments.
Of course, we start with Vladimir Lenin, but after Lenin dies, Joseph Stalin takes over.
Stalin was not necessarily a Leninist.
Or necessarily a true Marxist.
He was a totalitarian madman who took over control of the empire and, by the way, just completely ran it off the rails.
And not just with, you know, imprisoning political enemies, but also affecting science and ideas of history.
Eventually, Nikita Khrushchev comes along after Stalin dies and says, he was an absolute monster, we have to start talking about what he did.
Gorbachev was a Khrushchev guy.
He absolutely hated Stalin, and the whole point of Glasnost was, we have to get back to Lenin, we have to get back to Marx, we have to get away from Stalinism.
The problem is, there wasn't much of a plan for how to do that.
They tried to go through the ideology, bring it back into, like, you know, straight-up socialism.
Gorbachev, if you actually look at the history of how the USSR fell apart, the United States, like, plays an incredible role, Nick, because they wanted a bailout.
They wanted the United States to just go through and basically pay for Russia and the Soviet Union to get out of debt and to figure out a way to modernize itself.
The United States didn't do it.
They would give some funds here and there, they would dangle a carrot here and there, but what they wanted was a Marshall Plan.
They really wanted the United States to just shove a ton of money in there so the United States and Russia could get even closer.
Weirdly enough, as it started to fall apart, they were tied at the hip, but Gorbachev did not have a plan.
There really was not anything there that could make the USSR continue.
Well, by the way, the bigger issue in my mind with that was that the United States didn't do anything to help Russia, or the Soviet Union, or whatever you want to call it at that point, secure the nuclear weapons.
It was the only blunder we've ever made in foreign policy, Jared.
The only one that's ever happened.
And eventually, you know, you can trace all of the modern problems right now that we have over in that region to how we handled this whole thing.
I mean, you know, like Ukraine basically gave back over their nuclear weapons, you know, almost with like a handshake agreement that Russia would never invade them or the United States would look after their security.
It turns out, by the way, it's never a good idea to listen to the United States when it comes to nuclear proliferation.
It kind of puts you behind the able.
Well, ask Iran about that.
Or even the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the late 70s.
All these things.
And if you look at what actually took place, the United States was more than happy to let Gorbachev sort of, you know, bring this ship into harbor and eventually sort of Save him?
I mean, there are multiple moments that, like, this whole thing could have completely fallen apart.
There could have been a coup.
You know, there was an attempted coup.
Yeltsin was an absolute mess.
Eventually, we're more than fine with Vladimir Putin coming out.
And I gotta tell you, I don't know how familiar you are with it, but Gorbachev died a really lonely death.
He was hated within Russia.
He was seen as a betrayer of the cause of the Soviet Union.
He had lost his wife.
Vladimir Putin, you know, basically took a break from shoving his rivals out of windows to basically just say he died.
And, you know, it is a really, really tragic thing.
But this person more or less was kind of a Gorbachev was almost sort of a midwife to the Soviet Union collapsing.
There really wasn't anything else for it to do.
I've seen some polling over the last few years that there seems to be indications that the Russians would prefer to have been the Soviet Union still, which it's hard to believe that that really is the case, but it would lend more credence to what you're saying anyway in the fact that they just harken back to an earlier time.
Maybe it's nostalgia, but man, did you see The Death of Stalin?
Which is a great movie everyone should watch.
Great movie!
And it's funny, but in a way that makes you realize, holy crap, was this the worst way to ever run a country.
But, you know, if there is some reason why, you know, Russians want to go back to that, I mean, you know, you see a lot of it now in the propagandists coming out against Ukraine.
They have, they're still there.
They still want to try and achieve, perhaps it's because the Soviet Union represents when they were a bigger power in the world stage, but still.
Yeah, it's a very strange country that has a lot of... It's hard for me to wrap my head around exactly, you know, why they do whatever they're doing over there.
Nostalgia is just a hell of a drug, man.
It really truly is because it's like we're at this point where change feels almost impossible and like circumstances are getting worse and worse.
Basically, what Putin has shown us and, you know, from all of this, and Trump as well, weaponized nostalgia.
We used to be great.
We'll make it great again.
And that is a lot easier than saying, you know, like Gorbachev did, like, we can no longer continue living like this.
I mean, it's the same as like a Jimmy Carter.
Like, we have to make changes.
Well, guess what?
Somebody else is going to swagger in and say, no, we're going to the past.
That's really romantic.
I long for the days where corruption was simply just, you know, money in a freezer somewhere.
Why can't we get back to that?
That's what I want.
I completely agree.
Real fast, Nick, we were talking about this before we started recording.
You saw this, like, after Gorbachev died.
What an American thing this is.
