The show returns from a week off for Labor Day! Meanwhile, Nick Hauselman has intentionally avoided the news and is ready for anything, including Jared Yates Sexton catching him up on special masters, Steve Bannon getting charged with money laundering, and our railroad workers preparing for a historic strike. Then, filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman joins the pod to talk about her new book Roll Red Roll: Rape, Power, and Football in the American Heartland.
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You say that you believe Barr forced you out of that job at SDNY because he no doubt believed that by removing me he could eliminate a threat to Trump's re-election.
How was your work as U.S.
Attorney a threat to Trump's re-election?
Well, at the time I was fired, the Southern District of New York was working on a couple politically sensitive cases.
At one of those cases is the Steve Bannon We Build the Wall case, and we were very close to indicting that case around the time I got fired and Barr knew about the case.
Hey everybody!
Welcome to the McCraig Podcast.
We are back after a week off for Labor Day.
I'm Jared Yates-Hexton.
I'm here with Nick Hausman.
Nick Hausman, Last week was traveling, moving around, mostly kept completely and utterly quarantined away from breaking events.
Is that true, Nick?
I was off the grid for like almost four of those days, and I managed to stay off of the news for the other three.
You say as if you were avoiding using heroin.
That's wonderful.
I will say it's a Herculean task at this point to avoid news in any way, shape, or form.
I think you are to be commended for this feat.
You know what's interesting is I discovered that I really don't use my phone for much anything but Twitter news.
And I was fidgety.
I had nothing to do.
You know what I ended up doing?
I deleted a lot of apps on my phone that I didn't need anymore.
And I don't know about you, but on my text message notification, I've always had 10, 15, 20, 30.
I never opened.
It's just sitting there forever.
I scrolled all the way back years to finally check all those texts I hadn't opened before.
So now I have a beautiful zero notification on my text messages.
Wait, wait, before we get to the news, how many unread texts did you have?
I mean, it was probably like, it was probably like 20-something that's been... Oh my God!
Yeah, oh, it went back.
Not that I was embarrassed I hadn't seen those, but like, you know, years.
And I finally got rid of them.
I mean, that's where I'm at.
I really think that 70-some percent of my time on my phone is literally just looking at news.
That's incredible.
I've never been that popular.
All right, so we are going to go through the breaking news with Nick here in a second.
All of it fresh, apparently, except for the main news story, which we have to talk about in a second.
We're also going to welcome onto the podcast later Nancy Schwartzman, a filmmaker and the author of the new book Roll Red Roll, Rape, Power, and Football in the American Heartland.
If the subtitle didn't give it away, there will be some content warnings there in terms of sexual assault, but I guarantee you it will be a necessary good discussion.
I hope you stick around for it.
Nick, you were out of touch, you were kept away from the news, but somehow or another you still managed to find out.
That Queen Elizabeth, the Queen of Great Britain, died at the age of 96 following a 70-year reign.
That is seven decades for those following at home.
Prince Charles is now King Charles III.
A little bit of a history lesson.
The previous Charles didn't do great.
Charles I had his head cut off by Oliver Cromwell in the New Model Army in 1649.
Charles, too, basically had a completely messy reign filled with conspiracy theories and a messy kingdom.
He died of mercury poisoning after having bloodletting.
Go ahead.
Just not a great moniker to take on.
We gotta get into this, what the monarchy actually represents.
But yeah, Nick, you couldn't stay away from the news that the Queen Mother had died.
It was weird.
I must have sensed it because we were talking about it while I was off-grid, and just like amazed at how long she's lived.
And apparently, yes, the longest monarch ever, as far as I understand it.
And then literally the next day, Poof, I walk into a diner.
I'm not watching the screen, this diner in Idaho, which had Newsmax on it.
Not even like Fox News, Newsmax.
That's a hell of a choice, by the way, to just have Newsmax as your default news setting in a diner.
Yeah, so I sat with my back to it, but my son and my wife both said, oh.
And then, whatever it was, I was like, wait, that's a weird reaction.
So they had noticed that, and they said, well, we just talked about it yesterday.
So I figured, oh, you're talking about the queen.
But, you know, listen, I can remember, do you remember when Charles and Diana got married?
Yeah, yeah.
And I can remember that like being such a huge thing even here over the news in 82, probably.
You know what?
I actually don't think, obviously I was too young to have watched it.
I think that's one of those events that was like so sort of seminal in American culture that I sort of absorbed it through osmosis.
My main memory, and this is a weird thing, it's Night Court.
It was when Markie Post's character in Night Court was obsessed with the wedding of Charles and Diana.
Nightcore was a great show, by the way.
It was a great show.
Yeah, and so anyway, but you know, I don't know if we're supposed to feel anything about this.
I don't know of anyone.
She's just a figurehead.
She just waves her, you know, whatever, and been hanging out for a long time.
I mean, that said, I didn't watch The Crown.
Is that what it's called?
The Crown?
Yeah, so wait, time out.
I gotta say, you missed the social media event of the year, which was This outpouring of emotions and fighting over the legacy of Elizabeth.
It was not the best day in the world on Twitter.
I'll put it that far.
I want to share with you, Nick, this is actually great.
This is Andrew Sullivan.
For those who don't know, Andrew Sullivan is this sort of now right-wing contrarian who has like ugly, ugly beliefs.
He's transphobic.
He's racist.
This is one of my personal favorites, Nick.
Are you ready for Andrew Sullivan remembering the queen?
Lay it down.
A queen for the ages.
A rock.
An unbroken thread.
How to process this wave of complex cascading emotion.
Four words.
Long live the king.
Okay.
That's interesting.
How gross is that?
Like, so, I don't even understand.
Long live the king, like he's trolling because now it's time to have jobs?
No!
It's the new era.
Like, the idea of the monarchy is once the monarch dies, an automatic new monarch comes, which makes it an unbroken chain.
I gotta tell you, by the way, and I think you're responsive, are people upset about this?
Like, that's the great question.
Who in the modern world seriously gets so caught up in the monarchy?
Who supports this?
What an outdated relic.
What a disgusting institution.
You had, by the way, Jake Tapper was referring to Her Majesty.
Can you imagine saying out loud, Her Majesty, His Majesty?
Like, how can you do that?
I mean, there's a quaintness to it, and sort of a nice homage to the past, and it's kind of cosplay fun, right?
Like, in that way.
But it is, you're exactly right.
It's a quaint, antique artifact.
And to still talk, by the way, you missed this.
I'm so sorry that we gotta talk about this, Nick.
So after she died, over Buckingham Palace, a rainbow appeared.
And over and over and over again on social media, people are like, I think it's a sign.
Another cloud with her face in it, like, floated over a city.
It literally, it rotted my brain in 2022 to watch this happen in real time.
A dead monarch who did nothing but be born into the right family at the right time sent a rainbow as a message, Nick.
Well, by the way, it was even more crazy for her story.
She really wasn't supposed to be the Queen, and, you know, I'm already forgetting the history because it's not important to me, but, you know, there was some weird circumstance, right?
Somebody, oh, I know, denounced his right because he wanted to marry an American, whatever.
So, you know, she wasn't really even in line anyway, you know.
Listen, what would happen?
You know how you're not supposed to turn your back on the monarchy?
You have to do certain things, like bow or whatever?
What do you think would happen if somebody didn't do one of those things in 2018, let's say?
Are they going to get arrested?
What is all that?
Well, Nick, I'm glad you brought that up because in recent days there have been multiple people arrested in Great Britain for protesting the monarchy.
Oh, is that so?
Yes, people saying, I didn't vote for this.
I don't believe in this.
A bunch of people were actually, I got to tell you, Scotland and Ireland are having a great time.
They're really enjoying it.
And yeah, people are being pulled away from this.
But I think what's important in all of this is, yes, this is the changing of an era, but also Great Britain's in trouble, man.
