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Sept. 27, 2022 - The Muckrake Political Podcast

01:09:21

Italian Fascists and Complacent Cultures

Jared Yates Sexton is flying solo today and talking about the recent Italian election and the rise of neofascists into power. But then, he's joined by Sarah Kendzior to talk about her new book They Knew: How A Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent and the divisions and lies that put us all in incredible danger. Support The Muckrake Podcast at http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	Hi, everyone.
	It's Jared Yates Sexton.
	We've got a jam-packed show today.
	But before we get to it, I just want to take a minute to let you know that my new book, The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis, is now available for pre-order from Dutton Penguin Random House.
	Honestly, I am incredibly proud of this book, and I just can't wait for you to read it.
	This is the story of how our modern world was built and how we have arrived at this moment of just terrible crisis.
	It's a new history of how the powerful have used religion, conspiracy theories, and white supremacist lies to both enrich and empower themselves.
	And hell, all of those things have now brought us to the brink of ruin.
	This was easily the hardest thing I've ever done.
	And I can't tell you over the course of the research and of the writing just how much these current events have come into focus.
	Again, that's The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis.
	If you haven't pre-ordered a copy, why not go ahead and get that done?
	Alright, now, on to the show.
	Hey, everybody.
	Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
	I'm Jared Yates Sexton, and unfortunately, Nick Halseman is not here today.
	Nick is out in the world doing Nick things, which means that I am going to be manning the store for the next couple of days.
	We'll have this podcast, and then on Friday, we'll have the Weekender Edition.
	A reminder, all you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast in order to go ahead and get a hold of that and join in on the muckrake community and all of that good stuff.
	patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
	Now, I hear a lot of you at home sighing, saying, oh, I'm so sad that Nick is out in the world doing Nick business.
	Well, I have good news for you.
	Here in just a little bit, after we talk about current events and what's going on and some stuff that we're gonna have to keep our eyes on, I have the one, the only, back by popular demand, Sarah Kinzier.
	And Sarah's coming on to talk about her new book, They Knew How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent.
	And I gotta tell you, This conversation is one of the best conversations that this podcast will ever feature.
	I am very, very proud of it.
	Every time I talk to Sarah, I have a great time.
	I learn.
	And of course, it always feels good to talk to another person who, well, there's no other way to put this, gets it.
	So hang on for a little bit.
	I'm going to go talk to Sarah.
	But before we do, We have to talk about a development that this show is going to get deeper and deeper into as the weeks and months and, God, I hope not, years progress.
	In Italy, over the weekend, a new round of elections has brought about the ascent to power of Giorgi Maloney, who will be the new Prime Minister of Italy.
	For those who luckily have not come across Georgie Maloney in the past, she is, let me see, how do I put this, a neo-fascist.
	Straight up neo-fascist.
	Maloney is the leader of a group that calls itself Brothers of Italy.
	Brothers of Italy has a history that is explicitly rooted in Italian fascism, which of course is where it got its initial push, but also in Italian neo-fascism, which is its own thing that we have to get into here in just a few minutes and actually talk about and dissect a little bit.
	But this is a pretty disturbing little development.
	Those of us who keep an eye on these things, we weren't particularly surprised.
	This is where things have been trending.
	Not just in Italy, but around the world.
	Brothers of Italy and Georgie Maloney.
	And tell me if all this sounds familiar.
	I mean, this is a group, by the way, that has involved people with surnames like Mussolini.
	Just throwing that out there.
	Not that that matters or should trouble or disturb anybody.
	But, you know, this group It went from this marginal and virtually ostracized position within Italian politics to now dominating it and becoming the main major player in Italian politics.
	And a lot of this, by the way, and we're going to talk to Kinzer here in a bit, but Kinzer has talked about this in the past.
	People like Berlusconi and these craven cults of Of not just cults of personality but cults of like blatant corruption have led to this moment This group this Brothers of Italy with roots in fascism and neo-fascism.
	Let's go down the list and see if I don't know if any of this sounds familiar.
	Maybe it'll tickle the ears.
	Maybe it'll perk them ears up a little bit.
	This is a movement that is against immigration, xenophobic in that regard, talking about protecting Western civilization.
	I'm doing air quotes as I do that.
	They are explicitly anti-gay, anti-trans, saying that those people are preying on others and have somehow or another betrayed a traditional ideology and a religion and as a result have unmoored Italy and caused its problems.
	This is an anti-woke group.
	Again, air quotes.
	They are driven by conspiracy theories and now are talking about the possibility of rolling back abortion and reproductive rights.
	I know, it all sounds so upsettingly familiar, doesn't it?
	Before we dive into why it sounds familiar and what is happening here, I just wanted to go ahead and showcase a quick little segment from Charlie Kirk's show.
	Charlie Kirk, of course, is a right-wing bloviator, just an untalented smirking ass.
	And this is good old Charlie Kirk talking about Giorgio Maloney's victory in Italy.
	It's sweeping all across Europe and they can't figure out why.
	It's not fascist.
	It's common sense.
	It's normal.
	It's middle of the road.
	It's about things that are eternally important.
	Not about gender theory, post-modernist constructs, squashing the imperialist, colonialist history.
	No, no, no.
	This is about things that transcend all of that.
	The American political scene is going through the exact same thing now.
	In fact, you see, The globalists, the Uniparty, they have to do everything they possibly can to try and thwart this movement.
	So Kirk here, before we get into the obvious and troubling bullshit of what he's saying, Kirk here is right to a certain extent.
	This is an international movement that is sweeping not just throughout Europe, but also the United States, which we'll discuss more in just a moment.
	But you'll notice some of the things.
	And Kirk's broadcast, of course, is something that's showing up.
	I don't even know.
	I guess it's on YouTube.
	Maybe it has a podcast component.
	I don't subject myself to a lot of Charlie Kirk.
	I care too much about myself.
	But this is the type of address that you would have heard in the 1930s, only it would have been across the radio at the time, because it would have been an Italian fascist talking to the masses.
	One of the reasons why individuals like myself, and shows like the Muckrake Podcast, and shows like Gaslit Nation with Kinzier, one of the reasons why we've been able to predict some of these things, and actually it's not even a prediction.
	We talk about that, using that term a little bit.
	It's not like we're gazing into a crystal ball.
	It's not like we're going through the entrails or we're doing some sort of an ancient ritual to talk to the gods and have the future shown to us.
	Part of the reason that we anticipate all of these different things, whether or not it's the rise of Trumpism, the rise of authoritarianism, what direction the political environment will move in, how elections will play out, how trends will develop, part of the reason we anticipate this is because this is blatant.
	Everything that Charlie Kirk is saying in addressing that Italian election and the rise of Maloney to power in Italy, This idea that there are things that are eternally important.
	That right there is just a wink and a nod.
	Because the basis of fascism, the basis of authoritarianism, is a worship.
	And a continued weaponization of the idea of tradition.
	The idea that there are these natural ideas that are just inherent in humanity.
	And they always base that into a religious mindset.
	That there's a God who oversees this.
	There's some sort of a religious capital T truth out there.
	And if you possess it, you can do whatever you want with it.
	And you'll notice that the mindset here is very easily traceable.
