Trump Hosts Neo-Nazis, Amazon Workers Strike, China Upheaval
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman have a lot to talk about as former president Donald Trump hosted anti-semite Kanye West and Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes at Mar A Lago last week. What is happening in China is unprecedented as citizens there openly protest the government and back here at home, workers are telling employers that they're not going to take it anymore.
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Hey everybody, welcome to the Month Break Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates, and I'm here with Nick Halsman.
Nick, the world needs to know, how is our favorite big boy feeling?
I'm feeling 100%.
I tested negative twice in a row, so I've gotten out of this thing in a very short time frame, and thank goodness for that, and I'm back.
Maybe a little tiny cough every once in a while, but that's about it.
Okay, good.
The muckrake community, the muckrake universe, we were all sending our well wishes.
I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to chalk that up to our energies and not to modern science or medicine.
Oh no, are you an anti-vaxxer now?
I'm just saying vibes don't hurt.
I actually believe that.
You know those things when people pray for people who are in the hospital?
There's been some study, who knows how scientific it is.
I choose to believe that there is something to that.
I thought that's great.
And listen, those are the good vibes that we need.
I've got bad news for everybody.
There are some bad vibes coming on this podcast, unfortunately.
But I do have to tell everyone, I have an insider source on the January 6th committee.
I've got some breaking news about what they're telling me.
Then we're going to be talking about China.
We're going to be talking about Amazon protests.
Those are wonderful.
But Nick, you and I both know exactly where the hell this podcast has to start today.
Well, you know, I don't want to ruin it for everybody.
So why don't you tell us what has to start?
So here's the thing.
I received multiple messages from people who are like, this is a muckrake podcast.
Just a fastball over the middle.
This is where all of our interests converge.
They're waiting to hear what we have to say.
Kanye West brought Nick Fuentes.
And by the way, I want to say, the news keeps calling him a... Have you been reading these euphemisms?
It's like right-wing provocateur, right-wing personality, white nationalist.
No.
We're talking about a crypto neo-Nazi Holocaust denier, Nick Fuentes, to go and meet with former President Donald Trump.
Kanye, we got to talk about, unfortunately, along with this, the anti-Semitism thing on the right continues to grow.
Nick, when you heard about this the first time, what was your initial feeling and reaction?
Oh, I don't know.
It's weird, you know, because there's all this outcry for condemnation of this from the right and all this and no one's really doing it.
I mean, it is it's just deflating at this point because It is so truly awful.
We know that the Secret Service vets these people before they let him into Mar-a-Lago.
So this is not an unknown thing that a guy, that Connie just, oh a buddy of mine just came with me at the airport, I ran into him, he's coming with me, whatever.
This is all known.
They know what this is going about.
And it's even more cynical when they say, well how can Trump be anti-Semitic?
He's got a Jewish son-in-law, right?
And it's like all these things are, it's just, it's just soul-killing.
I don't know how else else to put it.
There is so much to break down in this thing.
We gotta talk about what Kanye said about what Trump said.
We gotta talk about Kanye bringing on Milo Yiannopoulos, who the last time this podcast talked about that absolutely awful person.
I don't know if you remember this, Nick, he was joining the staff of a certain congressperson.
Oh, was it, who was it, Marjorie Taylor Greene?
Marjorie Taylor Greene!
It's weird how these things happen, but we'll talk about that in a minute.
Nick, I want to make sure that people understand who Nick Fuentes is, and we're going to listen to a couple of clips here in a second because I had a realization with the way this is being covered.
I know this is shocking.
American media dropping the ball when it comes to radicalization and extremism.
Again, this is not just a white national.
This is not just a right-wing provocateur.
This is a person who has explicitly built their entire brand and political identity on carrying out white supremacist neo-Nazi ideology.
This is a person, and we're going to play a clip here in a second, I want people to understand that what you're getting ready to hear is just thinly veiled coded language from Nick Fuentes on his show.
What he is talking about, Nick, and back me up on this, he is Holocaust denying in this clip.