It's been coming out recently.
There's a major energy crisis that is looming over winter.
They have ballooning energy costs.
We're literally looking at the possibility of some people within the United Kingdom possibly dying during the winter.
And now, like, this whole thing It just feels very very much on a larger scale like the decline of a once quote-unquote great empire that was built of course on genocides, exploitation, massacres, white supremacy, all of it.
But it is a lot.
I think it is.
I think it is.
And I don't know how to make this, but yeah, I suppose Charles, they'll begin to fade, right?
At some point, they're not going to have a monarchy anymore, right?
If it's 50 years from now or something like that, right?
Your words to God's ears, my man.
I wanted so badly for the entire institution to just crumble.
But people need it.
They need it like they need religion.
They need to believe in something magical happening that hides what all is going on.
I agree.
I agree.
I can't wait for it.
And, you know, again, this is the natural progression of humanity, I suppose, and they're going to realize.
And by the way, another piece of news to go along with this that goes along with Great Britain's decline, conservative Liz Truss became the new prime minister.
Liz Truss is part of this larger corporate structure.
She previously worked at Shell.
She was with all these, like, you know, conservative think tanks, pro-market think tanks.
She's an anti-woke warrior.
I know you're shocked.
She sucks, she's got nothing to offer, and Great Britain just continues to slide and decline.
And I gotta tell you, man, it feels a little bit like an harbinger of what we've got to look forward to.
Well, I'm looking forward to... Here's my thing.
I'm really praying that this isn't the headline that I missed over the last week.
Please tell me if there's something more than just the death of the Queen.
Because by the way, full disclosure, as soon as I got back on the grid, I got my phone back, I turned it on, there's this message waiting for me from Jared saying, please do not look at any news whatsoever.
Get to Monday.
So, oh actually, you know what?
That was before the news of Queen Elizabeth, so it has to be something else.
I've got a couple other things that I want.
I want to watch your real-time reaction to... Nick, there's been a development in the Trump documents case.
The case of Trump versus the United States, which I think is apropos.
It reached the Southern District of Florida, where Trump appointed District Judge Eileen Cannon, who, by the way, had absolutely no credentials whatsoever.
She is an originalist.
Nick, I know this is going to shock you, but she is a longtime member of the Federalist Society.
She ruled that the investigation into Trump's document situation had to be paused In order for a quote-unquote special master to be appointed in order to review over 11,000 documents to understand what is being done in this case.
Wow.
Well, also, she has no jurisdiction on this, right?
She's not supposed to have anything.
She's got jurisdiction!
And I know that podcasts are an audio form.
Before I got to the actual nut of that story, Nick was so excited I was going to tell him that Trump was led away in handcuffs and just crestfallen.
Alright, so you're telling me that some rando is able to have enough power over this proceedings to stop the... Because I can understand, like, you know, the investigation going on while they're also, you know, having a special master, blah blah blah.
You mean to tell me that she has now told the Department of Justice they cannot continue this investigation at all until... They have to pause as a quote-unquote special master.
Reviews these documents which is going to be an appointed person to literally and I want you to wrap your head around this a court appointed quote-unquote special master is going to go through Documents that are at the highest level of classified top-secret material that the United States of America has How are they gonna find someone like that?
I mean, right?
There's only probably a limited amount of people that need to do it.
And they've already done this, haven't they?
Didn't the FBI already go through all those records anyway and sort whatever material they needed to sort out?
Well, the court needs to figure out if this involves executive privilege, which is absolute nonsense because this has nothing to do with executive privilege.
Basically, every legal expert in the country has lined up to say this is wrong, including, let me check my notes, I don't know if I've heard this name before, a guy by the name of Bill Barr.
Went on Fox News and called it a deeply flawed ruling.
A Duke professor, which by the way is the alma mater of Eileen Cannon, because of course it is.
A Duke professor, Samuel Buell, said it was quote-unquote utterly lawless and that she had disgraced her position as a judge.
Everybody in the world is saying that this isn't just flawed, but it's actually embarrassing on her part.
She doesn't know what she's doing.
The Department of Justice has gone after this to try and get it overruled.
Oh, right.
Is that so there is something they can do?
It remains to be seen, Nick, because one of the things that we're watching here is the judiciary, which, of course, has been stocked with a very, very particular group of people to protect Republicans, Donald Trump and the wealthy.
It's unclear where this goes from here.
I should have known better.
I should have known better to think that there would have been something positive with this when I got back.
I'm mad at myself, Jared.
I'm not even mad at this judge.
I'm more mad at myself that I get excited for a minute.
We have other developments that maybe might be seen as a little bit more positive.
But I will go ahead and tell you, and we need to react to this in time, this is the system protecting itself.
This is what happens.
You have some, like, people look at this and they say, "Donald Trump obviously is going to go to jail.
You can't steal state secrets and possibly sell them off." There's a line that he crosses where it has to stop.
As we keep saying, this system is built to protect powerful, wealthy white men.
And, Nick, we're seeing it constantly.
You see special masters.
What did we see in Congress?
We saw a parliamentarian.
Like, these are things that are just popping up to try and protect this.
It's absolute horseshit.
It's like the monarchy.
Like, these are peons from a distant past of something.
But, you know, did she... I'm just kind of curious, because, you know, I like to look at the other side of things, too.
Did she throw out even a nugget of some sort of justification for why the hell thing has to pause?
Well, Nick, I'm glad you said that because she brought up a really, really good point, which is it could cause reputational problems.
Yes, it could hurt Trump's reputation.
It's a sparkling reputation that he needs to protect.
It's weird, actually, for those history heads out there, that's actually one of the reasons why George W. Bush's legal team went to the Supreme Court and asked for them to stop the counting of votes in the 2000 presidential election was that Continuing to count votes could hurt his reputation.
Wow, I don't remember that at all, but that was one of the things.
By the way, that is, I don't know, Barr was part of that, but that was Kavanaugh.
Bush's legal team in 2000 said, George W. Bush's reputation as the winner of the election of 2000, his reputation and status as winner could be hurt if you continue counting votes and show that he actually lost.
That actually now does sound familiar and wow.
The law is malleable.
That's the entire point of this.
We like to imagine that it's quote unquote blind or impartial and it's just not.
It's just a bunch of people arguing bullshit and who wins out in the end.
It's not like this priest class of the judiciary class.
Like that's not what this is.
Like this is a person who got put in by Donald Trump who shouldn't have been there.
He shouldn't have been there.
He shouldn't have won the presidency.
He shouldn't have been able to stalk the judiciary, and we just see over and over, like, the consequences of this play themselves out.
I'm trying to think of, like, what's going on here, because obviously delay is the only tactic they have, as Trump has done forever and ever.
I suppose the notion is that they can delay it until he wins the presidency again and then departures himself, right?
I mean, you know, did anybody pontificate as to how long it might take some... Oh, did she put a time frame on when to appoint a special master?
I haven't seen anything about that but you know in most things legal they just sort of like you know they float around and who knows like next week like oh shit we forgot to look at who's gonna be the special I will let's get on that right now one of the things that I really enjoyed about having this story in my pocket and explaining it to you is How fresh it was going to be, the idea of a special master.
Like, this isn't, you know, it's just this term that is just completely sort of made up whole cloth, and to watch you have to process the absolute bullshit nature of this entire situation, it's pretty choice, I'll say that.
I hear ya.
Again, I'm just, you know, I should never have let myself even have a glimmer of hope on this one, but hey, by the way, they'll go through it, they've already done it anyway, nothing will happen, and then they'll start up again, you know?
Well, I mean, hopefully, maybe that's the case, and maybe the monarchy will collapse.
Can I hit you with some good news?
Please, give me some good news.
This is another one that I've been very excited to talk to you about.
Steve Bannon, the former campaign head of the Trump campaign, former advisor and mole man, surrendered himself in New York.