	If you have capital T Truth, if you have God on your side, well then you don't have to worry about elections.
	Elections are disgusting.
	In fact, elections are just inviting quote-unquote globalists, which is as close to saying Jew as Charlie Kirk is going to say in one of these rants, It's the idea that if you go ahead and open yourself up to having liberal democracy and having the people choose things, well that's just weakness.
	And of course they'll go ahead and accept the results of an election as long as they go ahead and give them power and that's how that works.
	If you have God on your side and capital T Truth, you don't have to worry about elections.
	On top of that, you can go ahead and just tell gay and trans people, hey, you have to stop what you're doing or else face imprisonment or harassment or sexual assault or even death.
	Why?
	You're asking me why?
	God is on my side.
	Capital T Truth is on my side.
	These rants against postmodernism, which is, you know, what all these people like to go after.
	And postmodernism, by the way, is always just a very, very quick little setup to say that you can't have different perspectives.
	Postmodernism is the breaking down of a canon or a one authoritarian mindset and view of how the mind works.
	Postmodernism is basically the idea that a bunch of people have a bunch of different perspectives.
	And if you bring that into the political realm and the philosophical realm, that means that, I don't know, maybe white supremacist culture and patriarchal culture shouldn't run everything.
	And maybe people have something to say about how the world works or how the world feels.
	These ideas are all inherently fascist.
	They're all inherently authoritarian.
	And this entire thing that is taking place here, it is as obvious as it can be.
	Because these people do not hide what they believe.
	They do not hide what they want to do.
	But if you go out right now, if you pause this podcast and you go look at coverage of this, there's a couple of places that mention the fascistic roots.
	They'll talk about it a little bit.
	They'll talk about the Brothers of Italy.
	Maybe even they'll bring up Mussolini and, you know, maybe they'll talk about the 1920s and the March on Rome.
	Like, they'll go ahead and do that because this is obvious stuff.
	When we hear fascist, there are things that have been taught to us that we're not going to simply throw overboard.
	They also treat Maloney and the Brothers of Italy and this rightward movement, they treat it as sort of, I don't know, normal.
	And there's a reason for that.
	If you go back in history and you take a look at the rise of Mussolini, the rise of Italian fascism, the rise of fascism around Europe, and the rise of Nazism, our media kind of treated all of that like it was normal.
	And not just normal, but needed and expected.
	You saw luminaries like Winston Churchill, they would say, man, fascism is the necessary antidote to socialism and communism.
	Why?
	Because fascists and Nazis and authoritarians are always there to help, you guessed it at home, capitalism in crisis.
	They're the ones who make sure that they can destroy the labor unions, that they can bring down any sort of solidarity, and they can go ahead and install discipline within the working class.
	Make sure that they go to work, make sure the economy keeps rolling, and if there's pain that's going to be necessary, like, I don't know, maybe if there's some sort of an economic problem that's looming on the horizon as, you know, the rates are going up and recessions are starting to spread, maybe they can go ahead the rates are going up and recessions are starting to spread, maybe they can And if people are going to suffering, they'll choose who suffers the brunt of the suffering.
	And of course, the people who are going to suffer the brunt of the suffering, we've already looked at here.
	It's going to be immigrants.
	It's going to be gay people, trans people, women, and people of color.
	And the poor, of course.
	Don't forget the poor, which is sort of where those subsets sort of come together.
	But yeah, they're not going to treat this, you know, as the idea of fascism rising in Europe.
	They'll kind of like sound a little bit of an alarm, but much like they did with Mussolini, they'll go ahead and say, man, this Giorgi Meloni is just an effective executive.
	It's really weird.
	And maybe there's something to this.
	And we'll see this grow because this movement is growing.
	It's not just in Italy.
	Italy is just another domino in a long, long line of dominoes.
	We saw it in Sweden, for God's sakes.
	France has seen now the rise of Le Pen, the gaining of momentum.
	We've seen it in Great Britain.
	We're of course not just Brexit was on the back of this, but the current conservative trend in that country.
	And obviously we've seen it elsewhere.
	We've seen it in Brazil.
	We've seen it in Hungary.
	We've seen it in Russia.
	And now we're seeing it in the United States of America, not just with the election of Trump.
	Who was a demagogue who grifted all these people using neo-fascistic language, rhetoric, and staging, but also that apparatus that grew around him, the people who have tried to intellectualize and legalize Trumpism for their own benefit and gain.
	So why is this happening?
	It's happening because material conditions are worsening and corruption is worsening.
	And as those two things are taking place, people are looking for answers.
	They will look for answers wherever they can find them.
	And this is something here in just a minute when I talk with Sarah, we're going to get real in-depth to.
	They'll look for them wherever they can find them.
	Sometimes, that'll be the truth.
	Maybe they'll learn about the reason why there's still a neo-fascist party in Italy.
	Maybe they'll figure out that post-World War II, the United States and England spent a lot of time really propping up fascists and neo-fascists in Europe, particularly with things like Operation Gladio.
	In which they paid for stay-behind armies just in case the communists or the socialists would try and gain power in Europe.
	And how they went ahead and made sure that fascism stuck around.
	Because fascists were handy, as I've already said, in putting down communists, socialists, and potential leftists.
	Maybe they'll learn that actual history.
	Or maybe they'll learn conspiracy theories that have been weaponized by people like Giorgi Meloni and the Brothers of Italy.
	Maybe they'll go ahead and learn these fabricated realities in which the reason why things are so bad is because a sinister cabal of quote-unquote globalists And again, that is just code for Jewish puppet masters and the liberals who love them and betray their countries.
	And then on top of that, the people that they manipulate.
	The people of color, the women, the gay people, the trans people, and the poor.
	And they'll tell them, the reason why things are so bad is because you've been betrayed.
	Almost like, I don't know, a knife in the back.
	If that sounds familiar at all.
	They'll say the only way possible for things to get better is for you to give us more power and more wealth and we'll punish the people responsible.
	Which means that they'll just continue foisting the consequences on these other people while they bleed their true believers dry.
	There's so much happening here and you know longtime listeners of this show know how frustrated I am when shit like this happens and when obviously our media just completely screws it up whether intentional or otherwise and they just normalize this stuff and then we move forward.
	For years, we were told that this was, again, hysterical hair-pulling and that there was no way authoritarianism was going to gain hold.
	We had reached the end of history and the liberal institutions were going to protect themselves.
	You need to calm down.
	This is absurd.
	You're being hysterical.
	And now we're watching literal neo-fascists get elected into the highest offices of power.
	And it's not just in, again, Hungary or Turkey.
	It's in Italy.
	It's one of the major Western nations.
	We just watched France nearly fall to that.
	We're watching it grow in England.
	We're watching it grow in Canada.
	We're watching it grow in the United States of America.
	And the same people who legitimize this and launder this and normalize it are saying, what are you all so worried about?
	Yeah, Georgie Maloney belongs to a neo-fascist party.
	Is that really something to be worried about?
	It pisses me off.
	It really legitimately pisses me off.
	And it should piss you off.
	And on that note, speaking of getting pissed off and getting like actual real knowledge, what do you say?
