Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the right wing misinformation campaign regarding the break in at the Pelosi's house in San Francisco, plus the ramifications of Elon Musk controlling twitter. In a bit of good news, Brazil voted out fascist wannabe Jair Bolsonaro, and this could have some influence on the US elections next week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckbrake Podcast. | |
| I'm Jared Yates Saxton. | |
| Listen, Nick Halsman is back. | |
| Nick, buddy, how are we doing? | |
| We're doing, I'm doing okay. | |
| It was a rough week, but I'm back and I'm looking forward to talking with you. | |
| You were missed so bad and I think I speak for everybody when I say welcome back. | |
| I am so glad that we get to talk about just absolutely atrocious shit together again. | |
| That's, you know, it's brainstamped that way, right? | |
| That's what you and I, we're talking about atrocious shit. | |
| That's how I think about you. | |
| One of the great things about our friendship is it is based on talking about awful shit. | |
| And before we get into it, and man do we have a lot to get into today, just a reminder, November 8th, next Tuesday, election night, midterm elections. | |
| We are going to be partnering up again with Democracyish. | |
| Of course, that is Daniel Moody, that is Wajahat Ali. | |
| We're going to be going live at 8 p.m. | |
| Eastern. | |
| Details will follow. | |
| We're going to be reacting to the results as they come in, talking about things where we find it. | |
| This is coverage you're not going to see anywhere else. | |
| Nick, are you, I want to say, excited? | |
| But excited doesn't feel like it covers it. | |
| Are you looking forward to doing this? | |
| Oh, I'm looking forward to doing it. | |
| There it is. | |
| I don't know if I'm looking forward to it itself. | |
| And I feel like the Hucksters have been out in full force on either side and I don't know what to believe anymore or what to hope for. | |
| You know, and I hate to say, I'm just going to assume the worst so I can be pleasantly surprised because it just makes me feel awful for the rest of the week. | |
| Well, there you go. | |
| So for those of you who haven't caught our election coverage in the past, regardless, if things go well, they go rough. | |
| If it's stressful, of course, it's going to be stressful. | |
| It is always good to be with people who are kind and supportive. | |
| They're there for each other. | |
| Solidarity now, solidarity forever. | |
| That is November 8th, election night, 8 p.m. | |
| Eastern. | |
| The Mutt & Craig Podcast. | |
| Democracy-ish. | |
| We hope you will come out. | |
| In the meantime, Nick, on Friday, October 28th. | |
| My mother's birthday, by the way. | |
| This whole thing broke as I was celebrating my mom's birthday. | |
| I will talk... That is the weirdest thing. | |
| So wait a minute. | |
| Your birthday is the 7th. | |
| Yup. | |
| That's my mom's birthday. | |
| There it is. | |
| My birthday is the 11th. | |
| Yup. | |
| My dad's birthday is today, the 31st. | |
| Wow. | |
| And you're saying that your mom's birthday is the 28th? | |
| What a happy little Libra clan we are. | |
| I mean, it's not quite Libra right now, but okay, it's close. | |
| Scorpio. | |
| Somebody just swerved off the road. | |
| They're so angry right now. | |
| Well, on October 28th, it broke. | |
| I don't know what else to call him. | |
| An assassin. | |
| broke into the home of Nancy and Paul Pelosi, of course, Speaker of the House. | |
| This happened in the early morning. | |
| This attempted assassin was carrying a hammer, zip ties, tape, ran in screaming, Where's Nancy? | |
| Attacked Paul Pelosi, who was able, thank God, to call authorities in order to come and help him out of a potentially murderous situation. | |
| It comes out that this assassin wanted to take out Nancy Pelosi. | |
| Within it, Paul Pelosi suffered a fractured skull, injuries to his arms and hands. | |
| The police fortunately, again, were able to stop the attack. | |
| Before we go forward, and my God, is there a lot we have to get into this. | |
| Nick, what were your initial reactions to this? | |
| What do you think this says? | |
| About the current state of American politics, and I'll go ahead and jump the gun and say, not good. | |
| Yeah, not good, Bob. | |
| You know, I guess my first reaction might have been confusion, but then also, oh God, what are they going to then turn this into on the other side? | |
| And of all the people to be attacked, it's Nancy Pelosi's family. | |
| And Nancy Pelosi being like the poster child for them. | |
| And I was not disappointed what's been coming out of that. | |
| And listen, I love a great conspiracy. | |
| No problem on this end, on my end. | |
| But this is awful clear stuff that the cops have already released evidence and information to know what was going on and what this was. | |
| And this is the state we're in where people won't believe it anymore. | |
| No matter what, because they want to have their own, you know, they want to dunk on somebody apparently is what it feels like. | |
| And that's just, it's awful. | |
| It's awful. | |
| And it's not, I think the point being is that it was who inspired this? | |
| How was it inspired? | |
| And why it will continue to happen, I think is the issue. | |
| Yeah, you nailed it. | |
| Why will it continue to happen is really the conversation that we need to have and everybody should be having. | |
| Unfortunately, something like this is not unpredictable. | |
| You know, we've talked in the past, and let's go ahead and do this because unfortunately it's part of the modern political era we live in. | |
| This is not a partisan position to say that the Speaker of the House, that's the third person, third most powerful person in the United States government, Republican or Democrat, should not be targeted by a madman with a hammer for assassination, period. | |
| I'm not necessarily a fan of Nancy Pelosi. | |
| I think it'd be best for everybody involved if she walked away from leadership, but of course she controls the purse strings of the Democratic Party. | |
| But she has become, and this of course is a right-wing Republican strategy, she has become the focus of all of the evil in the world. | |
| There probably hasn't been an ad run by a Republican right now for the midterm elections that hasn't featured their Democratic opponent, like, Photoshopped next to Nancy Pelosi. | |
| Right? | |
| I mean, that's running right now. | |
| Nancy Pelosi controls them. | |
| Nancy Pelosi tells them what to do. | |
| Nancy Pelosi is behind crime. | |
| Nancy Pelosi wants to take your guns. | |
| Nancy Pelosi is conspiring with evil globalists to destroy you and your family and everything that you love. | |
| That takes a toll. | |
| Over time, you can't continue to do that without eventually some unhinged maniac. | |
| And that's what this person is. | |
| Nick, listen, you've known me for a while. | |
| I don't shy away from this stuff. | |
| I dive deep into this guy's writing. | |
| I dive deep into his digital footprint. | |
| I wanted to understand what radicalized him. | |
| I wanted to understand where all this came from. | |
| His philosophy, if we want to call it that, his ideology, if we want to call it that, is so muddled and so unwell that it has been obviously cultivated, radicalized, and targeted by the Republican Party and a bunch of right-wing grifters and personalities who have made a ton of money and have gained a ton of political power by pointing at Nancy Pelosi These things happen in that environment, period. | |