And was indicted on multiple charges of money laundering, conspiracy, and fraud, resulting from the scam, the We Build the Wall scam, that Trump had pardoned him for, which took care of federal charges, but not state charges.
Oh, wow.
And he surrendered, I guess.
Well, not that that meant anything.
Yeah, we got a Steve Bannon perp walk.
Oh, really?
Even you got the video of that?
Oh yeah, we got to see him going through the judicial system, being passed down like so many feces.
Multi-shirted?
Was he multi-shirted?
You know, now that you're talking about it, I don't know if I saw multiple shirts.
Okay, so they perp walked him under that, because again, the acceptance of the pardon is supposed to somehow indicate guilt.
By the way, just for a second, Nick, as an exercise, because we have this really unique experience.
I just want you to take a second, take a deep breath, and I want you to visualize Steve Bannon being walked through the legal system.
Just do it real fast.
How's that feel?
Feels good.
Feels good, I gotta say.
I hate to see anybody have bad experiences, but that feels good.
Yeah, it does.
Bannon, this is great.
After he was sort of walked through this, I'm not mad.
quote unquote, "one of the best days of my life." - Bannon said that? - Bannon said that, which by the way reminds me of one of my favorite drill quotes, which is, and another thing, I'm not mad, please don't put it in the newspaper that I got mad.
I mean, he basically turned this into, in typical Steve Bannon form, he came out and said, quote, "I am proud to be a leading voice on protecting our borders and building a wall to keep our country safe from drugs and violent criminals.
They are coming after all of us, not only President Trump and myself.
Are you ready for this?
This is, these assholes, it never stops.
I am never going to stop fighting.
In fact, I have not yet begun to fight.
They will have to kill me first.
Right.
Yeah.
Obi-Wan Bannon here with the, you strike me down, I will be more powerful than you can imagine.
Yeah, he wants to be the martyr.
Great.
I'm sure he's relying on the fact they're going to put him in one of those nice prisons or something like that, I guess.
It's incredible.
And for those who maybe haven't kept up on this, this is just a purely Make America Great Again style scam.
Bannon, who, and I wrote a little bit about this this weekend, is like one of the true believers of all of this.
Like he is an actual ideologue.
He's not just, you know, doing this for shits and giggles.
Like he actually truly wants to unravel liberal democracy and create a new traditionalist style society.
Meanwhile, at the same time, Nick, took advantage of border wall bullshit, Trump's main appeal, and created this group that it's called We Build the Wall, which brought in $15 million.
Basically stealing, you know, social security money from people around, and all of these things are continuing to do.
And did it all, you know, for personal profit and gain.
And this is one of the true believers who still use the MAGA philosophy and worldview to line their pockets.
Well, is there any better, not even a metaphor, but any more simple of, like, what the Republican Party is than this?
And, you know, because I couldn't be on the news, and I I couldn't risk being on Twitter for anything else.
I literally was like I was so I did it was I was on my book I'm doing a lot of the Reagan research right now so I'm stuck in the middle of the Reagan thing and like it keeps coming up over and over again how in the name of evangelicalism or in the name of you know conservative values they would just continue to grift and they that's how they viewed this as a way of just getting a rich quick scheme that like seemed to have the blessing of the government behind it this is it this is exactly what this is and it's again will probably not have any effect on
On any of those people, even the people that gave them the money, probably would do it again, right?
Like, I don't even know if they have regrets on it.
Well, I mean, you know, when it comes to ideology, again, it's the way we explain things.
I have to imagine that everybody who got scammed in this thing, they look at it and they think, oh, this wasn't a scam.
I didn't get scammed.
Like, this is just, you know, the deep state going after and trying to keep us from doing whatever.
The wall was not necessarily going to be built.
It was a giant boondock.
It was a way to scam money from the government, a way to scam money from donors, you name it.
And I think someone like Bannon, when they approached this, did he want a wall?
Absolutely he did.
Does he want anti-immigration statuses?
Yes, absolutely.
He wants a white nationalistic state.
That's what he wants.
But this entire ideology, MAGA, this growing authoritarianism, like all of it is about, I want the money.
I want the resources.
I want the power.
Everything else is just tinsel.
You know what I mean?
Like, Bannon likes to talk about esoteric concepts.
He likes to mess around with all these, like, old neo-fascist, proto-fascist people.
Julia Vola.
These, like, weird people with runes.
You know?
But the runes don't mean anything!
Like, you wanna talk about, like, the Nazis or the fascists.
Torch-lit parades.
They don't mean anything!
Swastikas.
They don't technically mean anything.
They're just...
They're dressing, right?
To say, we deserve to have the money, we deserve to have the power, we deserve to have the resources.
Everything else is just like an excuse.
Everything else is just trying to hide what is greed and manipulation at the heart of all of it.
Well, you know, the big rallying cry is, I'll never trust the government to spend my money.
I don't want to give them anything because it's so ineffectual.
But, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, Jared, but if you were to, like, raise a big pile of money for a specific project that you wanted to have happen, and you try and present that to the quote-unquote government to then do what you want them to do, there's a name for that, isn't it, would you say?
Because that's kind of what he was probably trying to do, right?
You just can't give the government a lump sum of money and say, like, you have to do what I want you to do with this, because that's the word I think is corruption.
I believe it's corruption, and I will say, in the instance of this scam, I think that that large sum of money wouldn't have made it intact.
Well, so I'm sure he said to himself, oh my god, you know, there's all these regulations.
We have to go through all these hoops.
We'll never get that money where we need to go.
Well, geez, I could use a new yacht instead.
Like, if it's just sitting there for a while, I won't go anywhere.
We can't spend it yet.
Like, what's the big deal?
That has to have happened.
And I'm sure he took that money.
He spent that money, right?
And in all of this, man, like, it's the same thing.
It's all of these, like, Christian televangelists who got caught, you know, wetting their beaks as they're, like, raising money for God or whatever.
Like, you start out thinking, I'm doing this for the greater good, which is what Bannon thinks, right?
Like, this is for the greater good.
The next thing you know, you think God is on your side.
You think that you're working with the universe to make good things happen.
Well, guess what?
Don't I deserve something nice?
You know?
Yeah.
Doesn't Banny deserve a nice new coat?
You know?
And it just sort of snowballs from there, because It's hollow.
It's as hollow as an Easter Bunny chocolate.
Like, there's literally nothing inside of it.
All of it is just a veneer that basically covers up this vacuum of nothing but pure greed.
Pure greed.
That's what it is.
Because you always like to reference power.
And it seems to ring hollow for me a lot of the time.
To me, it's just money.
I mean, by the way, maybe if you talk to Tony Montana, power and money are the same thing.
Yeah, but money is a material representation of power.
You know, you want to go back, you said something I think that is really important, which is, somebody like a Donald Trump can surround themselves with the quote-unquote best in the law, even though most of the law, like, doesn't really work with him.
Another thing that you missed, there have been a couple of developments, speaking of Trump, I just want to drop a couple on your plate.
One, a book claims that a couple of years ago he tried to pay a lawyer by giving him a horse, Which is great.
He tried to barter a racehorse instead of paying his bills.
The second, and Maggie Haberman, a friend of the pod, was shilling her new book, which of course, she had all kinds of information that probably would have been useful at the time.
Apparently in 2020, Trump was flirting with the idea of barricading himself in the White House after he lost the election.
Wow.
How flirty did he get?
Do we know?
Pretty flirty.
I think flirty with bringing in extra food and whatnot.
Just bringing in a lot of Big Macs.
I can't find it now, but I remember at some point around that time, somebody had video of a procession of things being carted into the White House or out of the White House late at night.
I wonder if that was it?
I'm trying to figure that out.
I gotta tell you, that reminds me, and I'm so glad that I got reminded this, a couple of other little pieces of my new show that you've missed by not being online.