	Let's go talk to Sarah Kensier.
	Hey, everybody.
	I am really, really thrilled to be here with Sarah Kinzier.
	You all know who Sarah is, but you need to know that Sarah's new book, They Knew How Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent, is out.
	If it's not already on your bookshelf or your nightstand, you are doing something wrong.
	This is an incredible, incredible book.
	So before we begin, thank you for coming on, Sarah, and congratulations.
	Oh, thank you for having me on.
	Okay, so before we get into some of the concepts and sort of plumb this thing, I gotta ask you, this is now your third book, and none of your books have been particularly safe.
	You've obviously challenged sort of the Coastal mindset that has led to how we've arrived here, and we'll talk more about that in a bit.
	You've talked about a culture of complacency and grift and corruption.
	This book, I have to tell you, when I read the description of it before it was released, I got so damn excited.
	And then when I got it, you know, and that's one of the things I really enjoy about well-written, not just prose-style books, but in terms of the ideas behind them, You did not play it safe here at all.
	You went into the idea of conspiracies, which makes you more or less persona non grata in this culture.
	It doesn't help in any way, shape or form when it comes to our media or political classes.
	But you went there.
	Can you talk a little bit about why it was necessary to do this and sort of your mindset behind it?
	Yeah, I mean, this is definitely a topic, both the actual topic of conspiracy theories, which is a thing that, you know, respectable people aren't supposed to discuss.
	know, it's never very good at being respectable and actually government conspiracies or conspiracies by corporate actors or so forth, which is really what they don't want you talking about.
	And what a lot of this kind of, you know, gossip or blather or propaganda often related to conspiracy theories or highlighting sort of, you know, malevolent actors like Alex Jones and letting him sort of stand in for this is the type of person who delves deep into government secrets.
	Like that is the kind of overarching narrative that the media and political system wants to put forward.
	And, you know, it means that, you know, there are a lot of people wary of me.
	There are a lot of people angry with me.
	I think, you know, not just over this book but over Hiding in Plain Sight.
	There are mostly a lot of folks that I think just wish I would not delve into these topics and there's proof of that within the book itself because it discusses what happened to the journalists who did look into a lot of topics I explore and they knew, you know, who were murdered.
	So yeah, I'm not quite sure sometimes I'm putting myself in this position, but it's mostly because we see the cumulative effect of people not taking on these topics decades ago.
	You know, the journalists I refer to, many of whom are highlighted in the last chapter of the book, were killed in 1991, killed in 2000, you know, killed in 2004, and so on and so forth, and their work abandoned and left behind.
	What we're facing now, and you've written about this a lot, is the culmination of the Reagan era and its policies of unsolved actual government conspiracies like Iran-Contra, the 9-11 aftermath, the 2008 financial collapse, and so forth.
	And the refusal to face these crises head-on, the refusal to tell the truth about powerful actors has hurt us.
	And I think in terms of journalism, people put their careers first.
	And so this is, you know, kind of a, I mean, maybe it's a career burner.
	I guess we'll find out what happens.
	It's selling very well.
	I mean, what's the irony of it?
	It's a very, very popular book that people are supposed to pretend they don't know about.
	I don't know.
	That's the story of my life.
	But that's why I'm living in Missouri.
	Well, I gotta say, I think, so one of the things that constantly fascinates me is, first of all, I think the core bullshit of America is becoming more and more obvious every day, and I think which is part of the reason why we're in the situation we are.
	We keep hearing a lot of people, you know, sort of touting this idea of respectability, the idea that You know, we just need to rally around our institutions.
	We need to rediscover faith in America and sort of push back against so-called conspiracy theories or so-called disinformation.
	But I think one of the things that this book does, and I think any modern good journalism does, is it points out that our institutions deserve to be questioned.
	You know, you bring up Iran-Contra, which is something that we just sort of let go, just sort of like flitter away because, you know, we didn't want to interrupt a lot of the business that was going on.
	But you actually take a look at not just like the big celebrated ideas of like Watergate, you look at something like MKUltra.
	You have the government literally drugging people and trying to experiment with mind control.
	You have COINTELPRO, where they're literally infiltrating one group after another and engaging in extra legal operations.
	You've got even Gladio around the world, which is trying to push back against so-called leftists, communists or whatever that are carrying out coups and assassinations.
	The United States of America has broken reality and reshaped it to its own sort of economic and political purposes.
	And now to look around and say, why are you all so paranoid?
	It's one of the most batshit things to really try and wrap your head around, right?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And, you know, there's been a change, I think, in how people talk about all of these issues, both because institutions were essentially forced, you know, to bring transparency and accountability to a lot of the operations that you just listed in the 1970s, because there was a robust industry of investigative journalism, you know, getting information about political pro, getting into gun papers, finding out the truth about MKUltra and so forth.
	There's also more institutional instability at that particular time, you know, because J. Edgar Hoover happened to die at that time, there was Watergate ongoing, and so it produced this climate of critical inquiry and also a kind of baseline expectation among journalists that your job is to challenge power, is to get to the bottom of corruption for the benefit of the public.
	And also in the sense that, you know, no person, just because they hold elected office or because they're born into wealth, is better than anybody else.
	I mean, that was sort of a baseline belief.
	That has been absolutely obliterated.
	You know, and we have a media that is dominated by nepotistic elites or by people who are, you know, put in a pay-to-play industry.
	It's largely based in a few coastal cities and you know they protect their friends, their friends work within these broken institutions and then there are deliberate policies to try to keep truth from coming out that you know the eradication of the fairness doctrine and so forth.
	I think the big one for our generation was 9-11, and the atmosphere immediately afterwards were to, you know, question the official narrative at all, and I'm not talking about things that are very outlandish, like, you know, the planes were CGI, like, not that kind of thing, but why did our intelligence agencies not see this coming?
	Because as I lay out in the book, I mean, there's, you know, entire television episodes, like, I just, I talk about the X-Files spin-off, I'm sure this is giving me enormous credibility as it discusses But seriously, six months before 9-11, there was an episode of an X-Files spin-off series called The Lone Gunman, which I watched at the time, about a hijacking of a plane into the World Trade Center using the plane as a weapon in order to kick off a series of wars in the Middle East.
	That was the plot of the show.
	It was seen by millions of people.
	Later, we hear all this, oh, no one could have ever imagined.
	No one could have seen this coming.
	It was beyond the comprehension of all of our intelligence agencies.
	I mean, we also know that that wasn't true.
	It was in George Bush's daily briefing.
	Our intelligence agencies, some of them, or some people in them, they were on the ball.
	But we're supposed to not question that, not question who it benefits, and kind of, you know, and anyone who did, you know, whether it's the Dixie Chicks or investigative journalists or whatnot, really were ostracized and pilloried.
	And I think a kind of culture of conformity arose through that.
	It strengthened through the 2008 financial collapse, it became harder.
	To get a job.
	I think folks in our generation felt compelled to fall in line.
	I think there's also obviously a genuine atmosphere of fear and trauma, and when people are frightened.
	Last thing we want to think is that their institutions are failing, and they're not protecting them and they're not going to come through in the end.
	That's certainly the story of our era, you know, every single day.