| And they're going to continue to happen. | |
| I feel strongly that we need to kind of go through a little bit of what was being portrayed and what from that other side. | |
| But even before we get to that part, you know, this is the trade-off. | |
| The tradeoff is that if we campaign this way and vilify the Democratic Party the way we are, we're going to pick up X amount of votes. | |
| Now, among those new voters who probably never participated in the democratic process before, there will be X amount of people who have severe mental issues who could conceivably do this. | |
| And then of those people, there will be the people that will then carry these things out. | |
| And that they must have made a calculated decision that that's okay. | |
| That's really where they're at. | |
| They know that this is dangerous stuff that they're peddling. | |
| And they know that, okay, we'll have to deal with it a few times and then we'll say thoughts and prayers and it'll be fine. | |
| That's really what they're doing. | |
| Can we point to Democrats who do this and vilify? | |
| And I wish I could say, you know, this is really a both sides thing because I heard that all weekend long. | |
| Of course you did. | |
| But I don't know. | |
| I mean, I know Scalise was shot during a softball game and the guy was like a Bernie supporter. | |
| But I don't remember hearing Bernie vilifying Republicans like that. | |
| And, you know, listen, Kevin McCarthy, next in line to take the gavel, said he was going to hit her with the gavel. | |
| Hit her with essentially a hammer. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| And that's the other thing. | |
| Again, the both-siderism thing. | |
| Steve Scalise got shot during this softball practice, which was terrible. | |
| I mean, just absolutely awful. | |
| That shouldn't happen. | |
| Our politicians shouldn't be targeted for assassination. | |
| Nobody should be targeted for that. | |
| But as you're talking about it, Nick, I don't know if you remember this, but it was around-the-clock conversations. | |
| About political rhetoric. | |
| Is the left out of control? | |
| Is this going to lead to more and more violence? | |
| And you're exactly right. | |
| It's like Bernie Sanders came out and said, this is awful. | |
| Nobody should be doing this. | |
| And we'll talk in a second about what Republicans, how they have responded to this. | |
| But that environment that has been, again, created and cultivated by the Republican Party, and you better believe it was like the day that Timothy McVeigh was discovered to be the bomber behind, you know, the Oklahoma City bombing. | |
| Like, the Republican Party and the National Rifle Association, they had to have meetings, Nick, where they were like, We have kind of cultivated this and we have kind of created this rhetoric in this country and what has happened over all of this time and and this guy and we're not going to name him of course but to talk about how he was motivated just a broad stroke Nick | |
| There are so many things that are happening in this country that people have no understanding of why they're happening. | |
| They have no understanding of why their lives have gotten worse. | |
| They have no understanding of why they feel more exploited. | |
| They have no understanding why there isn't more hope for the future, why politicians can't help them or won't help them. | |
| You know, the deep politics that you and I talk about on every episode of this show is about trying to clear out that misunderstanding, right? | |
| And talking about the larger, deeper implications and politics behind it. | |
| But if you don't have that, you have to create simple black and white good versus evil narratives. | |
| And in this case, I mean, Nick, I wrote about this on my sub stack. | |
| One of the last straws that broke this guy, and this is true, was that he went and saw the Dwayne The Rock Johnson movie, Black Adam. | |
| And was like, oh, that's wokeism all across and people like Nancy Pelosi are trying to brainwash us through Marvel movies, DC movies. | |
| There are market reasons why Marvel movies feel different and why DC movies feel different and why they're more eclectic and diverse. | |
| Like there's all kinds of different things there. | |
| This is internet subcultures aggrieved white men and the Republican Party and their donors taking advantage of it and basically creating a loaded weapon and putting it out on the street. | |
| And that's the long and the short of it. | |
| That is the exact recipe on the back of the box on how to create situations like this. | |
| And it's a good example of the severe issues that this guy is going through. | |
| I've seen this movie. | |
| I went to see this movie, Black Adam. | |
| And I can tell you that that message is not in there, whatever he was thinking he was hearing from that. | |
| And again, this is what the Republicans want to seize on, is how, you know, it's just like with the gun issue, it's always, it's sort of the mental issue of this, not the actual guns. | |
| It's how bad the cities are, which are always run by Democrats. | |
| That is their pivot. | |
| You know, the conspiracy stuff, though, tends to then, you know, it gets infectious. | |
| So he is all muddled and you can, I hope you'll fill us in a little bit more of his manifesto or whatever online but you know what spread out of this is like you know glass was broken on the patio and the glass fell on the outside. | |
| So that can't meet, nobody could have broken to get in that way. | |
| Or some mythical third person answered the door and then they were both in their underwear. | |
| I mean, like, this is the kind of stuff that, like, because they're primed, they're primed for hatred, they're primed for that, it's so easy to then just believe it all. | |
| I'm trying to remember what the other stuff was. | |
| They both had hammers at one point. | |
| It was something like that. | |
| Oh, okay. | |
| And then the way that Pelosi called in the 9-1-1 call, which I think might be worth discussing because it was actually very, very smart. | |
| And instead, this is now being perversely twisted into some sort of proof of what they think is going on. | |
| But I don't know. | |
| Do you want to fill us in a little bit on what the stuff on his imprint is? | |
| Yeah, so this guy has gone down the type of rabbit hole that we're seeing more and more of now. | |
| So just to go ahead and listen. | |
| I know it's always a weird exercise to try and put yourself in the mindset of these people, but this is instructive. | |
| And this is something I've been studying like a lot lately, which is he started off as a 9-11 truther. | |
| He started off saying, somebody has not told us the truth about what happened September 11th. | |
| And by the way, that's accurate. | |
| We have not learned the entire truth about what happened on 9-11. | |
| And I'm not talking about jet fuel melting steel beams. | |
| I'm talking about the role of Saudi Arabia in this. | |
| I'm talking about the failures of national intelligence. | |
| Who knew what and when did they know it, right? | |
| That has categorically, and we can have other discussions about everything else. | |
| You can hear my name, right? | |
| People can hear you nodding. | |
| But here's the thing. | |