Is that fair?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, even if you want to try it, even if you had to struggle a little bit between the lines, this is denying without question.
Let's listen to this and understand that this is about the Holocaust.
Max says, if I take one hour to cook a batch of cookies and Cookie Monster has 15 ovens, working 24 hours a day, every day for five years, how long does it take Cookie Monster to make six million batches of cookies?
I don't know, that's a good question.
Certainly, oh no, no.
That doesn't really sound correct to me.
Wait a second.
Right.
And this is one of the big Holocaust denier thing is like, there's just not enough time in a day to be able to kill six million Jews in that time frame.
So obviously it didn't happen.
That's what they'll say.
And here's the whole thing about Holocaust denying.
It's actually kind of, it's kind of an example of what the right wing does anyway.
We talk about it all the time.
The right wing wants it both ways all the time.
They need to have two opposing viewpoints in their head at once, which is something that they accomplish constantly.
Neo-Nazis do two things.
One, they discount the Holocaust so that they don't have any sort of, like, they want to believe that they don't have any political strikes against them, right?
They want to say that they have Nazi ideology, that there's no evil behind that, that Nazi ideology is somehow or another clean of six million people being killed.
But they also want to say something else, Nick, which is, man, I wish they would have done more.
In their mind, the Holocaust not only didn't happen, it should have been worse.
Yeah.
And that's what Nick Fuentes is doing.
And I want people to think about this.
He's laughing about the Holocaust.
He's literally belittling the idea of the Holocaust.
This is the person who met with the former president and was reportedly very impressed with, right, and gave him all kinds of like thoughts and pointers and all that, which we'll go over in a second.
This is vile, Nick.
He is a vile person.
You know, I'm not sure I've ever told you this, but I was a trained interviewer for the Shoah Foundation for Spielberg's Holocaust Memorial, you know, where he was memorializing everyone who was still alive, their testimony on film.
And I interviewed two survivors.
And we were trained and we learned, we had to study, you know, what we had to deal with in terms of denying what they were going to say.
And the fear, Always tended to be that the farther we got away from World War II and that time frame, the less evil it would feel, you know?
And so we think about the evil people from the Middle Ages, whatever, as some sort of, you know, picture in a book.
It doesn't really have any visceral feeling.
What's that?
They're like a different species.
They lived in a different world.
It doesn't really matter.
That kind of thing.
Yeah, it's not like scary, you know.
But like Hitler, we should maintain that fear of even the imagery of him and Mussolini and all those guys.
And the fear has always been that as the farther we get, the less, you know, people study it and learn about it.
Then it just becomes a thing that happened at one time and, you know, oh well.
And then we get this.
Yeah, and this is what Fuentes does.
The only reason we're sitting here talking about Nick Fuentes, the only reason that he met with a former president of the United States of America, the only reason he's exorbitantly wealthy and powerful now, is because he has built his brand on being the person who will go ahead and say the things that other people don't want to say.
Right?
Because the right-wing figures and provocateurs, you name them, the white nationalists, even some of the white nationalists will be like, Well, I mean, there's a difference between the races and look who built Western civilization, right?
But they don't do this, right?
Fuentes is the person who's just like, that's fine.
I'm a crypto Nazi.
What are you going to do about it?
And he laughs about it.
The radicalization process.
And unfortunately, we got to talk about Elon Musk because he paid forty four billion dollars.
So we have to talk about him constantly.
We're watching radicalization take place.
And Nick, as you get deeper and deeper into any subject, whether it's Naziism or a hobby, you look more and more for specialized, focused language in people.
You know what I'm talking about?
Like, you and I in politics, we're paying attention to people who are into deep, deep politics.
People who get into this grouper world, this white supremacist, neo-Nazi, crypto-Nazi shit, they go and look for someone like Nick Fuentes.
They go from like that, you know, alt-right, light stuff, into this.
And that is what he has done.
This isn't It's not an act.
It's not funny.
This is literally Nazism that is being mainstreamed every single day now.
And it's the smarm.
It's weird because a lot of times you might look at Trump and be like, okay, he's not funny to me, but he's trying to be funny and there's something about it.