	You see these kind of bot-brained individuals, and sometimes just real bots, ceaselessly insisting that justice is imminent, that the institutions are fine, that everything is holding, and every day there's some sort of proof that that is not the case.
	You know, today as we're talking, it's that, you know, Matt Gaetz is not going to be charged after all, after, you know, this massive investigation where it was quite clear he had participated in pedophile trafficking.
	I mean, he had You know, wanted to pardon for it preemptively from Trump, like there's a lot of evidence.
	They're failing and folks don't want to admit it, I think for a multitude of reasons.
	It puts us in an even more dangerous place to just refuse to admit that this is going on and to label it paranoia or alarmism or conspiracy theory in a pejorative sense.
	We should be having theories about the conspiracies because they're not providing evidence about what happened, unless you're left with theories.
	Yeah, and I want to talk about why that has sort of been, how that's been attacked and how it's been effectively neutralized.
	And I want to start with a little bit of a dangerous statement, which is it's actually very true to look at Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency in 2016.
	And a lot of what somebody like an Alex Jones would say, or, you know, so-called right-wing conspiracy theorists.
	And the reason why they're so effective is because there's always a nugget of truth to what they are saying.
	For instance, this whole idea of a deep state, the idea that there is an unelected bureaucracy that controls a lot of what happens through financial and political, socioeconomic means.
	Completely and utterly true.
	They're not an evil cabal of, you know, there are, of course, child pedophile rings out in the world, but it doesn't mean that that's what is happening there.
	It's about profit.
	It's about power.
	It's about control.
	Same thing goes whenever you talk about something like a New World Order, which is actually just a satanic Christian framing of how capitalism around the world works.
	It just takes the onus from the wealthy who have corrupted the systems.
	And as a result, we have actually sort of, and I think a lot of this goes back to what you talk about in your book in terms of like how you can sort of move these things around, it It makes you incapable of talking about what has actually occurred, because all of a sudden you're thrown into the same pool as people who are like absolutely off about what they're doing.
	They're manipulating in the way that they do it, but it also goes ahead and alters the narrative and creates a sort of detour around any sort of possibility of finding truth.
	Yeah, and that's deliberate.
	You know, there's a deliberate act of manipulation for people who are committing conspiracies to try to make the subject at hand look ridiculous.
	You know, and I discuss that in the book with Keats and Kate, with QAnon, which are these sort of funhouse mirror images of actual plots, actual conspiracies, which are happening.
	The thing is, though, is that we're not helpless actors in terms of how we talk about it.
	The choice to surrender the vocabulary and give it to the Alex Joneses of the world to instead sort of, you know, cling to this veneer of respectability and restraint.
	It's a bad decision.
	We need to be forthright.
	The things that are happening You know, they are crazy.
	And when you talk about them, you may sound crazy, but they are real.
	You know, we are seeing state criminality in an overt way, a way that is flaunted to us, you know, deliberately, I think, in part to demoralize us, you know, to confuse people.
	There is this expectation that folks still have that if it really is this bad, if it really is this off the rails, somebody in charge will surely come in and, you know, bring things back to quote-unquote normal, which of course ignores the fact that normal was never really normal, you know, given all the Operations you listed before, but also just the general corruption of American history.
	You know, a lot of this is not that outlandish.
	It comes down to corruption, greed, desire to take over territory, desire to dominate and control others.
	Those are as old as humanity themselves, but that is what is often dismissed as wild conspiracy theories.
	Like, The idea that powerful, wealthy actors would plot in secret in order to preserve their wealth and power, like, how in the world is that outlandish?
	Like, it's not.
	But because, you know, we are supposed to have good faith, endless good faith in the people who deserve it the least, those of us who point it out are viewed kind of with this instinctual skepticism.
	And I think it kind of goes hand in hand with a lot of noxious American trends, you know, the belief in American exceptionalism.
	The belief in kind of toxic positivity, that if you just wish for something hard enough, and if you just believe enough in the institutions, then they will save you, despite all evidence to the contrary.
	And, you know, evidence that's to the contrary is what a lot of people don't want to see.
	Yeah, and you know, someone like a Donald Trump, and do not get me wrong, I think Donald Trump is incredibly dangerous and needs to be rejected, needs to be held accountable for everything that he's done.
	But I think he's become sort of a sin eater for American culture.
	The idea that this one individual spoiled everything and we had this utopic type situation.
	But if you actually take a look at it, and I think that you've documented this well, American culture, economics, political, you name it, have absolutely relied not just on Donald Trump, but people like Donald Trump.
	And, you know, there's this concept within intelligence circles, limited hangout.
	The idea that if something is going to be discovered, maybe you give a little bit of something so you can go ahead and cut it off and quarantine it.
	And I can't help but feel that it's a little bit strange now that Donald Trump has been caught red-handed harboring American secrets and, I don't know, having people around to look at them, I guess, just to show them off.
	I don't know what we're trying to tell people at this point.
	That suddenly as that happens, suddenly these business practices are actually getting a little bit of scrutiny, right?
	And what are the side effects of that?
	It's not going to jail.
	Like right now, the ramifications of Trump in New York is that he may not be able to have his corporation in New York any longer.
	As opposed to going to jail and being held accountable for treason or espionage.
	It really feels like a lot of these systems of power that created Donald Trump, relied on Donald Trump, and resemble Donald Trump in a lot of ways, are more than happy to sort of throw this sacrificial lamb or sin eater out and then sort of look around, dust off their hands and say, hey, I know you recognize the problem, but it's taken care of.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	You know, it took a village, as Trump's opponent said, to create Trump.
	You know, he's the product of decades of unchecked corruption, ties to organized crime, ties to big business, ties to the government.
	They presented him in the media as this neophyte outsider, despite the fact that he lives in a literal golden tower in New York City, and despite the fact that he had Either run for office or wanted to run for office four times before 2016.
	It goes back to 88, 96.
	He ran in 2000.
	He ran in 2012.
	This is not an outsider in any way, and he's surrounded by people very much like himself.
	He was trained by Roy Cohn, who was the consummate insider, and he was surrounded by people like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort and others.
	He brought Bill Barr, who of course is the Iran contract cover-up general, back into the fold to cover up his own crimes.
	You know, so he's linked to everyone.
	This extends to the media.
	It extends, of course, to the entertainment industry, which is, you know, where he was rebranded, where he was repackaged.
	You know, he's this sort of consummate American archetype who, unfortunately, is rooting for the destruction of America.
	I think that that is their goal.
	A lot of people assume the end goal is fascism, is autocracy, and I think it's a stepping stone on their ultimate goal, but I think what they want is partition.
	I think they want a number of small, oligarchic states competing with each other, warring with each other within American soil.
	I think they want the dissolution of this country, in part because they're actively funding it.
	This isn't a hypothesis entirely.
	On my part, And it's frightening to me that folks won't look at that big picture because, you know, the penalties for Trump are obviously very minimal.
	You know, this is Trump change for him, these sort of civil lawsuits and so forth, you know, because he's able to profit off of what he did while he was in the White House.
	And of course, you know, Kushner and those surrounding him are also able to profit.
	He doesn't need to make You know, the deals he did back when he was a private citizen.