| That is an actual question, right? | |
| Like, what actually happened on 9-11? | |
| What happened after 9-11 is that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party coalesced. | |
| They came together to not only go for the Patriot Act, but also the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq. | |
| For years and years and years, capital-L liberalism meant that everybody was on the same team, even as Republicans kept saying Democrats were trying to help Osama bin Laden, you name it. | |
| So you create this culturally paranoid society telling, you know, oh, the threat level today is red, you know, like all of this stuff sort of boils up. | |
| You have people like this guy and they look around and they say, everybody's on the take, right? | |
| Everybody is absolutely in on this conspiracy. | |
| The government's been completely co-opted. | |
| Where's my representation? | |
| And quite frankly, like the criticism of September 11th should come from the left. | |
| It actually should! | |
| Why did George W. Bush and his administration fail so bad? | |
| Why did everybody sort of fail in the response to this? | |
| And Nick, the problem, it all got co-opted by people like Alex Jones. | |
| And, by the way, people like Donald Trump. | |
| They were the only ones who said, look at all these people, they're all corrupt, right? | |
| And then all of a sudden, you end up on the other side of it, Nick, and all of a sudden it's like, before Joe Biden is sworn out, or sworn in, You've got George W. Bush hanging out with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. | |
| You've got George W. Bush being completely laundered and legitimized. | |
| Dick Cheney doing this. | |
| There is no explanation beyond the effects of neoliberalism and what's happened in politics to really explain that. | |
| And if you don't know that, and if you're not educated on that, and you're not up to date on that, there's so much room for conspiracy theories to grow. | |
| QAnonism, Alex Jones stuff, Trumpism, all of these things, they grow from that, you know? | |
| It's fertile soil that allows all this to grow. | |
| And so if you go through this guy's footprint, I mean, it's a roadmap to how right-wing radicalization works in modern America. | |
| I mean, it's as straightforward as it gets. | |
| Is this the part where we can share one of these soundbites of the conspiracy theories? | |
| Yeah, so we have to address the conspiracy theory. | |
| Listen, the reason why we need to talk about it is because we need to actually dissect it, talk about what has happened, and look at how the right-wing weaponizes this stuff. | |
| We don't want to spread conspiracy theories, but we are a podcast that takes this stuff seriously. | |
| We do this for educational purposes. | |
| Now, can you play the dumbass Dinesh D'Souza clip, please? | |
| Okay, so it makes sense that Paul Pelosi was in his underpants. | |
| He's at home. | |
| It's early in the morning, but why was the assailant in his underpants? | |
| And what if the assailant said, where's Nancy? | |
| Not because he was after Nancy Pelosi, but he wanted to make sure she was not home. | |
| And how did they both get hammers? | |
| And how did Paul Pelosi get away a bathroom break to make the 911 call? | |
| And why did Paul Pelosi tell the police that he knew the guy? | |
| His name was David, and he was, quote, a friend. | |
| My conclusion? | |
| This guy, the assailant, is either a sex partner or a male prostitute, and this is a sexual rendezvous that went Sideways. | |
| Dude, Dinesh D'Souza's intellect couldn't power a lightbulb. | |
| Well said. | |
| One of the dumbest sons of bitches who has any sort of national platform imaginable. | |
| What a stupid, stupid man. | |
| We'll break this down in a second, but Nick, every time he somehow or another manages to just bubble up like so much fetid flotsam, I just, I can't, I can barely contain myself. | |
| I hate this man. | |
| But we have to put him in a certain category because there are the politicians who went to Harvard and Yale who know better. | |
| We know they don't believe what they're saying, Ted Cruz. | |
| But this guy believes it. | |
| He believes it. | |
| This guy publishes books. | |
| He makes movies. | |
| He believes the shit he says. | |
| And man, I don't understand. | |
| He doesn't package it in any kind of pleasing way. | |
| I don't know how he gets as many people to listen to him as he does, but yes, this is the danger. | |
| This guy goes out there and without any information, as soon as this thing happens, he starts making shit up. | |
| And again, by the way, who cares at that point? | |
| Can you hear what he's trying to do here? | |
| San Francisco, you know, whatever. | |
| I hate to say good versus evil, but this is the evil part of this part, where they're vilifying something that, you know, doesn't necessarily have to be vilified in a way. | |
| So, you know, please. | |
| It's so stupid. | |
| And just to give you an idea of how this happens, everybody. | |
| So what occurs, obviously, is something like this happens. | |
| Like, right, like somebody breaks into this home, there's like a strange thing. | |
| The information that gets out is not curated very well, right? | |
| There's all kinds of, one person says another, they immediately gets on TV, another person says this, immediately goes on the internet. | |
| All of a sudden, we learn all these different things at once. | |
| All of a sudden, there's a third person there. | |
| There are two hammers. | |
| There's a person in their underwear. | |
| There's a weird call to 911 talking about a friend. | |
| And you're exactly right. | |
| Paul Pelosi was able to talk in a way that let people know that things were happening. | |
| Very, very smart. | |
| Probably saved his life, to be honest. | |
| All this stuff comes out, and immediately the right wing, the Republican Party, is going to assemble an alternate explanation. | |
| Because the simplest explanation is that a person that they radicalized tried to kill Paul Pelosi and wanted to assassinate Nancy Pelosi. | |
| That is the simplest and truest explanation. | |
| Yeah. | |
| What's that called? | |
| That's Occam's Razor. | |
| Occam's Razor, not Murphy's Law. | |
| Because it's obvious. | |
| And this isn't fake. | |
| It hasn't been put together. | |
| What happens, and we've covered this on the podcast before, Nick, it starts out on the far reaches of the right wing, right? | |
| It starts out even further than Alex Jones. | |
| It starts out with some real kooks. | |
| In this case, a lot of this originated from a right wing publication that, you know, talks about how, like, major Democrats and celebrities have died. | |
| And they've been replaced by like clones or body doubles or whatever. | |
| They create it and it's pleasing. | |
| And then you see idiots like Dinesh D'Souza. | |
| It's like, oh, piece of candy. | |
| Look what I found. | |
| And they start putting it out there. | |
| And all of a sudden it starts finding a little bit of cultivation. | |
| And why? | |
| Because it helps them contain their worldview. | |
| They don't have to take any responsibility for this. | |
| And it goes ahead and it does exactly what you were saying, which is It puts it in assorted nature, right? | |
| All of a sudden now, it's about gay guys, right? | |
| It's about San Francisco. | |
| It's about Nancy Pelosi's secrets and what's actually happening here. | |