One, Trump last night, we're recording this on Monday, last night, Sunday, September 11th, Trump made an impromptu trip to Washington, D.C.
Like, there was nothing on the schedule.
He showed up wearing golf clothes, and just showed up, and then got in a car, and there's been no explanation.
Of course, the internet went wild immediately.
He had been arrested.
You couldn't see the handcuffs, all of this, which, there's no reason to believe any of that.
Other rumors started going around that he went for treatment at Walter Reed, that there was a medical problem.
There's a possibility he might have just went to play golf.
We don't That was another thing that has popped its head up recently.
That's weird.
Like, no one, like, followed him?
Or they didn't see where he went, I guess?
I don't know.
It just sort of, you know, devolved into basically speculation.
Okay.
Interesting.
Interesting.
Yeah, so it's been a weird couple of days with all that.
People are looking for signs, they're looking for wonders, you name it.
You know, it always comes down to sort of superstitious.
Well, by the way, was 9-11 commemorated at all?
Well, I mean, yeah.
I mean, it was the usual sort of American rigmarole.
That was it.
Never forgetting it.
Did Trump didn't pay any less service to the truthers?
I don't believe he did.
All right.
So, another piece of good news.
By the way, best of luck to Steve Bannon.
Another friend of the pod.
Best friend.
I hope your travails figured themselves out, and I hope you go to jail for a very long time.
Nick, there's been a development in Ukraine.
Really?
There was a surprise counter-offensive.
Basically, Ukraine juked Russia out of their shoes.
They have taken advantage of supply chain issues, mobilization struggles.
They have taken back a vast amount of territory.
In large parts of Ukraine, they have pushed the forces of Russia back within the Russian borders.
It's being called by some one of the greatest counter-offensive in modern military history.
Holy shit, really?
That was so weird, because I was talking about that this week, too, and that came up because I was hanging out with my son, who's, you know, a Russia-phobe.
Wait, Russia-phobe?
No, what's the Russia file?
Forgive me.
Or Soviet file.
Nonetheless, but we were trying to talk about this, like, I'm like, wouldn't it be great if they started just doing incursions into Russia itself?
And we've seen a little bit of that, like, way around the border, but this is slightly, obviously different, but in theory, if you want to consider Well, there's a lot happening with this.
You know, we've talked constantly about the story behind the story, which is whether or not the Putinist regime can maintain itself.
In fact, that's – are you as worried as I am about this because a stalemate could very potentially lead to like nuclear attack, wouldn't you say?
Well, there's a lot happening with this.
You know, we've talked constantly about the story behind the story, which is whether or not the Putinist regime can maintain itself.
There is a little bit more – a little bit more information that has seeped out that makes it seem like possibly Alexander Dugan's daughter, Dugan, that her assassination might have very well been an internal struggle.
people.
The possibility, and by the way, I don't know how much you've been paying attention to this recently, A lot of people just keep falling out of windows in Russia.
The thing is, in Russia, you stand next to the window, the next thing you know, you're toppling out.
It's weird.
O'Reilly.
Yeah.
Well, there's that natural suction that comes right from the outside, the inside, the air quality.
Muckerman.
The cross-breezes, I believe they call it.
A lot is happening right now.
Russian culture, for the most part, has been expectedly Propagandizing the war, pretending it's either not happening or it's a glorious success.
Over the past couple of days as this counter-offensive has taken over, like, you're starting to see some Russian commentary that are starting to, like, say, this is a problem, and things are going badly.
They're having a hard time filling the numbers, they're reaching capacity.
I will say, I don't think that this war is going to end anytime soon.
Actually, Russia is getting a ton of weapons from Iran, these other so-called rogue nations.
Putin is going to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping really, really soon, probably going to see an infusion of cash and resources.
And on top of that, going back to the energy crisis that's burgeoning in Britain, winter Is really, really a conducive period for Russia.
That's when they start supplying a lot of energy to Europe and the Western world.
We don't know how this is going to play out.
We don't know if Putin's going to make it through this.
Can he survive it?
Is there going to be some sort of an internal friction that could take place here?
A stalemate is going to lead to a ton of death.
Hopefully there can be a negotiation and Russia can simply leave Ukraine, but I don't think that Putin's political survival, I don't think it's conducive to that.
So, remind me, what happened when the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan?
It went great.
It was an operation that just couldn't have gone better.
And then, when they finally did, the whole thing fell apart, then what happened in the Soviet Union?
So, here's the thing.
There were a bunch of things that went wrong with the Soviet Union and eventually, let me check my notes, it disintegrated.
Okay.
So, you know, why not?
Just in this modern era, things happen at a lot more, like, a hyper speed, right?
So what took, I think it was ten years, right, of Afghanistan morass could take, you know, ten months or a year, whatever it is here.
I wouldn't be surprised, but what you have to worry about is a guy like Putin would just end up not wanting, you know, over my dead body you're going to take this position from me.
I haven't seen, in my study and my analysis, I haven't seen anything within the Putinist regime that even starts to lend itself to a backing down or a de-escalation.
Literally, again, getting back to ideology, because that's, you know, the front that explains everything else, it's all been ramping up.
We're seeing all that Z shit, we're seeing all that nationalist shit, the esoteric anti-New World Order shit, it's just doubling down.
So the question here is, what's going to break first?
But as long as Putin enjoys support from these other sort of There's no question that one of the easiest solutions would be to find a Brutus, and I have a feeling that there's a direct connection between that necessity and people falling out of windows.
I think there has always been an incredible relationship between those.
Absolutely.
Yeah, because that would probably be the way that this would actually happen, which would be unprecedented.
We haven't had anything like that.
Although, in Argentina, Argentina, the Vice President, is that where we were?
Did you see that before I went away?
Literally, a gun misfiring prevented what would have been the most awful thing to see on video live ever.
You know, that that almost happened.
So, you know, maybe it'll have to happen again in this situation.
But then who knows what happens post Putin?
Who takes over for him?
No clue.
And by the way, speaking of things we don't know, one last story that shocking that no one's talking about this and no one's actually covering it.
We are on the precipice of one of the largest railroad strikes in the modern era.
There has been a Really, really worsening situation between railroad workers, and that's hard to say, railroad workers and railroad companies.
We are a couple days out from literally one of the biggest strikes of the modern era.
People don't really think about railroads anymore, but if that stops, if that comes to a crashing halt, believe me, you're going to be experiencing the consequences of that.
The White House has tried to mediate this in the past couple of weeks.
In true presidential fashion, it's been weighted a little bit more towards the employers than it has the employees.
Mediation has failed.
It looks like we're almost a full go for it.
I want to say, first of all, solidarity to the workers, but also to our listeners.
One thing you have to understand in a burgeoning labor movement era, you might be made uncomfortable.
Some of us might have to suffer from the consequences of labor solidarity, but the employers and the wealth class expect us to not support people because of that discomfort, because of those consequences.
It might get weird, man, if it doesn't somehow or another get mediated.
And also, I got to tell you, speaking of Reagan, we're going to be looking at a moment here, like, what does Joe Biden do if the possible economic and political health of the Democrats, particularly, Is that another, you know, air traffic controller situation?
And whatever the White House does here, it, those decisions really impact what happens going forward.
Like that is a, that is like one of the most massive things a president can do in the modern era.
Right.
And I was exactly, I was waiting to make that point about air traffic controllers because if we'd forgotten, Reagan fired them all.
And it put a chill on the ability for unions to have any kind of influence over the working conditions for a long time.
That was a direct threat.
And we finally come back, but it's taken like this long until unions are now as popular as they have been.
And newsflash, unions prevent workers from, I don't know, getting killed and maimed and long term illnesses.
Like all those things are so important.
And it was crazy to think that not that long ago it was a four letter word that these conservatives in the name of business were vilifying.
But it's another chance, by the way, for Biden to swoop in, which is these are the things he's pretty good at, and negotiate something.