	He is an entirely new form of leverage.
	He is an entirely new form of revenue.
	And our government does not want to confront that.
	Our media has grown less and less willing to confront it as well.
	I feel like there is a stronger investigative culture back from about 2017 to around 2019 when the Mueller probe ended that really was delving pretty deep into the background of not just Trump, but the people in his circle talking about, you know, their past crimes and the future threats that they pose.
	And then it was basically abandoned because people take their cues from these institutions.
	They assume that if the Mueller probe has ended, it must be because I guess there was no there there, even though, of course, Trump had confessed to the crimes.
	Donald Trump Jr., as you infamously noted on Twitter, had confessed to the crimes.
	You know, others, Bannon and others, had confessed to the crime and there had been, you know, a multitude of indictments of much of his campaign staff.
	I mean, you know, we can sense the theme here.
	People act as if they have selective amnesia.
	They don't want to talk about that and honestly it's alarming because I feel like the circle of people, like my readership is pretty big, but the circle of people who I talk to who also work in media, you know, it's becoming smaller and smaller.
	I'm watching folks kind of get on this bandwagon of electioneering Overreporting.
	And I'm not saying you shouldn't vote.
	You should absolutely vote.
	That's an important thing.
	Our job as journalists, our job as analysts, is not to cheerlead people, it's not to cheerlead institutions, and it's not to, you know, look the other way when there is enabling within the system.
	You know, you obviously have one side on the Republican right-wing side that's an apocalyptic death cult.
	You have another side that is refusing to do anything meaningful to stop That group of people from harming the American public, and so they are accomplices in the crime.
	Are they as bad as the first group?
	No, but they're making the crimes of the first group possible, and therefore they deserve scrutiny as well.
	And I think because we have this kind of forced race politics landscape where everything is about Democrats versus Republicans, even though most Americans are not in either party at all.
	Most don't vote, and of those who don't vote, about half are independent, at least a very small number of people.
	It's still the presiding framework, and it is apathetic to history.
	It's ignorant of current events, and it's dangerous to society.
	Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up, because I wanted to have a conversation with you.
	We've sort of talked about this.
	We've never talked about it on a forum like this, and I think that this book is a pretty good way to get into this.
	I think people like you and me, particularly in the backgrounds that we have, we have seen this system crush people.
	We have seen people let down by it.
	We've seen communities absolutely steamrolled, more or less off the map.
	We've seen the consequences of lies and greed.
	And I think the people that we're talking about here, the people who are supposed to hold, like, the people who are supposed to get into this, whether it's in the media, whether it's the punditry, whether it's the political class, the elite financial class, those people are beyond the consequences of all of this.
	Right, like maybe, you know, in terms of how taxes are going to work or how the economy is going to go, those are the places where they actually care about it.
	And that's where the journalism shows, right?
	Like, will this hurt the economy?
	Will it not hurt the economy?
	And I feel like a lot of us, I think you and I are from this sort of background, I think a lot of our listeners and a lot of our readers are as well.
	They knew that this was rotten.
	They knew that this was bullshit.
	They have felt forgotten by the people who are beyond this.
	And the people who are beyond this have no real interest in getting down into the corruption and the rot of the system because they have a lot to lose.
	They have their careers, they have their own reputations, their own mindsets and worldviews of who they are.
	And as a result, I think they look at somebody like a Trump and they hate him because he made it obvious and made people question what was going on.
	In a lot of cases, and I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about this, you know, everybody said with Roe v. Wade being overturned, oh, the streets are going to be on fire.
	Well, guess where that hurts?
	It hurts red state America.
	It hurts middle America.
	It hurts poor people.
	A lot of people can say that they were against Roe v. Wade being overturned or that they were outraged about it, and they can make comments about it, but it's not actually affecting their lives.
	They're beyond it.
	And that balkanization of the United States that you brought up just a couple of minutes ago, That is, I think, predicated on that, right?
	Will any of this authoritarianism inconvenience me or hurt me as opposed to people that are out of my sight and I think are below me?
	Does that check out?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And I think they also use people in states like ours as the scapegoats.
	You know, they use us as the people.
	They pretend that we are the ones who, you know, wanted Trump, who worship Trump, who are part of, you know, the MAGA diner circuit or whatever the New York Times is doing.
	Because in reality, the greatest Trump backers are Wall Street and oligarchs and wealthy people and elite people and people who don't want to pay taxes and racists and bigots.
	And they're not all You know, poor and living in trailers.
	That is the stereotype they want to do.
	They want to blame, you know, what is very much, I think, a New York phenomenon, New York and D.C.
	phenomenon on us.
	But of course, it's our regions that are hit the hardest.
	And then we're not viewed as people.
	We're viewed as spectacle.
	You know, and I'm watching this play out with Roe versus Wade.
	You know, people are like, why aren't the, you know, the women of Missouri taking to the streets?
	And first of all, many of them did take to the streets.
	At great risk to their lives.
	Absolutely.
	Because to, you know, revolt against this issue in a state where the police will beat you, where they'll persecute you, where they're trapping your menstrual cycle, you know, you've lost your bodily autonomy.
	Like, I don't have my bodily autonomy anymore.
	It was signed away one day by the Attorney General.
	I have a daughter and a son.
	My daughter, you know, has fewer rights I mean, that's a mind-boggling thing to have to contend to.
	And so when you live in an honest-to-God surveillance state where your life and your children's life are in jeopardy all the time, you, if you're going to protest and organize, you don't do it for Twitter consumption.
	Don't do it as a social media spectacle for people on the coast to see, oh look, you know, they did figure out that things are bad.
	Maybe now they'll stop voting against their self-interest as if our right to vote weren't taken away long ago.
	You know, they disregard the will of the people frequently.
	You know, they're disregarding it right now.
	The majority of Missourians don't want this.
	They don't care.
	But that's the thing.
	And, you know, because local journalism is gutted, you hear fewer kind of voices, you know, from here because I think if folks are going to speak out about this, they need to talk to someone they can trust, and that person is not going to be a parachute journalist who comes in from a big coastal city and, you know, talks condescendingly to you for a couple of days.
	But, you know, I've seen a real gap when I talk to folks, you know, in Texas, Georgia, in other, you know, I don't believe in red states, you know, I've been saying that for A decade.
	Every state is a purple state.
	But people who have to live under GOP state legislatures and people who have lost many of their rights and freedoms already, we are having a different conversation than people living in wealthy, big cities who have not had this experience.
	And sometimes they do actually share empathy and compassion.
	For us, but there's sort of an immediacy to the experience that I don't think you can grasp.
	You and I don't grasp on an intuitive level, day-to-day level, what it's like to be back in America, what it's like to be Native American.
	You know, we will never fully understand that.
	We can have empathy.
	And, you know, we can work to protect, you know, our fellow Americans' rights, but we won't ever get it.
	And I think that folks in these cities, they wouldn't get it unless they lived here day to day.
	But then they would, because that's the thing, is you don't magically, you know, change.
	You know, you don't magically become less or more worthy of respect based on the boundaries of the state that you're in.
	You're still you.
	You're just now subject to a different set of rules and regulations, very unfair ones.