| We have Greg Kelly. | |
| You want to talk about Dinesh D'Souza not being able to, like, power a light bulb? | |
| I'm shocked every single day. | |
| The Greg Kelly doesn't like sustain some major injury trying to tie his shoelaces. | |
| Alright, I pledge the next time we talk about someone like this, I will come up with some better metaphors. | |
| It's so bad. | |
| He, by the way, he basically goes out and says, you know what, maybe this will You know, maybe this will turn out to be a false flag. | |
| Then, of course, Glenn Greenwald, who is gone. | |
| Glenn Greenwald is gone. | |
| Glenn Greenwald says, it's very possible that the instantly formed media narrative, he always has to do that, by the way, will be proven true. | |
| But right now there are so many glaring doubts and holes in that story that it just takes common sense to question this. | |
| We're just asking questions, Nick. | |
| Jared, I'm sorry, I've got to clean my speakers after these uttered words from Glenn Greenwald. | |
| Oh, it's so disgusting. | |
| And what does it do? | |
| It now creates an alternative theory that Fox News, maybe Fox News won't say it, but maybe Fox News will sort of talk around it, right? | |
| They'll kind of flirt with it. | |
| I'm sure Tucker Carlson will be all over it tonight. | |
| And that's what creates this conspiracy theory. | |
| And we've learned during the lifetime of this show, all it takes is an alternative explanation. | |
| That's it. | |
| Just give them something to run with. | |
| It doesn't matter how stupid it is, how unproven it is. | |
| Give them something, they'll go with it, and it'll work out. | |
| As long as it gets out first. | |
| Because when you talk to the actual assailant, What he meant to do, it won't have an effect anymore on them. | |
| Can I read you? | |
| MKUltra. | |
| I mean, they take these guys, these loners, and they just, they pump them full of drugs, man. | |
| They don't even know what's going on. | |
| Right. | |
| That's another, uh, that's Alex Jones, by the way, in case you're wondering. | |
| Uh, they released it. | |
| They released the interview, or parts of the interview, with this guy Tepape. | |
| I forgot now, is it Tepape? | |
| Tepape, whatever. | |
| We'll call him Tepape. | |
| And he said he was going to hold Nancy hostage and talk to her. | |
| If Nancy were to tell DuPape the truth, he would let her go and if she lied, he was going to break her kneecaps. | |
| DuPape was certain that Nancy would not have told the truth. | |
| In the course of the interview, DuPape articulated he viewed Nancy as the leader of the pack of lies told by the Democratic Party. | |
| DuPape also later explained that by breaking Nancy's kneecaps, She would then have to be wheeled into Congress, which would show other members of Congress there were consequences to actions. | |
| DePave also explained generally that he wanted to use Nancy to lure another individual to DePave. | |
| Those are his words! | |
| That's what he's saying! | |
| No one's going to listen to that. | |
| You're not going to see reporting on that on the right wing media. | |
| Nobody cares. | |
| And by the way, I want to point out that this is I mean, that we know of at least two public execution possibilities. | |
| Of course, January 6 being one, this being another. | |
| We've heard of multiple people who have gone to Capitol Hill in order to try and get to her. | |
| I mean, God knows how many things we haven't heard about. | |
| Nick, this is a hugely important story. | |
| It's being completely neglected, completely ignored. | |
| I don't know if you knew this. | |
| New York Times put it underneath the fold. | |
| It put it like in the secondary position. | |
| It's already being undermined by this conspiracy theory, and this is becoming, and I mean, Donald Trump Jr. | |
| is making a joke, showing like a pair of underwear and a hammer, saying he's going as Paul Pelosi for Halloween. | |
| It is so disgusting, but also, I mean, this should be concerning for everybody. | |
| This is not only going to become the norm, but it's going to be just completely legitimized, and it's going to become something that doesn't, you're not even going to raise your eye in the future when these people are murdered. | |
| And the key here is the speed with which this comes out to take hold and take root and cement itself in the minds. | |
| And when you have someone like, oh, I don't know, some guy who maybe just bought Twitter, sharing one of these things, again, doing the asking questions thing, It makes you wonder where we are heading because there's a lot of different stuff that relates to the news that we have to deal with now. | |
| Probably the biggest platform we have for news dissemination, Twitter, is now owned by a guy who most likely is in debt to the Russians as much as anybody but maybe Donald Trump. | |
| And maybe Saudi Arabia while we're at it. | |
| I mean, the U.S. | |
| government supposedly is looking into this, not quick enough. | |
| Yeah, Elon Musk, of course, shared this completely ridiculous, farcical thing. | |
| I want to say probably his second day as the owner of Twitter, immediately starts pushing this stuff, is already, you know, being this based right-wing idiot. | |
| Another person who has proven time and time again that wealth and power do not denotate intelligence or any sort of competence. | |
| But of course, Elon Musk has now bought Twitter for $44 billion. | |
| He quickly fired the executives. | |
| He's planning on laying off somewhere between a third to a quarter of all staff in order to keep them from getting these bonuses and the money they're deserved. | |
| Also has already dissolved a board, so basically he has total power of it. | |
| I want to talk about the political and social implications of this, but before we do, Nick, I know you've had a lot going on. | |
| I don't know how much you've been on Twitter. | |
| Just in terms of user experience, that place is a mess right now. | |
| It feels Weird, it feels off, it's full of conspiracy theories, racism, white supremacists, disinformation, and it happened immediately. | |
| Like, the vibes are off, the algorithm has changed. | |
| What has been your experience so far? | |
| Well, the one thing that changed was if you were watching a video, you used to be able to just swipe up and it'd get you right back to the original tweet and you keep going. | |
| Now when you swipe up, it does the TikTok and Instagram thing where it just shows you another video from a random tweet that's not connected to your timeline. | |
| It's very much That's weird. | |
| At least they fixed it. | |
| I don't know if you noticed this, but if I was watching a video of The Sound on, and then I would go off of it to go see other tweets, The Sound, it would keep playing over and over again. | |
| So he somehow found that tweet and pressed pause. | |
| They fixed that, but let me fix one thing that I think was a little bit, and listen, Elon Musk is a piece of shit, so he deserves every kind of criticism of all time, but I do believe That the firings that were going to happen across the board were already in the planning stages before he bought it. | |
| Which kind of shows you the state of what Twitter was in anyway. | |
| Oh yeah, for sure. | |
| So there was that notion, but please don't infer that I'm trying to defend this motherfucker in any other way. | |