Because, again, it's a supply chain issue.
You know, the issues we had with inflation, There's a direct tie to the supply chain things we had with ships off the coast for months and they couldn't get their goods off.
This would be the same exact thing.
And if it happens right before the midterms, I don't know.
I don't know.
That's like some, you know, random act of God that happens to torpedo the damn Democrats again.
It's tough, man.
And I'll tell you this, like, it's union health and labor movement health.
is not just indicative of where labor is.
Like, literally, the firing of the air traffic controllers not only drove a stake through the heart of the remaining labor unions, but it signaled that the United States of America, particularly the political class, was on the side of the wealth class, period.
And that changed an entire era.
I mean, the 80s, that pro-capitalistic exploitation model, conspicuous consumption, was built on that.
If labor unions gain power, things start to change.
And not just in labor, they start to change societally and politically.
This is a major thing.
And you're exactly right.
Biden and the Democrats here have every reason to head this thing off.
You know, like, because if this comes to pass, I don't think people understand how reliant they are on rail.
I don't think they even have the beginnings of an understanding.
And right now, I mean, look at what happened with the infant formula thing.
One thing went wrong in one plant, and shit hit the wall fast.
We're talking about a massive industry that makes everything move and everything happen.
If something happens here, it's going to get really wild really quickly.
And then the question is, do you head this thing off and somehow or another signal that Biden and the administration and the political moment are on the side of workers?
Or do you cut that off at the knees and you basically do battle with the burgeoning labor movement?
And that's a defining moment.
It really is.
And let's not forget about the baby formula issue because that spawned all sorts of awful intentional misinformation from the Republicans about sending a formula to the border to for you know migrants were coming up from the border to like have for free all this stuff which was not happening at all.
Who knows what they're going to make up about the railroad situation in terms of how they're going to try and pin it on Biden and the Democrats as well.
That would be completely lying that people would just gobble up because, again, they want that misinformation to use in their minds to justify their positions.
It would be terrible because there is this notion.
Again, I hate to feel like I am naive, but something about the midterms in Congress indicates that there might be a hope that the Democrats can cling by a couple of seats to the majority control.
But that won't help if this happens and people get upset about prices and about lack of not being able to get goods.
A reminder, and this goes back to post-pandemic where people were leaving their jobs during the so-called Great Resignation.
Like having to wait a minute for service, having to wait a minute to get seated at a table, and then going out or paying more for gas or paying more at the grocery store.
Those minor inconveniences many times are manifestations of the consequences of solidarity.
Sometimes you have to say, as a consumer, I can't get what I want when I want it.
And maybe I'm going to have to pay a little bit more because those low prices and that convenience are oftentimes built on exploitation.
The Wealth Class wants you to turn your back on workers because you're inconvenienced.
And it could get really weird and ugly.
I have to imagine that this thing will be headed off, but if it isn't, man, If it isn't, this is a giant salvo in this burgeoning movement that we've been talking about.
Right.
And sometimes, as a fellow human, I might need to wear a mask to protect other fellow humans, and without the proper leadership, that doesn't ever get through, and it breeds into a metastasized version of anti-civilization that we very well could be heading towards.
And by the way, that's what the Republicans did with all of that.
It was a consumerist choice.
Are you telling me I have to wear a mask if I go to Applebee's?
It's about the convenience of individual, quote-unquote, freedom through consumerism.
That was their tyranny.
Oh, I can't go into Target without a mask?
This is tyranny.
It's about that convenience that this sort of hyper-capitalistic environment has created.
I should get what I want, when I want it, for the price that I want to pay for it.
That's what's replaced democracy.
That's what's replaced actual participatory democracy.
Instead of getting a government that helps you or a government that maintains systems or a social safety net, you get cheap Applebee's when you want it.
And that's not a good trade!
It's never been a good trade, and we're dealing with the consequences of it now.
All right, everybody, I'm going to go talk to Nancy Schwartzman, the author of Roll, Red, Roll.
A reminder, this is going to be a tough conversation.
You know, there is sexual assault being talked about here and abuse.
So try and stick around for that if you possibly can.
And we'll be right back with Nancy Schwartzman.
All right, everybody, as promised, we're joined by Nancy Schwartzman, who's a filmmaker and the author of the new book, Roll, Red, Roll, Rape, Power and Football in the American Heartland.
Nancy, thanks for coming on.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
So I think some people have been familiar with the work, particularly when it comes to this case.
Going back to 2012, of course, this was a really, really infamous moment in American culture.
This was in Steubenville, Ohio, where a 16-year-old girl, Jane Doe, was sexually assaulted by a high school football team.
This went viral.
It created A major firestorm of trying to reckoning reckon with these things and figure out what's going on.
This book I think is an excellent dive into it as well as the film, but I want to start before we get into the particulars of the book and the ideas that are in here.
What is it?
I am always fascinated by other artists, like their obsessions, the things that they can't get out of their head and they have to work with and constantly sort of like get into and dive deep into it.
What is it about this case in this moment, in this idea that for you is obviously sort of a compulsion, something that you keep going back to?
Cool.
And I love to be, you know, categorized as obsessive, compulsive.
Burning up type of creative.
I think what you know there's a couple things that happened in this case that drew me in.
Primarily, you know, the issue area I've cared about gender based violence for a long time.
I think I see really clearly all the ways that the average person does not sort of see the roots of the problem and, you know, I just have a kind of passion about righting wrongs in terms of understanding like who is to blame in a situation around sexual violence and like protecting victims and protecting young women.
Um, to be allowed to express their sexuality or go through high school or college without being victims of violence.
So that's kind of like a baseline just from my own personal experience as a woman and having so many people in my lives experience violence.
What was fascinating about Steubenville Was it's these teen dynamics, and I'm always going to love YA young adult stuff, you know, what is the insane hierarchy of high school?
Who are the cool kids?
Who are the victims?
Who are the, you know, class clown?
Or like, how are people trying to fit into this cultural structure?
And so Steubenville was fascinating.
It's like a 1950s high school, basically, the jocks and the cheerleaders.
Maybe some kids at band and then you have the off the grid religious kids who don't even go to school that are homeschooled.
So that school environment was fascinating.
Then there was the element of social media.
So Twitter, Facebook, all that stuff was sort of nascent at the time and growing.
I have long been interested in how people, as someone who straddles, you know, analog world and digital world, because I'm Gen X, right?
It's like, how are kids, how is their intimacy and relationships being formed with social media, right?
And so this case was the first to go viral.
These kids documented it, mocked it, bragged about it, talked about it, thinking that socials were private because it was so early.
So just like really understanding and looking at that.
And how technology and later hacking got involved.
The other thing that I only sort of understood when I got there that was so fascinating is the whole town was impacted, right?
It's an entire community.
I come from a suburb of a big city.
I moved to a really big city.
I did not have a small town experience growing up.
I did not have small town Americana.
Here's a town that's obsessed with football on Friday night.
Everyone drifts down to The Coliseum, there's a flag, there's smokestacks, there's something so romanticized about the town as an American town.
And then if you dig into the town, there's so many secrets.
There's secrets and, you know, gambling and there used to be prostitution in town and mafia lore.
So there's so much as a storyteller to like dig into in the town.
So it just hit all those points really well for me.
Yeah, I think the sort of idea of the Americana town.
I come from one of those small towns.
And, you know, there is very much, there's a sense of, you know, if you ask somebody to describe it, they would, you know, this is a place where you don't have to lock the doors.
Everybody goes downtown on Friday for the game, this, that, everybody knows each other, all this stuff.
You know, that's always like a very thin veneer, right?
There's always like a little bit of that veneer.
And then underneath it, you know, obviously it gets more complicated than that, because those are cliches and trite sort of explanations.
And I think one of the things that you hit on well in both this book and in your film Is this basically, this could happen anywhere.