He's on TV that there's something there.
This guy is a 24 year old smarmy ass with this with this smile on his face all the time and his winks you know because he will every once in a while say oh you know I probably shouldn't have said that but he revels in the fact that he will say it and then pretend that he's not supposed to say it but I the presentation is really troubling um and so um what's the word it's a repulsive But that's what's so hard then, because obviously millions of people do not find him repulsive.
And I shouldn't say people, I should probably just say white males.
And he's not repulsive to them.
This is it.
This is what is hard for people on the left to understand, people on the right, and how we're supposed to communicate with them.
And this is it.
This is the best example of that.
And I want you to play this next clip because here's the thing, and I've been thinking a lot about American media, how they cover stuff.
They use euphemisms.
You know what I mean?
And nobody trusts the media anymore.
And by the way, for good reason.
They don't play these clips.
They don't show you what this person actually does.
Nick, play this so that people can actually hear this person.
When it comes to the Jews, here's the silver lining.
It tends to go from 0 to 60.
Like, they're not wrong about that.
But there's a reason for that, and the reason is them, okay?
When it comes to the Jews, every society where shit has gone down with these people, it always goes from 0 to 60.
It never starts with burning all the Talmuds in Paris, okay?
It never starts that way.
So I want to go ahead and fact check him because it's important if we're going to air these people that we have to talk about what they're doing there.
but it frequently ends there. - So I want to go ahead and fact check him because it's important if we're going to air these people that we have to talk about what they're doing there.
He is right.
Things going after anti-Semitic, they do happen very quickly.
They don't happen because Jews deserve it.
It happens because Jews are scapegoats whenever there's a political or economic crisis.
And the people who have power, white people who have power, look for a scapegoat, which is what's happening right now.
This has been building and building and building, but right now this anti-semitism is happening because the white people in power, the wealthy white people in power right now, are freaking out.
And they have to find a scapegoat.
So that is correct, but it's not correct because of what he's saying.
Oh, I will argue completely that Hitler from 1933 to 1939, that's not zero to 60.
Those were years and years of slowly building up what he was trying to accomplish until they got there.
So I don't know what the fuck he's talking about.
And it's always it always starts with a little bit here.
Oh, they're going to someone's going to smash a window of a Jewish store.
And then and then, you know, the next thing you know, they have to wear the Star of David.
There's a progression that takes time with this stuff.
I don't even know why he's reveling in that, because it's wrong.
It's hard for me to even wrap my head around what the hell he's talking about, but you can see the evilness.
You can see how people are like, Yeah, he got it.
Like, you know, there is, I guess there's my answer to what that is.
That smarminess and that thing, especially when you're talking about the subject matter, it can be intoxicating to that very, you know, small group of people that unfortunately is enough that makes him wealthy and famous.
And I want to talk about how, and because this person, Nick Fuentes, is absolutely the type of person to take advantage of situations.
Nick Fuentes doesn't become popular or famous because of his own talent, right?
He seeks these moments.
So right now, Kanye West, who is not, you know, I'm kind of tired of talking about his mental health.
He's just an asshole.
Period.
That's it!
He's always been a narcissistic, abusive ass.
You know what I mean?
And now that he's in this anti-Semitic lane, like everybody from Candace Owens to Milo Yiannopoulos to Nick Fuentes, they see an opportunity and they have latched on to him and he's dragging them along.
When it comes to Trump, and we gotta talk about Trump and Kanye and what Kanye has revealed about this, Trump had no idea who this person was.
Trump is in his own headspace.
He knows that he's popular on the right, but what has been relayed is that Trump basically is just in la-la land at this point.
But guess what?
There are tons of people right now who are, they're pissed off.
They're MAGA people.
They've been told that their votes were stolen, their country was stolen, their elections were stolen.
Nobody's doing anything about it.
They're not winning elections.
They're not taking over the country.
The attempted coup failed.
So those people are now pissed off.
And I got to tell you, it's the stabbed in the back myth.