| But, are you aware that they now want to charge money, this is a new thing, and you called this perfectly where The future of the economy is going to be a la carte, right? | |
| Everything is going to be upsell. | |
| They want to charge to get the blue check and if you already have a blue check, you have 90 days to begin paying $20 a month or you lose the blue check and if the coders can't get this coding done by November 7th, whatever it is. | |
| It's like the first week of November. | |
| They're all fired! | |
| That's the other thing. | |
| I mean, I love this notion. | |
| I used to code a little bit like in, you know, for websites and stuff. | |
| I just love this notion. | |
| He's treating code like it's currency. | |
| That you have it and you make it and then, you know, how much did you do today? | |
| All right, well then you're fired because you didn't code enough today. | |
| I find that hilarious and probably the fundamental disconnection to the reality that Musk must live in daily. | |
| Well, so there are larger political and philosophical implications of him buying Twitter, which I want to talk about in a second, but I'll tell you this. | |
| For a genius businessman. | |
| And by the way, every time that anybody ever calls him a genius businessman, it should be followed by paragraphs talking about how he has absolutely relied on government assistance the entire time that he has been becoming one of the richest men in the world. | |
| Period. | |
| Not just that he was born into wealth, but also that he has just benefited from one contract and one subsidy after another. | |
| But his genius business plan was to immediately make himself the biggest asshole in the world. | |
| He's the biggest asshole on Twitter since Donald Trump. | |
| And he kind of reveled in that, Nick. | |
| He loved being this troll for a while. | |
| He gets on there and people immediately, there's a mass exodus because nobody wants to deal with him. | |
| Nobody wants to have him hovering over them. | |
| So I've looked, I think I have lost at this point going on 3,000 followers, something like that. | |
| People who said, later, everybody, I'm done. | |
| On top of that, you want to talk about blue check marks. | |
| Number one, I'll say this. | |
| My concern about the blue check marks is... | |
| It has become a status symbol. | |
| But why are they there? | |
| It's there to verify it's the actual person. | |
| It's there to verify that it's not some account that's trying to take your identity. | |
| I have had, I don't know, roughly 60 accounts that have tried to start up to look like me, to seem like me, and to go ahead and put stuff out there in the world that people could, like, somehow or another, like, get to me with. | |
| That's a problem. | |
| But second of all, like, you're going to take your main drivers of attention and suddenly, like, hurt them and alienate them? | |
| Like, that's not a business model. | |
| That's not how you actually do things. | |
| And that's Listen, that's all stuff that will shake out over time. | |
| God knows what's going to happen. | |
| But the problem here is there's already been a noticeable shift, not just in terms of what's allowed, but also, man, you can sort of feel the groaning underneath the hood. | |
| You can sort of feel that things have shifted a little bit. | |
| Not just the vibes are off, but that this is a person who's very interested in controlling information, right? | |
| This isn't just somebody who's like, oh, Twitter is a passion of mine and I think the world should be able to communicate. | |
| This is somebody who is one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world who wants explicitly to control information and the way that the lens of information and the rhetoric of it is perceived. | |
| And that is already happening. | |
| We're already seeing it play out. | |
| There are massive implications for that. | |
| And this deal should have never been allowed to happen. | |
| Period. | |
| The United States government should have stopped it on the grounds of national security or whatever else you want to cook up. | |
| This should never have happened, and the fact that it did shows us exactly how dangerous of a time that we're living in. | |
| Yeah, I think the control you're talking about maybe also could be pivoted to determining it unleashed. | |
| He's unleashed people. | |
| I'm sure we all saw the stat that the use of the n-word had 500% more. | |
| Skyrocket! | |
| And they're just saying it just because they feel like they can because they know they're not going to get banned or shadow banned or whatever those terms are. | |
| The amount of disinformation accounts and bots and also international disinformation bots and accounts, I've tracked it over the past couple of days. | |
| I mean, Nick, it's like the scene in Ghostbusters where the EPA opens the door and the spirits go. | |
| Like, the people, like there had to have been so many meetings that took place right before he took over Twitter. | |
| It's like, how are we going to hit the ground running? | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| Like, this is our opportunity. | |
| Let's not waste any time. | |
| I mean, literally every disinformation provider or weaponized group is out there just going wild with this. | |
| Yeah, it's disgusting. | |
| I think we can all say, anybody who's on Twitter who's listening to this, recognize how nice it was when Donald Trump was finally kicked off. | |
| It did have a discernible difference in the discourse. | |
| It is. | |
| And there's no question, though, in the couple days since then, it's really just sort of ratcheted up. | |
| Yeah, there's random people out there. | |
| They got like one follower. | |
| They tweeted like three times. | |
| And they're just getting amplified now. | |
| And that's what he wants. | |
| And when you look at it in the context of, you know, like Russia's, one of their super goals here is to destabilize the United States. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| They're not even interested in running their own country. | |
| They want to destabilize the United States. | |
| There's nobody who's done more to do that than Elon Musk in the last month and a half. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And so you have to wonder and there's you know the rumors are out there that like he needed to get serious financing and it could very well come from there because he's also you know echoing all the propaganda about the Ukraine war. | |
| And it doesn't make a lot of sense. | |
| The guy provided Ukrainians with this star link that allowed them to really have an advantage in the war. | |
| So you think, okay, he's the good guy, but that's quickly changed because he wants money. | |
| That's what this is about. | |
| Money and power. | |
| I mean, the whole thing that's taking place here, and we're going to talk a little bit here in a second about another part of this theory. | |
| It's related, but it's a little bit off to the side. | |
| What's happening right now is that the wealthy and the powerful, Nick, have reached like, I mean, my God, they're at like robber baron oligarch levels right now. | |
| Like they've totally corrupted governments. | |
| They've more or less, you know, gotten rid of all the impediments that they have. | |
| The next step in all of this, if you want to take this to the next level, like if you want to like power up and you're somebody like an Elon Musk, like something like a Twitter is absolutely perfect because what do you do? | |