	And that does change, I think, your perception of government.
	It makes you more likely to challenge authority.
	It makes you more likely to question things than people's living comfortably in Brooklyn or something.
	Yeah, and I think, and you talk a lot about respectability and where this has led to.
	I think that there has become this sort of, it's a very bizarre type of existence, right?
	You have a lot of people in the media and the political class.
	And let's go ahead and state it unequivocally.
	Life in America is based on other people suffering for your benefit.
	And the question is, how obvious is that suffering to you?
	Right?
	Like, do you see it?
	Do you live with it?
	Or are you away from it?
	And on top of that, it's an incredible business to pay a premium to get away from that suffering.
	To live in a gated-off community.
	To take that, you know, express lane that you pay an extra couple of dollars to get away from the gridlock and away from the human misery.
	And what terrifies me in all of this is it's obvious that the suffering is going to get worse.
	It's obvious that Trump is not the problem.
	Trump is a symptom of a larger disease.
	Already, Ron DeSantis, who is as disgusting as Donald Trump and as cruel as Donald Trump, but is more polished and more disciplined.
	And people like him are going to, they're already being laundered by our media and already sort of being polished up.
	Because that cruelty is necessary for this system to continue perpetuating itself.
	And there are a lot of these people, media, political class, it costs nothing to say that you care about the fates of people.
	It costs nothing to say the right thing on Twitter or release a PR statement at a certain time.
	Matter of fact, that only helps you.
	But also that respectability that we're talking about here.
	You need to stay within a certain lane.
	You can't talk about conspiracies.
	You can't talk about that exploitation.
	You can't talk about that suffering because it makes you look either wild-eyed or a conspiracy theorist or you name it.
	And as a result, what's being beamed to the majority of the country is now just a religious faith in our institutions that has absolutely no basis in reality.
	Yeah, it's a cult of bureaucracy.
	You know, that's how I described it in the book.
	It's like a Greek chorus of inertia enthusiasts.
	And you kind of wonder, like, what possible, what do you have to gain here?
	It is not good if there is transnational organized crime hijacking the country.
	is not good if there are violent militias, you know, backing candidates and making plans for when, you know, that candidate may be proclaimed the loser of an election.
	Like, you need to have actual functional institutions, not for the sake of veneration, so that they can do their job, and they can hold people accountable, and they can, you know, help deliver public safety, particularly around poll workers, teachers, public servants, hospital workers.
	They're not doing that, and so the veneration is just incredibly empty, and I don't know if it's because they want jobs themselves in these organizations, because there is this pipeline, you know, that goes from cable news to the government, you know, to podcasts, and back, and And, you know, it was always funny to me because sometimes I get people on Twitter who like my work and they're like, you know, Sarah, you should really have a job in the Biden administration.
	I'm like, oh my God, no!
	Do you hate me?
	You know, are you trying to punish me?
	That is my nightmare.
	I want to be able to tell the truth.
	I want to be able to talk about whatever I want.
	I obviously don't want to wear a suit.
	I don't want to dress up and wear makeup.
	I want to do all that shit, and I definitely as hell don't want to live in Washington, D.C.
	So, you know, there's no appeal in that for me, but I guess I'm an exception, and you're an exception, and the bulk of the people with the national platform talking about this, I think they crave that access, you know?
	We love access journalism.
	That's the flavor of our time.
	But then you have to think, well, what exactly do you have access to?
	Because this is not your standard bureaucratic procedure.
	You know, you have access to a violent, demagogic, kleptocratic cult movement that wants to strip America down and sell it off for parts, and that has already led to the suffering and deaths of millions of people and will continue to lead to more.
	And you are now an enabler To that movement.
	You are.
	However you define yourself.
	If you say you're just being neutral or you can't take a side, you've taken a side.
	And not, you know, protesting the side of Ashens and the side of the oppressor.
	I mean, you just are.
	The situation has got so severe.
	And what blows my mind is, you know, it's 2022.
	This is not like 2015-2016, when I was out there warning about all of this, and people were like, well, it's impossible for authoritarianism to come to America, because, you know, we've never had it, and our elections are of the highest integrity, and even if Trump got in, he'd be held back by checks and balances.
	Like, the hypotheticals are out the window.
	We all know that the worst-case scenario is just the scenario.
	Yet, There's still just, I don't even know if it's denial.
	I really don't think it's that at this point among pundits.
	I think it's just lies.
	I think it's propaganda meant to placate and it's, you know, the consequences of that are horrific.
	And on that note, I want to talk a little bit about this, because I think what you just touched on is really important to understand our media and political landscape.
	So first of all, I don't blame people who want to have faith in our institutions the exact same way that I don't blame people who want to believe in conspiracy theories, because we live in a really stressful, hard, exploitative, awful time.
	Like, they want to have faith because this is terrifying.
	What pisses me off are the people who peddle that shit.
	I'm not going to name a name because I don't want to throw anyone in this direction.
	There is an institutionalist that I ran across who has built up an entire empire for themselves.
	That is just like, you have to trust this plan.
	Merrick Garland's so much smarter than you.
	Do you not understand that I'm a professor at a major institution?
	You know, like all these things.
	And meanwhile, I know, and I know that you know this as well.
	We are incredibly lucky that we have been able to sort of foster our own little places in this sphere where I feel like, and I think you feel like, and obviously your books show this, you feel like you can say what you want to say and what you truly believe.
	You can hem to your principles.
	You and I have both, and I'm sorry for Inside Baseball, but hopefully people can learn from this.
	You and I both have published with major publications in this country.
	We've been in the major newspapers, major networks, all of that.
	It's not like there's a backroom deal.
	It's not like you get in a room and it's like, we really need you on our team here.
	But there are subtle pressures, right?
	There's rhetorical snips here and there, how these things are broadcast out.
	And I think people need to understand that there is this Like, soft but hard window that is enforced.
	And if you are within this realm, there's so much damn money to be made.
	There's so much influence to be made.
	You get brought into administrations.
	You get brought into think tanks.
	You get brought onto editorial boards.
	You name it, you get a weekly column.
	As long as you continue to sort of stay within this, it's almost like a pressure on a gauge, right?
	Well, one of the means of holding that pressure gauge back is, of course, hoarding state secrets, covering up state crimes, and then waiting later to release them in a book deal.
	And that is the expected mode of behavior to the point that I think people have Somewhat annoyed with me because I refuse to do that, and I'm kind of like, well, I'm not actually, because I'm not a participant in state crimes, unlike many popular authors of our time, I'm just an observer, but state crimes are in public, so, you know, we all really should be talking about them immediately now, and I'll just analyze them later, and, you know, not to sound like an asshole, but if you're a good writer, you don't need to hoard state crimes.
	You can just have folks buy your books because they genuinely appreciate your writing and your ability to That pisses me off to no end.
	Isn't that incredible?
	I think it's working as a tacit NDA, to be honest, because often, you know, some publications have in the contracts, you know, you must stay quiet, play it cool until the book comes out so you can hype it and do this and that.
	And so I keep thinking it's a very clever way to The amazing thing about all of this is I think a lot of people believe this is just reality.
	of ongoing national security threats, but it's glossed as just a business arrangement instead of a national security suppression arrangement, which is what it actually is.