This literally is something, like, this is the type of crime that does occur everywhere.
It happens to be the virality of it, the moment of it, I think, that is sort of the lightning strike that makes it apparent.
But we're not talking about just Steubenville, Ohio.
We're talking about much larger situations here.
Absolutely.
I mean, why these boys?
So the other piece that I really wanted to examine before even going to Stubenville was looking at perpetrator behavior, looking at pack mentality.
And I couldn't get into prisons.
I didn't want to interview serial rapists who were behind bars, but I did want to understand the mindset of People who target someone, who talk about it, who plan it, who execute it, and then, you know, disseminate the images.
And what was so available in the Steubenville case was all of that social media, right?
So you could track the conversations.
Those boys in Steubenville were exactly like the boys I went to high school with.
I went to high school nine miles outside of Philadelphia, public school, we had a horrible football team.
It was a totally different kind of demographic and the same stuff happened to the pretty freshman girl who was my friend coming into school.
All the dynamics, the victim blaming the next day, the girls ganging up on the girl, the older boys targeting The new girls.
So the rape culture that was going on in Stephenville, I was like, oh, that was my high school, hands down.
So it's definitely happening.
It doesn't have to be football.
And when this case broke and I was touring with a film, something had come out about the New York City Ballet that some of the men were trafficking in images of their fellow female dancers.
I was like, it happens in ballet!
Like, it's definitely happening everywhere.
It was just so Americana'd in Steubenville because it was the football team and they're a really good football team like it'd be different if they were a crappy mid-level you know team so it just had all of those elements but it's absolutely happening and it's not new it's been happening when I was in high school you know all that stuff.
Yeah, and I think the most important thing about art like this and investigations like this is pointing out, I don't know, it's these old trite ideas about who we are and who does what and why we do it.
For instance, the fact that this is happening in, you know, quote unquote, anywhere town USA, or a bunch of quote unquote, good boys who, you know, they're acting this or doing that or whatever.
There is something here, whether or not it's the perpetrators or the people who enable them or the people who explain away the crime.
There's something really fascinating here, right?
Like it's at this moment where they have documented their crimes.
There's no denying what happened here.
It is it is black and white as black and white as as can be.
But then identity starts to get involved, right?
Like these are people who wouldn't do something like that.
You have this coach Reno, obviously, who who goes in and starts talking about are we going to call this rape?
Can't we call it something else?
We've got the people in the town, you know, in a way going to this football game or supporting this team is much more about.
The communal identity, right?
This is who we are.
Don't interrupt this.
This happens in 2012, but 10 years later, our understanding of all those things, who is capable of doing these things and who, man, it's everybody, right?
There's always these capabilities of people stepping in.
The view in 2022 is completely different than what it is in 2012, but I think sort of picking at that is crucially important at this moment.
Yeah, I would say the reckoning still has not come.
I think it's probably because it's too painful, but also some of the confusion.
And I do think it's very generational, you know, is understanding even how, you know, some of the older men in town are envisioning, you know, 1950s styles dating.
So they don't understand how this girl getting around, you know, the victim blaming is so rampant.
In the 10 years since I've, you know, Since the crime, and you know the town has moved forward in some ways and in other ways like not at all and the rift between the Catholics has grown more strongly right so the fundamentalist whole the more like extremist Catholicism is really like taken root in town.
Which is, which is disturbing.
Um, you know, they're kind of infiltrating city council, which they hadn't before they kind of stayed out of like town business and now because there's this university they're coming in and you know what that means that means.
Non-separation of church and state.
It means non-autonomy over women's bodies.
It means more stigma for sexually active women, and God forbid they get pregnant and don't want to be pregnant, right?
It's like a very dangerous separate sphere ideology taking root.
The mayor, who's this lovely elderly gentleman, who's really like pro-BLM, like he's not gonna say BLM, but he absolutely Supports Confederate statues being removed from other towns.
Luckily, they're not in Steubenville, so it's easy to point south or, you know, you know, feels a kinship with African American community in town.
But I think he's still very confused about what girls wear in church and promiscuous behavior.
They just can't reckon like where we are sexually as a culture and how that does not mean we should be targeted for violence.
Yeah, and I think, to go along with that, the fundamentalism particularly is the fascinating part in here because, in a lot of ways, it's not that there was Across the country.
It's not like there's some great revival.
It's not like some sort of spirit came out and like caught people.
It's not supernatural.
It's literally a reaction to the events following this.
Everything from me to sort of that backlash.
There is the moment where it's like, this is too far.
We don't want these types of things to be exposed or dealt with.
I have to assume in a community like this, A scandal like this, it isn't just that it makes the community look bad, it shatters the mythology that all these people have to like sort of continue on forward sort of to make it through their days, right?
Definitely.
Definitely.
It's like you can't blame single moms like you did throughout the 80s and 90s.
Because these are good boys.
These are the boys that are from two-parent homes.
These are boys, you know, it's understanding kind of, I'm just gonna say, the like sociopathic rot at the core of a lot of American male identity.
It's like we, and it couldn't be clearer post-COVID, right?
Or in COVID.
Oh my god, our society is sociopathic.
Our society, like, enables, teaches, upholds, especially for men.
Narcissism and sociopathy are like, yep, you know, you over everyone else.
Like, that's totally fine mentality.
So really for people who did not grow up that way, grew up in a different America, let's say,
Just to understand that teen boys in their own town are so callous about another person's humanity and like will brag about it means they have to address online porn means they have to address like what they're not teaching their kids and um they're not ready to do that you know it's it's dark it's dark shit and a lot of moms don't want to think that their boys um really I have to say that the people where I got the most resistance from across the board were mothers of sons
Yeah, when I wrote my book on masculinity back in, my god, now that's five years, 2017, I actually noticed the biggest pushback was from mothers.
And it was because there was something in that about trying to protect their sons.
And a lot of the feedback was either the people who wanted me to stop criticizing masculinity because they didn't want to think about what was happening with their sons, Or it was it was mothers who wanted their sons to be better.
It's a very interesting sort of a thing.
And in the past, and I'm interested to see what you have to say about this because as a I'm a, you know, a hetero white dude from a small town that was football crazy.
I used to see men who were misogynistic, repulsive, all of that.
And it happened.
And listen, it bled into social situations.
It bled into conversations.
It happened all the time.
This isn't something that just occurred.
What's happened now, though, I think as sort of a backlash to all of this, what we're talking about is it's a gleeful misogyny.
It's a reveling in it.
It's a doubling down on it.
And now it's almost as if The hypermasculinity, overcompensation that comes with it, the aggressive misogyny.
It is now more of an identity than it was in the past, which was something that sort of, it occurred and occasionally it would leak out, but now it's much more of an aggressive embrace.
It's like an identity.
Yeah.
It's, it's backlash.
I mean it's just backlash against woke as on backlash against you know and then there's the whole like Reddit world of like cooking and, you know, if God forbid you, you know, get dumped by a woman, right it's it's this backlash against.
You know, women having any kind of power, whether it's like we're doing better in school than you are, or we hold the keys to your sexual fulfillment or like whatever it is.
I think there is, has been this really encouraged level of like glee about being disgusting about it, whether you're an incel, which is one end of the spectrum, or you're a hyper masculine jock, right?
All, you know, it's, it's really just this backlash against Women in power and I think Hillary Clinton, you know, running for president helped accelerate that and then Trump sort of cemented it as like, this is an absolutely acceptable form of identity.
And even when I'm visiting where my mom lives in Florida.
Gross Florida, obviously, but you know, it used to just be kind of quiet, like Southwest part of Florida.
There are flags and like really nasty, hateful banners on people's lawns.
And like my niece and nephew play there.
And I'm just like, what's up with this?
Like, it's like hateful rhetoric, just like plunked on the lawn.
And these are upper middle-class homes.
And it's like, why are you saying even my cat hates Biden?