| Everybody, by the way, likes to pretend like this is a leftist website. | |
| It is a narrative website. | |
| It's a public square where news stories, breaking news, all of those things are brought together. | |
| It's where we sort of, as a people, we come together to decide, okay, what is the consensus about what's actually going on, right? | |
| And what are the alternatives to that? | |
| All you have to do, it's not like you have to go on there and just be like, everybody has to have a swastika in their avatar. | |
| Like, you go on there and you move it slightly to the right. | |
| That's it. | |
| And you say, oh, we're going towards the center. | |
| And you keep having the center slide and slide and slide until what are you doing? | |
| You have created, basically, a consent manufacturing machine. | |
| Which is, by the way, what our media has been for decades. | |
| But this is a new version of that. | |
| This is a brand new, accelerated sort of version of that. | |
| And to have someone like Elon Musk, who you're exactly right, and I'll never forget when we were recording that episode and you absolutely predicted that some sort of like cancelable offense was coming for Elon Musk. | |
| And what happened? | |
| It was right before that stuff came out, and right after that stuff came out, he went hard right. | |
| And all of a sudden, because he made a decision, he's like, I have to be with these people if these other people are going to be mad at me and cancel me or whatever. | |
| Because remember, Nick, he had a ton of support with the center. | |
| He had tons of support with the Democratic Party and a bunch of people who were like, Elon Musk is actually pretty cool, blah blah blah. | |
| He went hard right. | |
| And what's happening right now is that he's using his wealth, his influence, to launder and sell everyone on a far-right ideology that helps not only Russia, not only Saudi Arabia, but who even knows who all is all in on this, right? | |
| Who wants to dismantle democracy? | |
| Who wants to carry these things out? | |
| And right now, this falling into his lap and being carried out in this way, it is It's something that I kind of expected was going to happen, but yet still watching it happen has left me... | |
| Shaking my head, there's really no other way to put it. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And if you read his writings, listen to him speak, his brain works in a very different way. | |
| But it gives me negative impressions. | |
| Listen, people can think in different ways and that gives them unique insights and sometimes you become successful that way. | |
| But there's just something about his thought patterns that make me... | |
| It just gives me, the hair stands on the back of my neck. | |
| Also, the thing with the right-wing propaganda, it is a fact that that gets shared much more often than anything on the left. | |
| There's something about the nature of people who are predisposed to believe in that thing that simply need to get it out more on Facebook, on Twitter, on those email chains, God forbid, you get from people in your family. | |
| There's something You know, and we talked about with Nick Carmody, probably there's something like, you know, dopamine release when you try and share these things that they seem to gravitate towards. | |
| But we know as a fact, in terms of volume, that that's a much more potent vein that you can mine. | |
| It's distinctly right-wing stuff. | |
| It's dangerous. | |
| It really is dangerous. | |
| And it also shows you how we slowly creep, slowly creep more and more to the right. | |
| And at some point, the only solution is to have some sort of radical left shift like we saw in the 60s, right? | |
| So people like Malcolm X have to come along and Martin Luther King have to come along and try to radically shift things, which stirs everybody else up. | |
| But if they don't, you can see the creep never ending to the right. | |
| Well, and let's be very clear. | |
| It's the same way that everybody talked about CNN and MSNBC are leftist institutions. | |
| No, they're not. | |
| They are corporate media. | |
| At best, they're center-left. | |
| At times, they're mostly centrist. | |
| That's mostly what they are. | |
| It's that Fox News has moved so far right that it has made them seem left. | |
| Twitter has never been leftist. | |
| It's a corporate social control thing that allows corporations to launder their public relations. | |
| It's a centrist thing, and by the way, it's more or less dominated By centrist, liberal journalists. | |
| That's where that takes place. | |
| That's why they've become celebrities. | |
| That's why they've sort of taken over a little bit where publishers have. | |
| Facebook is so far right, Nick. | |
| It's where you go when you and your uncle want to get together and share conspiracy theories, right? | |
| So the idea of a leftist social media corporate Endeavor makes no sense. | |
| That's not going to happen, right? | |
| A corporation's not going to put forward a bunch of money to basically be like, destroy us! | |
| The entire message that I'm telling you is, I shouldn't have the money that I have, take it from me. | |
| That can't possibly happen, and so you keep having this further and further drift to the right. | |
| If you listen to Jack Dorsey talk about Twitter, though, It's like the most ridiculous technophile psychobabble, you know. | |
| It's this word salad he talks about, what he thinks it means and what it should be and how it should be controlled. | |
| And it's hard to read, again, in a little bit like Musk. | |
| Those two together having a conversation, you're just staring there going, like, they're not saying anything and it's going on for hours. | |
| Well, and, you know, we wanted to talk very, very briefly. | |
| One of the things that has gained a little bit of traction over the past couple days with Musk taking over Twitter Actual friend of the pod, Dave Troy, has been talking about this collaboration between Musk and Jack Dorsey. | |
| Part of it has to do with the fact that Dorsey, after having left Twitter or being forced out, depending on what you're listening to, has talked to Musk, he encouraged him buying the platform. | |
| Dave, his block is this idea of long-termism, and we wanted to have a quick conversation about what long-termism is, simply to start the conversation, because this is something everyone should be familiar about, we should be able to draw our own conclusions about it. | |
| But to go ahead and just give everyone a quick little brief thing. | |
| Long-termism is a larger sort of a tech idea. | |
| It also takes place in charity circles, wealth circles, how should you give your money, how should you take care of people. | |
| There are all kinds of differing branches of this. | |
| But long-termism is this philosophy that there are future generations that outnumber us, that we should be looking towards the future, that we should be trying to avoid a cataclysm that destroys the Earth, we should be trying to move to the next stage in our evolution, we should be trying to reach a point of transhumanism in order to leave behind ... I don't know about you, Nick. | |
| I'm 41. | |
| My body aches. | |
| We should be leaving that behind at some point, turning into an interstellar species, and that as a result, the most important thing is forward advancement through technology, which means we need to beat the brakes off of impediments, right? | |