	But anyway, I interrupted you, what were you saying? - Well, no, I just, the amazing thing about all of this is I think a lot of people believe this is just reality.
	It's an industry.
	This is literally a profession that we're dealing with here.
	It's not, again, it's not like people are going into a basement at Comet Ping Pong Pizza and indulging in rituals.
	This is about people who are professionals, they're careerists, and they understand that their power and their wealth and their economic and career fortunes depend on how close they can stay to this.
	And there's an understanding that you don't bite that hand that feeds you.
	Like it's its own A system of reward and reinforcement.
	It's so hollow.
	I mean, that's the thing I don't understand.
	It's so hollow.
	It's so empty.
	It's so meaningless.
	You know, we have a brief time on Earth.
	It's rapidly shrinking.
	There's life expectancy going down.
	Like, if you're going to write, you know, you need to write something meaningful.
	You need to write something that's honest and true.
	It can maybe, you know, change things for the better.
	At least it's creative or beautiful or something.
	Like, I don't understand, you know, these hollow men.
	You know, they're like the T.S.
	Eliot poem.
	Their head's full of straw.
	And they just, they don't, Their incentives, the things that they find attractive, the things that they find worth pursuing, they're just, you know, ephemeral and vacuous.
	And I just don't get it.
	That's what I mean.
	I mean, I think you're right.
	You know, there is a sort of unstated code, like a kind of, it's not like say this, say that, but it's implied.
	And I've been very poor at picking up the implications.
	And I think that, you know, what happened possibly to both of us, I refer to this, you know, this time period of 2017, 2018, when everyone's like, my goodness, you know, we have misunderstood the election.
	We cannot believe Hillary lost.
	We must now reach out to the heartland to go talk to the real America and find out what makes them tick.
	It's called like the Golden Yokel period because they would, you know, reach out to me, being in St.
	Louis, a metropolitan region of three million people with my PhD, and get, you know, and ask me about farm life and all these things.
	I'm like, I can't answer that.
	I don't live on a farm.
	I live in St.
	Louis.
	And it's just, they didn't care, but they really needed to keep it up.
	In years, there's a kind of pressure, I think, on them.
	Put some Missouri folks on the air.
	Put some Georgians.
	You know, whatever.
	One of those square states in the middle.
	That's good.
	And then it went away.
	Then it changed to, let's worship the bureaucracy.
	Let's worship the Democratic Party and the Saviors and Mueller and all these people are going to save us.
	And, you know, They clearly weren't saving us, so I just said that, because it was happening right in front of our eyes, and my God, the blowback!
	You know, and I think it's because I broke the unstated rule.
	I didn't know I was in a game.
	I didn't know I was playing, because I hadn't volunteered for that.
	When I go on TV and someone asks me questions, I just answer with what I'm genuinely thinking, what I genuinely feel, and I didn't know I was supposed to do something else.
	I really kind of, you know, maybe I am a little yokel bumpkin in that way because it went right over my head that that was a game that others were playing and that I was just a sort of involuntary participant in that.
	I had a media figure, speaking of, I had a media figure who reached out to me and they were like, you have to really, like, you can say this on this side and then when you go on TV, this is how you have to sort of alter that.
	And then I had another person reach out and they were like, you know, I think if you were just 25% more positive, I think you would see 25% more profit.
	You gotta smile more when you talk about fashionism, you know?
	You gotta be more cheerful when you talk about the organized crime.
	And by the way, just a quick little side note, a little asterisk.
	We have that Golden Yokel period to thank for J.D.
	Vance possibly being the next fascistic senator from Ohio.
	No shit, man.
	Because that man made a fortune off of liberal metropolitan people, media political class, wanting to understand the rubes.
	And what did he tell them?
	They deserve their lot in life.
	They deserve their suffering.
	They're idiots and you can just feel great about what has happened and they rewarded him with so much money and now he is in place to go ahead and help Peter Thiel push like a techno-fascistic agenda.
	Yeah, it's incredibly dangerous.
	And, you know, and the inability to discern that, to kind of look at like, well, what has JD danced on since he left Ohio and Kentucky?
	Perhaps that's also worth looking into.
	You know, they want caricatures.
	And I think what they see, especially the cities of the Midwest and the South, is enormously inconvenient to this grand narrative, you know, this bifurcated narrative that they want to present of red and blue.
	You know, you can look at Missouri and, you know, a lot of it is quite conservative, although I think, generally speaking, everyone is disillusioned, everyone is discontent.
	You know, Kansas City, you know, St.
	Louis are liberal cities with black mayors, and, you know, you can see that with Cleveland, with Detroit, and then if you look into the Deep South, if you look at Mississippi, you know, that is a heavily black state, and Jackson is a very predominantly black city.
	They are uncomfortable, like these elites from the Northeast.
	They pretend that their anger is directed at the, you know, MAGA, Higgs and Yokels and whatnot.
	I think that they're very uncomfortable within a very heavily activist, outspoken, diverse communities in these Midwestern and Southern regions, which are often the cradles of civil rights, the cradles of union rights.
	You know, it's places where people rise up.
	It's places where movements form.
	And they impact life in these very comfortable places, and I think they don't want to deal with the complexity of the situation and the diversity of our demography, but they also don't want to deal with the fact that we, as people who have to live under a repressive state government, know more about how to fight back.
	And that's especially true with, you know, Black people in the South with voting rights.
	It's true with women, say, in Texas who've been fighting for reproductive rights for, you know, longer than any of us because their law, their bounty hunter law, I came first, and so they have the knowledge, and they do not want to admit that folks from states like ours are actually the people best equipped to fight it, but they also don't think they want us to win this fight.
	They think they are fine with a, you know, technocratic, corporate form of authoritarianism, one that looks the other way for them, lets them, you know, get away with, I don't know, whatever, you know, Procuring contraception or whatever it's going to be outlawed next.
	But the rest of us, you know, we could just go to hell.
	We could just, you know, suffer over here because we deserve it.
	And that is why the J.D.
	message of they deserved it, they didn't work hard, they, you know, succumbed to drugs, blah, blah, blah.
	You know, they love that because then they have an excuse to hate us when there's not really a real reason to hate us.
	Yeah, and you know, I kind of got, not a rude awakening, because this wasn't that surprising, but as I was talking to people, like, in terms of, like, trying to fund a project to fight back against this stuff, you know, I had one rich donor after another tell me, these people are fucking idiots.
	You can't reason with them.
	I even had one, and I've told this story on the podcast before, who's like, listen, what we actually need is a democratic QAnon.
	Would you be interested in working on something along those lines?
	That was literally a plot on The Good Fight.
	Yes!
	It was called QAnon.
	Because it's literally the idea is, no, these people are morons.
	You just have to compete to manipulate them.
	Because I think what you just brought up is important.
	Because if you actually fight back against this, the only way that you can fight back, which is the people pushing against this, as opposed to the corrupted institutions covering it up, that means reform.
	And that means a change of balance in terms of labor and wages and rights.
	They want to go ahead and eliminate the fascistic takeover without looking in the mirror and reforming themselves, I think.