Like, why are you putting like hate It's so dumb.
I was like, I don't, is that some weird, like, pussy reference?
Like, I don't understand why your cat is involved.
But, you know, it's just like hate on the lawn, right?
And you're just like, geez, when did that all start?
So it's gleeful misogyny.
It's gleeful hatred.
It's gleeful, you know, really just like bad behavior.
Yeah, I think it's a big backlash.
I think incel culture has trickled in.
And, you know, Chad's are even behaving in the same way, you know?
Yeah.
And I think it's because, you know, I told this story a few times on this podcast, like I have members of my family who would, you know, brag about their sexual conquest, how much money they had just be.
And we're talking like pre-Trump.
And what would always happen is the moment they would leave the room, everybody in the room would be like, I just feel so bad for him.
You know, it's just, it's so sad.
He's obviously so insecure.
They knew what that was.
And any guy who actually pays attention to other men who engage in this, they know it's overcompensation.
It's fear.
They're terrified other men are going to think, you know, they're less masculine or whatever.
And so they, they perform and go back and forth.
And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit What do you think is happening in the group dynamics of all of this?
We have in this situation, this is a gang assault.
This is a group of young men who carry out this awful, awful abuse, this awful crime, and they revel in it.
They're talking to one another.
They're trading these pictures, these videos.
What do you think is playing out there?
How do you think that that plays into this total picture?
Yeah, I mean, there's a kind of whole section where I sort of named out like these like archetypal observations I made.
They're not, you know, clinical diagnoses, but everyone played their part.
So even before we got into the assault, we had someone that I like to call the fire starter.
He had been wronged by Jane Doe.
She had broken up with him and moved on.
He started, he, Trent was the ringleader, he's the quarterback, he's rising quarterback, he's hot shit.
He's the one that started talking to Jane Doe and like establishing like, oh, I like you.
He got her information from the fire starter, who's Cody Saltzman, he gave her his He gave Trent her number.
He gave Trent her father's number.
He's like, here's how you get her.
He's also the one who took the photo of her being carried on Instagram and tagged as sloppy, right?
And that's the photo that went viral.
He's not in the room during the assault, but I would say that he was pretty critical to like getting things moving, documenting, setting it up.
So Trent's ring leading Malik is a classic follower even the prosecuting attorney was like that kid's a total follower he's hanging out.
He's a really phenomenal athlete.
He's African American kid adopted into a white family, like the story of the blind side because he's such a great football player and so he's hanging out with these elitist kids right and he's just following along he participated in the assault but like he didn't Text or tweet about it.
Too much.
But he's there.
He's doing it.
He's fitting in with Trent.
Then you have Anthony Craig, who I find fascinating.
He is like the trafficker.
I call him the gossip, right?
He traffics in information.
And there's 200 pages of text messages that For legal reasons you can't, like, include all over the place, but are amazing to read.
And he is talking out of all sides of his mouth.
Talking to Jane Doe.
What do you remember?
Who did you talk to?
Talking to Jane Doe's friend.
Just to confirm, she doesn't remember this or she does?
And then going back to the boys and saying, don't worry, she doesn't remember.
She's telling me what she does.
He's playing everyone's friend.
He gets called back into the police station twice because they catch him in a lie.
You know, so he's there.
He takes pictures.
He sends them back to the bigger party.
He's just trafficking in info, right?
And my favorite line that he says to law enforcement when they catch him with a picture is he said, honestly, I was so scared by what was happening.
I took the photo to show my dad.
I was scared.
Moments before he had texted everyone, wait for me, bro.
They're going to rape that girl.
So it's just like, dude, so many receipts.
So there he is trafficking in info, keeping the fires going.
He's like egging on what's happening in the room because there's an audience at a party adjacent taking it all in.
Right.
So there's someone who, I mean, Trenton Malik committed the assault and then Evan Westlake was there, and Mark Cole was there as well.
Mark Cole, like, hosted the party, so he, like, enabled it to happen in his mom's house.
He also was one of the few that had sort of a sense of responsibility, like, this, this, like, isn't good.
I'm not gonna stop it, but we're at my mom's house, right?
So there was just this collection.
I think the people that are really important Are the witnesses, are the documenters, and are the, like, enablers?
I mean, they all help it go.
Like, it could have just been a quiet thing with two guys doing something awful, but it was really accelerated by the audience.
The other person to mention is Michael Notianis, who made this, like, comedic And putting that in quotes, you know, 12 minute video recounting what what he was seeing and how funny it was and all this stuff.
So he was really maximizing his social capital in the moment because he was cracking jokes.
So it's a lot of social capital being gained by these guys following the ringleader.
Psychologist David Leesop would say, you know, Trent Mays was the ringleader one night, but that doesn't mean Anthony Craig could have been the ringleader another night.
So it's not, there's not like one bad apple.
There's kind of like a network.
But I think the documentation and the sharing and the audience building, which is what some of these guys were doing, is like as important to the group behavior.
Yeah, I think, and this goes back to one of the reasons why I think your work on this case has been so excellent, is this is as repellent of a situation as it is.
The documentation of all of this is uniquely modern.
It gives us the insight, I think, into how these situations occur, what psychology is playing out, and It's really hard to look at.
That's something I keep coming back to.
It's really, really hard to look at, but it's something we have to look at.
We can't turn away from this thing.
It's not that easy.
Yeah, and our impulse to pull out the camera and not intervene is really disturbing.
I mean, we're seeing it everywhere and everyone talks about it now with like wildlife or an accident or like anything.
It's like, what is this impulse to take out and film?
I'm really fascinated by, you know, the Brett Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey Ford.
Scenario just reminded me a lot of Steubenville in terms of also I think beyond the documentation which is like some some of the aftermath there's the premeditation.
Yeah.
And I think we understand premeditation to be this like criminal mastermind with all these maps and plans and you know giving Trent Jane Doe's number is like A bit of premeditation, right?
Making sure Mark Cole's mom's home so you know where party C is going to be.
All right, we got that set up that morning.
That's premeditation, right?
So Brett Kavanaugh, even when Lazy Ford was, you know, in the room getting pinned down, it was either Brett or his friend walks in, turns up the music, closes the door.
It's like before things happen, but they turn up the music.
It's like, oh, it's like shit is about to go down.
That is pre-meditation on some level.
That's not an innocent, like, oh, we were hanging out.
Why did you turn up the music?
Right.
So it's like I'm fascinated as someone who does look at like criminal behavior for lack of a better term.
But just like how are how do these things get set up and then get said, oh, I got caught up and swept up in the moment, which is what a defense attorney will say happened to Malik or Anthony Craig.
Like they were just wrong place, wrong time.
Bullshit.
They knew the plan the night before.
That was not an accident.
So I think a lot of times, culturally, we want to think these are circumstances out of our control, or it's a good guy who got swept up in a bad thing.
I mean, it's hard to speak out.
Sean McGee in my film and book speaks out.
Geno Atkins, another football player, I really appreciate that he said all the things he said in my book.
Like he's willing to talk now as an adult who's like, wow, I have perspective.
It's hard to speak up, but there are people who do it and it just sheds light on like, this isn't an accident.
These aren't people getting swept up in a situation.
They're capitalizing on one, creating one.
Yeah, and real fast, because I wanted to talk to you about this before we wrapped up.
You know, on one hand, I think a lot of what we talk about when we're talking about these topics are, how do we capture this?
How do we make sure that people are held accountable?
Which is one thing, that is obviously a component of it, right?
And the phone is a panopticon, like the camera makes it possible to sort of do this, or social media, or whatever.
How do we make changes so we're not having to capture the crime or the act?
What in your opinion, from your research on this, looking at this, the ins and outs of the situation, what would actually solve this?
Or what would actually reduce this issue?
Now that you've taken a look at it, what are the ways that we can take away circumstances or change culture or education?
What do you see as being possible here?