| We need to give more money, more power, more cash to tech overlords, so to speak, and basically create almost like a Manhattan Project on steroids in order to do that. | |
| But the problem, Nick, is when you look at the world that way, there are consequences. | |
| Taking the brakes off of all that, it increases climate change, it increases concentration of capital and concentrated hands, and by the way, it reduces people to sort of numbers and says, you know, some people are going to die, but in the greater good, in a utilitarian way, we'll be able to do better things in the future, and we'll just have to accept suffering right now. | |
| And I'll talk about that just a little bit more here in a second, but what's your sort of take on all of this? | |
| It's a little bit worse than that, I think, in the sense that there's a limited amount of resources that all need to be dedicated only toward getting to Mars, or whatever, or living somewhere else. | |
| And by the way, there are different strains of this and different beliefs in this, but yes, that is a prevalent sort of an idea. | |
| Right. | |
| And so as a result, it's like it's it's it's morally it's against their moral principles to help certain people, because that will take away focus and energy and resources towards getting us somewhere else. | |
| And basically, it means fuck anybody who's poor or who needs an extra hand or who needs any kind of help for anything. | |
| And only the people who can like somehow get through this Orwellian, you know, crucible will then be eligible to then get on these ships and will get out of here and will recreate society again. | |
| And like you said, it totally it. | |
| It absolves them of any kind of climate change notion because they're gonna get off this planet, and they don't give a shit if they destroy it in the meantime. | |
| They'll just destroy another planet at some point too, I'm sure. | |
| So, it's a real problem for anybody who's actually living in the real world and reality, you know, right on Earth right now. | |
| Well, I mean, you and I, like, God knows how many years we've got left. | |
| Why should anybody give a shit about us, you know? | |
| I mean, it is an argument. | |
| It again goes back to that ideology idea that we talked about, which is you tell yourself a story that goes ahead and rationalizes why you do the things you do and why your life goes the way that it does. | |
| In this it basically says, I'm rich and powerful because I am the most talented, the most intelligent, and as a result, I need to be given more resources so I can go ahead and push us forward. | |
| We all know, and we've talked about on this podcast, all wealth is is a representation of wealth. | |
| It means somehow or another you have ended up with more money than other people, often because you were born into wealth and the system was created in order to help you. | |
| The question that ever gets asked in all of this is, Are you? | |
| Even if this is true, even if we should be putting all these resources in like individuals hands, why are you the person who should have it? | |
| Because you have the most money right now? | |
| Because somehow or another that shows that you're the most talented? | |
| That's bullshit. | |
| That's not how any of this works. | |
| We all know it. | |
| But this is about saying, listen, I know you want to help people. | |
| I know you want to feed people. | |
| You want to inoculate people. | |
| You want to make, you know, give them education. | |
| But your money is better spent going ahead. | |
| And by the way, this is important. | |
| And this is how charity works. | |
| It's better to just go ahead and give money to the things that you care about, right? | |
| Because that's actually better in the long run. | |
| It is its own religion. | |
| And I think you can look at what's happening with Musk through the lens of long-termism, but I also think that that doesn't cover the entire story of the whole thing. | |
| Do you ever reflect on Musk's upbringing as a child and how his parents raised him? | |
| Do you ever, like, sort of think about that and what it was probably like that got us to where he is now? | |
| Well, I think so much of what happens here, and Nick, the problem is, you know, and this isn't... I think some people get over this, and I think some people reckon with it. | |
| If you come from extreme wealth, you kind of, in order to sleep at night, you have to tell yourself you deserve it. | |
| Right? | |
| Like, there's a reason why you have that wealth. | |
| You're not hurting people. | |
| You're not exploiting people. | |
| Eventually, people can come to terms with their own privilege, but my God, is that a hell of a path. | |
| Well, yeah, but it's not even you're not hurting people, you're not exploiting people, it's you are smarter than everybody else. | |
| Yes. | |
| You know? | |
| And you know more than everybody. | |
| Are we allowed to talk about Louis? | |
| I don't know anymore because there's a show. | |
| Have you ever seen the show, Louis? | |
| I think Louis C.K. | |
| has been cancelled a couple times over, but if you want to use the example, I think that's okay. | |
| Well, it was a terrific show. | |
| I hate to, you know, whatever, but at some point he's got to watch a kid, and the mother's like, hey, can you help me? | |
| Can you watch him? | |
| The guy's like, well, sure, I'll watch your kid. | |
| He's probably 10 years old. | |
| And she goes, he doesn't eat this, he doesn't whatever, and I've never told him no. | |
| And then runs away. | |
| And now he's got to figure out how to handle his kid for the afternoon. | |
| He's never been told no in his life. | |
| And it devolves from there. | |
| And I can't help but picture this as what Musk as a child must have been like. | |
| Well, here's the thing, and I'm glad you brought this up. | |
| Elon Musk is a brat. | |
| That's 100% true. | |
| This is a person who has shown unbelievable narcissism and solipsism. | |
| The idea that he is the most important character in all of this, which, by the way, is part of the reason why he bought Twitter. | |
| He wants to be the main character. | |
| He wants to be the person that everyone's talking about. | |
| And, to go ahead and draw the line very, very quickly, that's why Donald Trump ran and became president. | |
| He needed to be the center of attention because there was a black hole inside of him that could not be filled up with all the attention. | |
| He needed literally everybody in the world to be talking about him at any given time. | |
| And here's the thing, and you know this as well as I do, it didn't work. | |
| Literally everybody in the world was talking about Donald Trump at all times and it didn't budge an inch. | |
| It didn't change anything. | |
| It didn't make him feel any better. | |
| For Musk to do this, it's not going to help. | |
| For Musk to be given every cent in the world and overall power to do whatever he wanted, it's not going to fill that hole. | |
| Period. | |
| Yeah, and now he's got nobody around him to tell him, hey, this long-termism thing, like, this is ridiculous, whatever you're thinking about. | |
| Like, hey, if you want to go to Mars, great, whatever, but if you're going to try and, like, affect the entire society and influence people to that degree as a callous, you know, dismissive of humanity, then we got a serious problem, and you don't deserve to be in the position that you're in. | |