All of a sudden, you need somebody who's now going to give you a new version of this.
Who's gonna give you more pissed-off shit.
Who's gonna give you more purpose and focus.
That's what Fuentes is doing.
That's what Milo Yiannopoulos is doing.
And I gotta tell you, there's a whole universe of people who are gonna do the same damn thing.
Well, so that's interesting because I don't think I even contemplated that, that the notion of losing the 2020 election needs a scapegoat and that the Jews could be that.
But that does make sense.
I've got to say real fast on that note.
We haven't said it on the podcast yet.
Election denying does not prepare people to win elections.
It prepares people not to give a shit about elections.
Okay, yeah.
I mean it would certainly it does explain it is that nerve and it also is we've been saying this for years the desperation will continue to rise and they will be it'll become more and more ridiculous is not the right word even but this is this makes again more sense as they continue to plummet down the abyss of political you know in theory it's self-immolation eventually this would that's what's going to happen to it but on the way down
violence, it could be terrible.
You know, and we were actually looking for this video.
It's apparently off the Internet at this point.
But I watched this thing dozens of times.
It's Kanye talking to Milo Yiannopoulos about the meeting with Nick Fuentes and Trump.
And one of the things Kanye keeps saying, by the way, is that Fuentes told Trump you need to beware of the difference between loyalists and lawyers.
And I don't know if your ears just perked up a little bit.
He's not just talking about lawyers, Nick.
He's talking about the difference between Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner.
He's talking about white nationalists, white supremacists, and Jews.
That's what he's saying.
All of this is coded language.
Then, Kanye says that he asked Trump to be his VP, which is just mind-blowingly stupid.
And what did Trump talk about, Nick?
He talked about the prisoner that he got pardoned on behalf of Kanye and Kim Kardashian.
Trump just had no clue what was happening in this meeting at any given time.
But he gave this carte blanche to this person.
We're watching.
And I want to bring good old Elon into this, because you and I were talking about this before we started recording.
These people are having breakdowns.
They're literally engaging in a political project that feeds off of, like, mental health and personal crises.
Elon Musk is posting pictures of guns on his bed stand, and I'm sorry, but he's posting about the number 88, which is white supremacist code.
Like, these people are unwell, and they're in the culture mainstream, and what's going to happen is this stuff is going to continue to increase the radicalization.
It's this type of like, Breakdown that is unfortunately contagious, particularly in a country like the United States of America, where people are in such bad shape.
Oh, I mean, Elon is now taking on Apple and trying to... He's basically trying to force Apple to take the app off of the App Store, which would be the death of Twitter, basically.
And it just adds more fuel to the fire that he's trying to do this on purpose.
He's trying to sink Twitter, even though he's crawling about how there's more people, you know, interacting now than before.
By the way, let me ask you, is your is your experience on Twitter any different in the last few weeks?
Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
I got to tell you, I don't know.
I don't think we talked about this.
No.
I ended up on this list.
This weird list of about 5,000 accounts that we're like being like focused on or whatever.
Yeah.
The harassment reached 2016 levels, which was really shocking because they did clean it up for a while.
And what I noticed, like, you know, I'm not getting thrown off Twitter, at least not today, even though I'm like spouting like anti Elon Musk, like left a shit.
But I got to tell you that the the harassment and the pylons and all of that, the focus stuff It has increased exponentially for me.
It's hard for me, I haven't experienced it directly as much.
But yes, I do feel like it's creeping and people are getting more emboldened.
And we might forget, it's this weird thing.
You know, before it became politicized, right?
So Twitter becomes politicized around in 2016 or 2015 when Trump gets involved, right?
Isn't that ground zero sort of a way to be?
Because people were awful on Twitter before that.
It was Gamergate.
Gamergate is sort of what loosed the energies out and they realized that there were a lot of people and a lot of accounts and a lot of movement and energy that they could bring together.
And then what happened is that the alt-right Yeah, and you know, he's trying to spread fake CNN headlines.
the nihilism and the authoritarian energies and it started coalescing into like a really bad cesspool.
Yeah.