	Yeah, and they also don't want reform of the institutions because that opens a whole history lesson that they're deeply uncomfortable with.
	You know, the same way that the Republicans are waging their little CRT war against accurate history, you know, trying to suppress the truth about slavery and Jim Crow and things that have actually happened that students should of course be taught about in school.
	They don't want, I'd say, the last 40 years in particular of institutional rot and complicity and decline to be looked at, in part because it's living history.
	It's a gerrympocracy.
	You know, our leaders, the average age of Congress is, you know, well into its 70s on the Democratic side, and it took many people to make this situation possible.
	And they made a lot of money.
	They made a lot of money, and they looked the other way, and they worked together.
	And I'm often the only person out there on some of these topics, like, you know, the Jamie Goralik situation.
	She was the Clinton, you know, deputy DOJ head who hired Merrick Garland back in the 90s, mentored him, was basically a force pump of corruption afterwards, involved with 9-11, the 2008 collapse, the Sackler opioid dynasty, you know, all these sort of things.
	Ben was Jared and Ivanka's lawyer, and now is, you know, mentoring still Mayor Garland and managing January 6th committee hearings.
	And I'm like, look, like this is not a partisan issue.
	This is a corruption issue.
	You have certain individuals who are exemplars of corruption that work on both sides.
	They work mostly to uphold corporate interests, in particular, to protect the reputations of the institutions.
	To make sure that nobody probes too deep.
	To make sure that the type of investigations in the 1970s, like the Church Committee, the Pike Committee, and so forth, that nothing like that could ever happen again.
	And you already have practice with that, with Iran-Contra, where you saw not just Barr covering it up, but John Kerry to some degree covering it up.
	It's a recurring theme, and now it's the exact same people, and now they're all in their 70s and 80s.
	I sometimes wonder what will come next, because, you know, these folks, they've been around since you and I were little kids, but they're not going to be around forever.
	But I just see, you know, a nepotistic order, or these sort of You know, the type of lackeys that move in and out of the cable news bureaucratic pipeline, like the Jen Psaki's of the world or whatnot.
	You know, folks who don't want to probe too deeply into institutional rot, because it does jeopardize their own career, their own leverage.
	And it's not everyone.
	There are obviously, you know, welcome exceptions to this rule, but, you know, notice how they're treated.
	Notice how they're pilloried.
	If somebody like, you know, AOC is very outspoken about this, you know, they They see figures like that as very, very threatening.
	The people who weren't born and bred to play the game, those are the people that they're afraid of.
	Yeah, and real fast, one last thing.
	I think you and I, we do enough of these interviews that there's a sort of, I don't know about you, but there's like this moment where I'm like, here comes the hope question.
	Yes, I got it last night in Columbia.
	Well, I always hear, you know, it's sort of this moment where like, I look at like the person interviewing me, if it's a video thing, and like, they're just, the color is out of their skin.
	And they're like, well, that's depressing.
	And I'm like, well, I don't know what to tell you.
	And, you know, I think the way that you answered this is really important.
	I was thinking about this.
	When a tornado siren goes off, the siren doesn't pause its siren to say, we think it will be okay, right?
	You have to go ahead and sound the alarm and call it what it is, otherwise it goes ahead and feeds into a culture of complacency.
	But I will say, and I think you and I share this, You brought up the idea of faith.
	I've heard you talk about this, which is where I come from.
	And I've been telling people lately, we may not see the victory in this thing, right?
	It may last beyond us.
	It may last into our children and our grandchildren's lives.
	But what history does tell us is that humanity is incredibly strong and resilient.
	Yes.
	And the conversation, like you and I would not be talking if it wasn't for human resiliency.
	We wouldn't bother with any of this.
	We've got way too much shit for it.
	Right!
	I don't want this!
	I would much rather be doing this.
	It's a nice fall day outside.
	I would much rather be outside doing this.
	But I think that, for me, you have to have faith that humanity can overcome this greed and corruption and find something better.
	But that's different than sitting back and hoping that a Marvel superhero type intervention or a savior is going to come out of the clouds and put everything right.
	There's a massive difference between wanting somebody else to take care of this and understanding that this is going to take like an existential reconsideration of ourselves, our culture, and almost like a spiritual revival of something different as opposed to just waiting on someone to take care of it like a customer service agent.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, there's hope as in fantasy or a wish, which is often how I see hope used by these, you know, institutionalists or people looking for saviors.
	And then there's hope, like I said, in the sense of faith, you know, and persistence and endurance and a refusal to bow down and deliberate action and, you know, compassion for other people and empathy and imagination.
	Like, those are all things that are More in our control.
	It doesn't mean that we're necessarily going to, quote, win.
	I mean, I don't even think of it as winning.
	It doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, right will be done or that, you know, right will be done to us or by us.
	It means things may continue to be hard, but at least you have your moral At least you know that you're doing the right thing and that you've tried your best and, you know, you've made some kind of, hopefully, a positive impact on other people.
	Like, if people focused on it that way and made that their contribution instead of looking to powerful actors to act in a completely different fashion than they've been behaving the whole time, then we may get somewhere.
	And, you know, I think when you're forced to live under oppressive conditions for a long time, you come to understand that.
	And a lot of my understanding came from, you know, Earlier work long ago, studying Uzbekistan, you know, which was always a dictatorship.
	It was a dictatorship under the Soviets.
	It was a dictatorship under, you know, their first president, Islam Karimov, and it's still a dictatorship now, but it actually is finally improving somewhat in terms of personal freedom.
	People didn't lose their souls, you know, or they refused to lose their souls.
	They often were exiled for that refusal.
	They were jailed for that refusal.
	They were like, no, I'm going to stay a human being and an independent thinker and someone who cares about others, even though that will hurt me in the eyes of the party, in the eyes of the government or the police.
	that may endanger me, but think of a compulsion, like you have no choice because otherwise than what?
	You're just, you know, you're one of the hollow men, you're a zombie, you know, you're, you're just a shell of yourself.
	Like what's the point of life if you go through, through it like that, you know, as this hollow empty figure, instead of maybe endangering yourself, but at least actually being alive, you know? - Yeah.
	And, and, and again, thank you so much, Sarah.
	The book is They Knew How Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent.
	If you've already bought it, you know how excellent it is.
	Go ahead and get it for other people.
	This is the kind of thing I think that can actually bring people over to some sort of a reason and understanding.
	Thank you so much, Sarah.
	Here it is.
	Thank you.
	Thanks for having me on.
	All right, everybody.
	That was, again, Sarah Kinzier.
	The book is They Knew.
	I hope you've already read it.
	I hope that maybe you're reading it for the second time.
	Maybe you've bought multiple copies for your relatives, your friends.
	This is important stuff that we have to take an actual look at as You know, literal fascists take over the governments of the major powers, and we're told consistently, eh, don't worry about it.
	Everything's fine.
	Just, you know, things are going back to normal.
	Swear to God.
	Anyway, thanks again to Sarah Kinzier.
	A reminder, this week, on Friday, we will release the Patreon-exclusive Weekender Edition.
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	And we'll be back next week.
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	But this Friday, the weekender, I'll be flying solo again at patreon.com slash one quick podcast.

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