This ad from the 90s starts circulating and it's a Pizza Hut ad where Gorbachev goes into, I assume, a Moscow Pizza Hut.
Maybe with his granddaughter, who knows?
He goes in and he's eating a pizza and this goes wild on social media because how American is it?
And everybody in this place starts talking about Gorbachev did great things.
He gave us freedom.
No, Gorbachev took away the greatness.
Just a really weird commercial, isn't it?
I mean, listen, I do commercials, right?
I always love clever hooks and way to make people, you know, pay attention to what you're doing.
Um, and I think that part of it is, uh, it was really, it was clever.
It really was clever because they were able to throw a lot of sort of the propaganda back into the Russians' faces.
Um, you know, I suppose, I imagine it's, it's stock footage that they're using in, in actors in America, but like you kind of get the feeling like, I don't know, maybe they are in Russia, but, uh, it was definitely, um, uh, eye raising, eyebrow raising, and certainly, uh, a very effective piece of advertising for Pizza Hut without question.
Well, I'll go ahead and say this, and I want to put a marker down in the sand.
Pizza Hut used to be better.
Speaking of nostalgia.
Like, man, back in the bucket days.
The personal pan pizza days?
They still have those?
I believe they still do have that, but they used to have that little rippled bottom at the end, and the cheese would get stuck on it.
Unbelievable.
But I think it's so incredibly telling.
This commercial is just sort of post-Cold War environment, just concentrated.
It's incredible.
The argument in this neoliberal consensus era, the idea that, oh, this person gave us freedom.
No, they took away our honor.
But guess what's most important?
We got a pizza franchise out of it, which is incredible.
I think that's as telling as anything really gets.
And it does have a good commentary on the food in Russia.
Like, I feel like, you know, there was rationing.
It was hard to be able to eat, you know, good food that tasted like as good as Pizza Hut back then.
So, I kind of, that's also a part of what they're saying as well.
And I'm sure a lot of these Soviets or Russians would say, like, it is better if we could have Pizza Hut versus the gruel that we were eating, you know, in, like, Ivan Denisovich.
Well, and I'll also say, America really enjoys the idea that as we export our businesses, that is freedom, right?
The American idea is that we're going to send you our best ideas and cultural things, and that equals freedom.
Like, after the Soviet Union collapsed, like, you start seeing all these commercials that are like, GE is in Russia, you know?
Oh, they got McDonald's there.
And actually now, it's actually really interesting, like, when they invaded Ukraine, McDonald's all of a sudden started pulling out all of their, you know, their franchises.
And that was something we kept like reporting on in the United States.
It was like, oh, the worm has turned.
You've lost your McDonald's.
And it's really weird how we've imbued these franchises with the idea of what America is and what American freedom is.
By the way, the McDonald's movie with, what's his name, the original Batman, Michael Keaton, is another one of those.
It might be a movie that we do for this pod because it captures that.
There is an essence of America in the origin stories of these franchises.
You see them in the long threads on Twitter that permeate my timeline now, I don't know about you, but like, here's how McDonald's started in 1950, whatever.
There is, right, like bootstraps, you're pulling yourself up and you're like creating something new, there's innovation, there's, there is a bit of that, that, that Americanism, you know, exceptionalism we talk about in the, at least in the very beginning of these things before capitalism makes, turns everything to shit.
Yep, yep, yep.
The only thing we can say for sure, R.I.P., Hale Gorbachev.
Sometimes nothing brings people together like a nice hot pizza from Pizza Hut.
Hale Gorbachev.
He did very well, by the way.
He smiled very nicely.
He had a nice reaction to Hale Gorbachev.
I'll tell you what, Gorbachev, and this is like one of the defining parts of his legacy, he was a celebrity.
And he enjoyed being a celebrity.
He had that narcissism that was necessary.
By the way, speaking of narcissism, we have to talk, Nick.
We got to talk about pictures.
We got to talk about documents on the ground.
We got to talk about boxes.
My God, the shit has officially hit the fan when it comes to Donald Trump and documents.
Again, a lot of it is blacked out and redacted.
I'm not stupid.
But here's the point here.
You know, I dealt with a lot of classified material in the Secret Service too, like motorcade routes.
And Brian, I've got news for you.
After the motorcade route is run, and 100,000 people saw the motorcade route, it's not classified anymore.
I'm not telling you those documents aren't classified because I'm not a leftist media loser who jumps to conclusions.
I'm simply telling you, jumping to the conclusion and assuming the FBI's story and the DOJ that it is classified is equally dumb.
No, here's the thing.
That, by the way, for anyone who doesn't recognize that terrible voice, that's Dan Bongino.
And by the way, Dan, who, for whatever reason, preemptively blocked me on Twitter, if you're listening, like, I hope you're doing well and you are that stupid.
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