And it's happening again.
Yeah.
And, you know, and he's trying to spread fake CNN headlines.
So it's weird because he like I don't know if we want to get into this, but then it becomes what the right thinks is censorship.
The left would say it's misinformation or hate speech.
And And we talked about this before a lot, but that's another one of those two things headbutting.
It'll never see each other's side.
It's like at some point you have to say, we cannot have hate speech like this.
And Musk thinks that it's just, and this is another reason why the way he functions, the way his brain functions, I feel like, It's just not compatible with being a CEO of a major corporation where people work under him and where he has to make decisions like this because, you know, at least with Jack, there was this decency notion where they had terms of service that you couldn't post hate speech and inspire people to hurt other people.
And by the way, that list that they hit that they're going to remove, right?
There's another list out there of the people that have been suspended because of hate stuff.
He's gonna let everyone back, I think, right?
No, they're all gonna come back.
And I do have to say, You know, we were talking about this, I want to say it was on the weekend or last week.
We were talking about that cult phase, you know what I mean?
Where it's like, somebody's like, man, that Jim Jones, he's got it all figured out.
And then the next thing you know, Jim Jones is handing out Kool-Aid at gunpoint, right?
The Elon Musk cult is incredible.
This thing started, I don't know if you noticed this, it was like he went after Apple and he was like, if you're not going to have it on the iPhone, I'll make a new phone.
And suddenly everybody on the right was like, I can't wait for this new phone.
It's going to be the best phone ever.
It's like, no, he's not going to do that.
That's not going to happen.
And on top of that, like you literally have created a techno messiah for yourself.
And we have reached the point where all of us are looking at this and we're like, and look at Tesla, by the way.
Look at the numbers coming out of like Tesla and Tesla stock.
All of a sudden people are like, oh my God, I think maybe this person is wealthy because one, he was born wealthy in apartheid South Africa.
And on top of that, he basically subsisted on U.S.
public money and funds and programs and also completely interest-free loans.
Free money!
Dude, if you have money and you get free money, you're a winner.
That's how this whole thing works.
You may not know this, but Tesla is not a car company.
The reason why Tesla makes any profit, any profit at all, is because they sell carbon credits to other companies.
Which again, I think we mentioned this before, but talk about like just blood money or the ability to sort of wipe away any kind of pollution that you're creating by paying a little money on that.
Soda quote wiping away pollution.
Outrageous!
But by the way, that's what they did.
Because Tesla was making all-electric cars, the government said, we'll give you extra credits that you can then sell.
And he made the market for them.
So listen, you might want to give him a pat on the back for being creative in a business sense.
But let's not pretend like Tesla makes money.
And by the way, I drive a Tesla.
It drives fantastically, but I'm ashamed to drive it now.
And the point being that it's all smoke and mirrors.
This has nothing to do with what he's built up.
He's completely subsisting on the government handouts, as a lot of these guys do.
And everyone wanted, the Musk fanatics want to think he is this business genius.
And I want to point something out very quickly before we talk about January 6th, because I've been getting been getting a hot gossip, Nick.
I've been getting the inside scoop, if you will.
I thought about this the other day.
If Twitter was around during Henry Ford's time, when Henry Ford went off on his elders of the protocol or the protocols of the elders of Zion, right, when Henry Ford became the main propaganda organ for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, it would look a lot like what's happening now.
And the entire point of what has happened in America is this cult of the wealth, right?
Which, if you are wealthy, and if you are one of the wealthiest people, who knows what happens behind the door, Nick?
There's so much genius at play.
And then all of a sudden, like, you sit here and you look at him.
Take a look at somebody like Kellogg, who created all these, like, sanitariums where people are, like, using yogurt, you know, and not masturbating.
And everybody's just like, I think he's got it figured out.
I think everything's good.
By the way, we're doing a podcast.
Nick has no idea what I'm talking about.
I'm thinking about Kellogg, the guy who made the cereal.
Oh, I'm talking about that guy.
If people want, maybe pause the podcast and go do a little bit of research on that.