| Well, and by the way, we're absolutely going to talk more about long-termism in the future because it's going to be something that we're going to have to reckon with. | |
| But I just want to point this out. | |
| This is important. | |
| Like, a human species that advances is eventually going to go elsewhere. | |
| Eventually, we're going to probably evolve past this. | |
| I'm sorry, but the writing is on the wall that transhumanism is probably the future if we don't destroy ourselves. | |
| But guess what, Nick? | |
| We have to take care of the inequality that we have and then all of a sudden we can figure out how to innovate and how we can do those things. | |
| The problem right now is we have a system of inequality that is absolutely buttressed constantly on utopian thinking. | |
| The idea that if you just allow the powerful more power and more wealth, they'll get things figured out and you'll receive a heaven on earth. | |
| Ask Jared Kushner how that went. | |
| Yeah, ask any of these assholes how that goes. | |
| But we'll talk more about this. | |
| Last thing before we jump off this broadcast, we need to talk about something kind of cool, actually kind of decent, kind of okay. | |
| The runoff in Brazil between Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro. | |
| Silva won! | |
| Silva! | |
| Silva! | |
| Lula won! | |
| He won 50.9% of the vote compared to the Bolsonaro's 49.1%. | |
| This is despite, Nick, over 500 incidents of the police trying to block people from voting. | |
| We're talking intimidation. | |
| We're talking widespread operations. | |
| The people still found a way to vote. | |
| They still went ahead and put Lula in a position to become the next president of Brazil. | |
| Unfortunately, the past couple days have not been great. | |
| We've got a bunch of people out there blocking roadways, intimidating people, threatening violence. | |
| Bolsonaro has basically had a boo-boo, Nick. | |
| He's been sleeping for a couple of days. | |
| He has not been seen. | |
| God knows if he's going to call for a coup. | |
| He has the support of the military and the police. | |
| He's already basically said the election was going to be stolen. | |
| What are your initial reactions and where do you see this going? | |
| He went to the office today. | |
| He left where he lives and went into the office. | |
| Was he wearing pajama pants? | |
| We have to check to see. | |
| I suppose they had that same – like we do here, right? | |
| Like a month of transition. | |
| We'll have to find out. | |
| But he hasn't said anything publicly. | |
| And I just want to make it clear that the cops, I don't think they were trying to block anybody from voting. | |
| They simply wanted to delay them getting to the polls. | |
| That's what they said. | |
| It's just a delay, not blocking. | |
| Eventually you'll get through, you know. | |
| But what was telling was that Bolsonaro was talking with a lot of Republicans here about the different methods you can use to fucking obstruct people from voting. | |
| This is where we're at here. | |
| Now they're talking to each other. | |
| This is bad. | |
| This is, you know, once you start getting people like, you know, The North Koreans talking with the Russians with the Americans with the Brazilians. | |
| Now you got a problem because some of those evil genius ideas really start to bubble up and then we can't stop them and you can't you know then there goes democracy. | |
| Bolsonaro absolutely followed the Trump playbook that was designed by Steve Bannon and his associates. | |
| What is getting ready to happen in Brazil? | |
| And by the way, Bolsonaro, if he loses, if he accepts defeat and there isn't some sort of a coup situation, he could face charges. | |
| I mean, he has been one of the most corrupt officials that we have seen in leadership in a long, long time. | |
| He is looking at the possibility of going to jail himself. | |
| And, you know, there is a real possibility there's going to be some sort of a coup attempt. | |
| The question remains, like, are the people of Brazil going to put up with that? | |
| Will Bolsonaro, you know, sort of blink at this thing? | |
| Will he go home and basically, will he go to his own Mar-a-Lago type situation? | |
| And then on top of that, the question is, what will the United States of America do? | |
| Because they're not always fond of left-leaning leaders, but that's something to be seen. | |
| But you better believe that the Republican Party is going to watch what's happening in Brazil. | |
| They are, again, going to test the fence, right? | |
| See if the electricity's on, see if the guardrails are intact. | |
| They're going to see how everybody reacts to this. | |
| It's like its own little laboratory. | |
| And, you know, I don't know I don't know if you can draw any conclusions about what to expect from the midterms from this, but I will tell you that I am hopeful that people are continually rejecting these assholes. | |
| Yeah, I mean, there is hope. | |
| If there's enough of a movement, it becomes very, very hard to stop. | |
| And then you would hope that that could infect places like Russia as well, where maybe, eventually, Putin wouldn't win a rigged election that they have there. | |
| Truckers are blocking the roads who are against Lula, you know, or Probosonaro. | |
| They're hoping for a military coup. | |
| Apparently, Bolsonaro is going to speak tonight, or at some point soon, from a pre-written statement, which, I don't know, what do you think? | |
| If it's pre-written, doesn't that feel like it's concession? | |
| Well, I don't think that guy could speak extemporaneously to save his life anyway. | |
| I mean, this is a guy who's been attacked by, I think, like three emus at some point. | |
| I think he set the world record for getting COVID simply because he couldn't stop himself. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I really don't know what to expect at this point, but I will say, His supporters, and this is the frightening part, they're ready. | |
| I mean, they were committing violence, they were committing murders before the election happened. | |
| Things only have increased in terms of tension. | |
| I think his supporters want it, and that's the frightening thing here. | |
| He has every reason to try it, and his supporters are definitely up for this. | |
| Alright everybody, we're going to keep a close eye on that. | |
| We will be back on Friday with our Weekender Show. | |
| If you haven't already, because Nick was gone, I had the keys to the store, I made last week's Weekender free of charge because I wanted everybody to hear the interviews. | |
| One with quote-unquote James, the Democratic strategist who told us a lot of truth about Democratic consulting and fundraising. | |
| And also with Angela Dinker. | |
| So if you haven't listened to that already, go and listen to that. | |
| But if you want to listen to this week's episode, you're going to need to go over to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast and become a patron. | |
| A reminder again, next Tuesday, November 8th, 8 p.m. | |
| Eastern for the live midterm election show. | |
| We'll be teaming up with Democracyish, Daniel Moody, and Wajahat Ali. | |
| We hope to see you there. | |
| More details to come. | |
| If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me? | |
| SMH. | |
| You can find me at JY Sexton. |