Yeah, I mean, really, truly, we need consent-based, ethics-based, pleasure-based sexual education starting from kindergarten.
And kindergarten is about boundaries and what is your body, what are the names of the parts of it, it is yours, you know, all the way up to what is emotional readiness in a sexual situation, you know, how to set boundaries for yourself, you know, how to listen.
Like, kids have Adults.
I mean, if you go on Instagram for anything with, like, love and relationships, it's all about how to set boundaries.
I'm like, wow, do we just have no clue as people?
Like, are generations born on social media just told, like, you literally have no privacy?
If I ask, can you see me on Tuesday, you have to give me the litany of all the things you're doing instead of just saying, no, sorry, I'm busy.
I don't need to know all this.
So I think boundaries are, like, a huge issue and we can't expect kids to be getting it at home or from their peers, right?
So I know it's, you know, trite to be like, we need sex ed, but we desperately need sex ed.
We desperately, desperately need to understand what are the mechanics of sex?
Um, let's talk about health and let's talk about mental health and then bodily autonomy.
Like how did, I mean, girls have no idea how their periods work and they have them for, you know, 35 plus years.
Right.
So we don't know shit about our cycles.
Like we just are so in the dark about so many things.
So to start with, That, and then be really clear about what is autonomy what is consent and consent is.
Um, not my favorite framework because it's like literally the lowest bar you could have.
Oh, was it consent?
Did you get consent?
Did you get it?
It's like, Oh my God, like, did y'all want it versus did you get it?
You know what I mean?
So, um, but we need all of that.
And then we need, we just need to be steeping emotional intelligence in all of our programs, which includes sports, you know?
So coaches need to be able to talk to their boys and not say, stay away from girls.
They're going to get you in trouble.
Which is every coach because coaches are not sex educators.
And I feel for them.
They're just trying to like get you from A to B, get you out of trouble and keep you on the field.
Right.
But they need to be part of this.
They spend more time with youth than the teachers.
Teachers are 45 minutes a day.
Coaches are two and a half hours.
I spent hours with my tennis coaches growing up.
They were monsters.
That might be my second book.
It keeps coming up.
Tennis, tennis, all the things.
So, you know, it's a little like on the nose, right?
But we need education from a very early age.
We need to understand boundaries.
We need to understand pleasure and rights.
And then everybody at the school, at the school and athletic level need to be part of it.
Parents need to ask if my kid's going to a gymnastics, Jim, you know, what the fuck?
Who are the people working here?
You know, what are the rules, right?
When you think about all the things that happen to the girls in the gymnastics programs up to the Olympic level, right?
So then there's accountability stuff where we have to have hard conversations in community when people we love do bad things.
You know, it's very hard when people that we love and trust, whether it's our good friend from math class or a coach or someone who was always nice to me, is suddenly not nice to someone else.
Like how, and I don't think adults have this figured out either in the workplace, but like, how do we do community resolution around conflict that centers the victim's experience that doesn't silence the victim, even if it's more convenient.
And I think it's incredible because that last part is like the really, really complicated matter.
But literally everything else that you brought up is being countered by this sort of counter-progressive, counter-revolutionary push.
You now have Basically, you're having children cut off from emotional support at school, emotional education at school, sexual education at school.
I mean, even something as small as saying, oh, sports are becoming feminized and they're not tough enough anymore.
Like, literally everything that you're talking about, which I completely agree is absolutely necessary to start making even the most basic changes.
That stuff is being countered by this movement that, by the way, is being fronted by the exact same people who say nothing's wrong here.
We don't need to take a look at this.
And that keeps us from like the really complicated work that needs to be done.
Yeah, yeah, no, that's a great way to put it.
I just, it just popped into my head, speaking of athletics being feminized, Tara Brock, the Buddhist teacher was, I was listening to a podcast of hers and she was talking about how exhausting it is to spend time with toddlers, right?
And like young children, like how emotionally, like physically, all of it.
And they did a study and they put Harvard's football team Had to spend two hours with like a mass of toddlers.
And they all said, oh my God, that was harder and more challenging, more physically and emotionally exhausting than any practice we've ever had.
Right?
And it's like, well, that would be a really fascinating experiment to do, right?
With athletes.
It's like, you know, it would just give you a different perspective on gender roles and women are the ones traditionally running after toddlers, getting no respect for it.
You know?
But yeah, I mean, sports being feminized, like we're being cut off from all of these things.
But the conflict resolution for adults and for youth offenders and for workplace harassment, like all this stuff, like gaping, gaping holes.
Around it, and it's everywhere, especially now.
I mean, people are desperately trying to be like ethical and community, but what do we do about that amazing organizer that happens to be an abuser?
I don't know.
No one's really modeling that well.
Although we have restorative justice and transformational justice frameworks, very few people are adopting those.
And again, we've been sitting here talking, I wish we had so much more time.
We've been sitting here talking with Nancy Schwarzman, filmmaker and author of the new book, Roll Red Roll, Rape, Power and Football in the American Heartland, an excellent book.
Nancy, thank you so much for joining us.
Where can the good people find you?
The Good People can find me on Twitter at FancyNancyNYC, even though I don't live there anymore.
Or I have a website, MsNancySchwartzman.com.
Yeah, and the book is out, and I hear it reads like a fiction, so get in there and read it.
There's also an audio version for more of the true crime-leaning folks.
Yeah, that's where you can find me.
Fantastic.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me, Jared.
All right, everybody.
We are back.
Nick, I have to tell you, I'm so glad that we got back to recording.
I don't know how you felt about it.
I missed the podcast last week, even though I did a bootleg thing for the Patreon.
Like, I missed this thing.
Oh, absolutely.
I think everybody probably did.
I mean, this is a thing that it feels good to do and have a conversation.
I saw people on the socials talking about having withdrawal.
And I don't think that they were joking.
I was, I absentmindedly a couple times hit Twitter and like this because I just do that when I open my phone.
I quickly had to swipe it off.
I was about to go into Discord like, oh, let's talk to people.
I'm like, oh, I can't do that either.
It truly is remarkable what, how hard it was.
It was one of the harder things I've had to do in a while.
And, um, Also, peace of mind.
Like, I was probably more rational and more, maybe, you know, lighter in the shoes for a little while with doing that.
So, maybe we should all try this for, you know, maybe a day at a time or something like that.
Because, again, I'm telling you, when I'm on my phone, I'm nothing to do.
I'm waiting for my wife in the store.
I would just go on to Twitter and read news for a half an hour straight.
Absent that, like, it was tough to find things to do, but it actually kept the mind, you know, a little cleaner.
I think that's an important thing.
I think if we can move away from that, and again, that goes back to the consumerist sort of convenience, right?
Like, I want it now, I want it now.
And that is an addiction, and I think it was designed to be an addiction.
I think that we can back away from that.
I mean, we don't need to be We don't need to be watching Trump show up in D.C.
and thinking, is he in handcuffs and we just can't see it.
You know what I mean?
That's not conducive to anything.
Having larger, more in-depth conversations and actually considering these things is really, really important.
I think one of the reasons we do this podcast and why we did it in the first place.
And yeah, I'm just glad to be back.
Absolutely.
You know, to be back to coalescing the vapor of human existence with you.
Always.
It's needed for me too.
This becomes a bit of therapy as well.
I think for everybody listening, for us and you and I talking.
And so, you know, it's important.
Yeah, and thank you everybody for your support, as always.
Reminder, we'll come back on Friday with the Weekender edition.
If you want to listen to that, go over to patreon.com slash montcreekpodcast.
Subscribe!
Support the podcast!
It keeps us ad-free, it keeps us editorially independent, and also we have a really good community of people that you should join and get to know.
That is patreon.com slash mcgreggpodcast.
We'll be back on Friday with The Weekender.
In the meantime, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me, SMH.
He's back on there, so you can actually find him there.