But these people, we think that they're geniuses when in fact they're beneficiaries of a system that is designed for them.
What we're watching in real time with Musk is not only the destruction of that illusion, we're watching what happens when powerful people have breakdowns, and what happens when we're all subjected to the breakdowns.
And again, Henry Ford, when he was pushing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, I'm fairly certain he was having a breakdown.
Do you know what I mean?
And inflicting on the rest of the world, which helped inspire the Nazis, but that's neither here nor there.
Yeah, go look up Kellogg and have fun with that.
And we're back!
And we're back!
Alright, so moving on to the next subject.
I don't know how to transition out of that.
There's no way.
You did it.
We're here.
I hope I blew some people's minds when they go look this up, because it is wild.
Wow.
So the January 6th Committee is finishing up their work.
They're putting together their final reports, the referrals, all that good stuff.
Nick, some stories are showing up in the press.
There have been some leaks.
I know that I have been contacted by a couple of people.
I know some other people who have been contacted by some people.
There are rumblings.
And by the way, you're welcome, everybody.
We talked about this months ago.
We told everybody months ago what was happening.
Is this the breaking news you're going to break for us?
I'm going to tell you the breaking news.
So I don't know if you remember this.
When the January 6th committee started, I said they have to talk about the funding.
Go on.
Terrible.
It was not good.
It was all I could do.
I love it.
I love it.
I told everybody they have to talk about funding and everybody said, Jared, wait till the end of it.
They'll get to it.
And I'm like, no, they're not.
They're not going to.
People are, first of all, they're pissed at Liz Cheney.
And I was told specifically by a member of a committee member's staff.
You were told, yes?
Sorry.
I was told that there has been an incredible amount of tension.
And everybody understands that Liz Cheney and a large contingent of Democratic members of this committee are intentionally withholding any discussion and any reportage whatsoever about the participation of the funders through dark money, right-wing donors, even Democratic donors, you name it.
They are suppressing it and it is being honed and tailored to specifically go after Donald Trump without basically anything else.
It is.
It's going to be the hit job that you and I talked about and you and I worried that it would become.
But that's exactly what everybody on this staff is.
They know it and a few of them are going along with it and then there are a couple in there who are very, very pissed off about this thing.
Well, Jared, you know, the green team, it's very complicated.
People will fall asleep before they get through the first paragraph.
So we don't need to put it in.
That's what I don't understand.
Put it in.
Let them skip over to not read it because it's too boring and too complicated.
But at least present it in this tome that they're going to give everybody.
Like that doesn't make any sense to me.
I had understood this to be this is a Democrat versus Republican or Democrat versus Cheney.
But you're telling me that the Democrats are on board with this or at least some of them are with what Cheney wants to say.
And a lot of them are.
I'm going to read you an actual quote from a message that I received from a staffer of a member of the Green team.
I'll just leave it there.
I'll just say that this is an actual quote.
Are you ready for this?
Yeah.
Fuck this shit.
Like, just straight up pissed off about this because it is a bipartisan thing.
Neither party wants to expose the donor class.
Because what happens if you expose the donor class, Nick?
They don't get any more donations?
You don't get any more donations.
You don't get any more donations.
And so the work of the January 6th Commission has been hindered intentionally on a bipartisan basis by not just Liz Cheney, but also members of the Democratic Party.
Yeah, but even the reasoning is ridiculous.
Are we that stupid?
They think we're that stupid?
I do like this notion that they're trying to pin it on Cheney as if she's trying to run for president in 2024 and that's why she wants to focus only on Trump to hurt him to help her.
It doesn't work that way!
Nobody who is going to vote for Donald Trump is going to vote for Liz Cheney.
None of them.
Okay, that's a good way to put it.
And I don't know if you saw this, somewhat relatedly, these rumors and leaks that have come out that Mike Pence is building a presidential run staff.
And he's already got the machinery in place.
Do you realize how much people are just bleeding him dry of money?
Like, Mike, I think you're the guy who's going to bring this country together.
I mean, while they're going home, they're like, can you believe Mike Pence thinks he's going to be the nominee of the GOP?
My God, keep those checks coming.
Yeah, well, no, they get the job now as he's putting it together, and then they're going to jump ship as soon as, you know, the other guy comes in.
Which is, you know, good business I suppose, but the Cheney thing is interesting.
Let's just pretend she's a patriot and she loves the Republican Party and believes in it and has to sink Trump by any way it means necessary to get him out of the race.
Maybe that's what she's doing.
That is a charitable way to look at it.
I have felt from the very beginning that Liz Cheney felt like this was one of those situations where She wanted to be on the committee first of all to like build her brand but also guide the committee.
I mean, she has been front and center because the Democratic Party is just like, let Liz Cheney say it.
She'll be the one to say it, right?
She has appeared to be the leader of the committee, and on top of that, has steered it constantly and relentlessly towards Donald Trump.
There has not been a mention of funding in any of these public hearings.
Not one, not a single second of it.
It has literally just been Donald Trump got the people there, Donald Trump got them riled up, and Donald Trump pointed them like a gun.
And that's it.
They've talked a little bit about the white supremacists and the paramilitary groups, but they haven't even gotten deep into that.
This is all Trump, all the time.
It has been Liz Cheney's show from the very beginning, and there are tons of Democrats who are absolutely okay with that.
Do you think that she knew that her political career was going to be over when she took this position?
It kind of had to be the only shot she could take, right?
Don't you think?
There's no other thing.
She had already put herself in the crosshairs of the MAGA movement.
The only thing she could possibly do is control it in the least way that she could.
I don't know.
I think her career in that way is done, no matter what.
That is the fact, right?
It's over.
She's not going to win another election in the Republican Party.
But what I'm trying to think is, there probably was in the very I think also her comments have been very revealing.
it, that notion that, oh, I could springboard this, I'll be out in front and center in these really big public hearings and I can make this into a presidential run.
And then within a day she's like, oh, oh shit, no one's going to get behind me on this.
That could have been a calculation that completely backfired for her too.
I think also her comments have been very revealing.
I think our audience might remember us talking about this, but she's made hints about creating a new conservative party and there's a lot of money in that.
And again, we're talking about the consultant class, the strategist class, right?
The people who are telling Mike Pence that he's going to be president of the United States.
They're also like, hey, you know what's better than a million dollars?
A billion dollars.
And it's basically like, hey, we could actually take the right wing of the Democratic Party and we could take the Republicans who have, you know, never Trumpers and we could maybe merge them in and make a party of the center and like the strategist class.
I'm sorry, but that's the stuff of like, you know, like hot and heavy dreams.
Because that's money!
That's where the donors go.
And I gotta tell you, the donors are going to remember.
And that's something else that this person said to me.
They said, the donors are gonna remember this.
The donors, like, they'll take care of their own.
It's like in a mafia movie.
You go to jail for the mafia, you get out, you're made, man.
Like, they'll take care of you, they'll take care of your family.
This whole thing has been running interference on the January 6th case and making sure that these people were protected.
Yeah.
And by the way, I know everybody's shocked that a Cheney would take care of corporate and wealth interests.
I know that's shocking.
Well, listen, you know, I'm just surprised that the Democrats and Republicans could get together and actually be on the same page on part of this, however awful it is.
Look, we have bipartisanship.
Look, you know, I just want to say something.
This is hitting me.
I know it's slightly off topic, but it's a little bit about the Congress.
Have we realized By the way, first of all, are we sure that McCarthy's going to be the Speaker of the House?
No, there's going to be a knife fight on the floor of the Congress.
But, like, the guy's last name is McCarthy.
We've done this thing before, this dance, before.
It just hit me.
Hollywood would never buy this script.
Okay, he's going to be the Speaker of the House, but his last name is McCarthy.
How can we be— Politics is like fashion, man.
It's like walking down the street, and you're like, cargo pants are back?
Oh!
Oh!
What's happening here?
Oh, okay!
Like there's another Bush that wants to run?
But like, this is even worse, but I don't know.
It just hit me, like, how the fuck is this?
I mean, at least have someone else's last name that isn't the same as Joseph McCarthy, who caused the entire Red Scare in the late 40s.
Like, I don't know.
Anyway, it's just, but it actually is perfect.
But again, no one would buy that script.
They wouldn't believe it.
No, this whole system is so screwed up.
And that's what happens when you have not only a gerontocracy, but you also have this elite in America that's just run on their names.
I mean, Matt Kennedy's going to make a comeback here pretty soon.
The Bushes will be back in it.
Chelsea Clinton will run for something.
It'll be fine.
Don't worry about it, guys.
It's just like the Star Wars thing.
The entire universe hinges on one family, the Skywalkers, right?
How is that possible?
They keep coming up.
Same thing.
That really sucks.
Hey, by the way, let's talk about some good news.
One of the reasons why this anti-Semitism and authoritarianism is growing is because something's building in the world right now.
There's like some really good stuff, some really good energy growing.
And we got to start off with China.
Don't worry, we're coming back to the United States.
Don't run away.
I promise.
In China, there have been massive uprisings lately.
And this isn't particularly something that you see very regularly.
China's very, very restrictive COVID protocols have been kind of crushing people.
And then on top of it, like the other day, it led to like this terrible, terrible incident with a fire, people not being taken care of.
At Foxconn, where iPhones are being made, there have been these big, giant brawls between workers and guards and police.
They've started paying people $1,400 to quit, Nick.
They're just like, go!
You gotta get out of here.
There is actual unrest taking place in China.
That authoritarian regime is on the ropes.
It's not a coincidence this is happening, as President Xi has forwarded his power, consolidated his power, taken on more authoritarian sort of tenets.
How do you feel about this right now?
Well, it's weird because what you're describing in terms of lockdowns for COVID, which, listen, I'm all for masks, I'm all for distancing, all these things.
But when you hear how they do it in China, it's exactly what the right here thinks that Americans or the government is doing to them, which they should take a week in China just to really feel that they think that that's the same.
But the bottom line is, and by the way, what happened in Iran?
Like, this was happening in Iran as well.
The idea that you would go out in public and be willing to be filmed saying things negatively about President Xi is heresy.
Like, you would be killed if you tried doing that.
So, this might not be, it might be short-lived, it might not go anywhere, I don't know, but certainly the fact that this is building to something is exciting.
You know, Tiananmen Square is in my mind, remember, that that was something that didn't get anywhere, and you have to be worried the same thing is going to happen again here as they start losing their minds about it, but at the very least, there is something happening, right, across the world here, and it is encouraging, but I am so nervous about hearing some atrocities that are going to be committed in response to it.
You know what's funny?
I'm glad you brought up Tiananmen Square.
The American conventional narrative of that is that there was a problem and then a tank came out and a person stood in front of the tank and stopped everything.
Like that's how like Americans view that whole thing.
No, people got slaughtered and it ushered in a brand new security state that China has been perfecting over and over and over again.
Here's the thing.
It doesn't matter if it's China.
It doesn't matter if it's Iran.
It doesn't matter if it's Russia.
And we'll talk about America here in a second.
People get tired of this.
They get sick of it.
Like that's the amazing thing about human beings.
You can put them in the most repressive like systems imaginable.
Right.
And when you do that like maybe you might crush their spirits for a while and maybe you'll install discipline.
But like you even get to the next generation the next generation is like man this doesn't work for me.
Like I don't like this is awful.
And we're reaching this point China has been so focused on competing economically, politically with the United States, trying to create this new bipolar world that a lot of the people have been crushed, a lot of the people have been mistreated, and eventually something like COVID happens
This this supposed black swan event, it happens and all of a sudden, all of those tensions, they start boiling over, which is why we're watching in some of the most oppressive corners of the world right now.
People are saying, you know what?
Enough is enough.
And I'm with you.
There's a very real chance this is going to lead to crackdowns, a very real chance this is going to lead to violence.
It already has in Iran.
It has happened in Russia.
But I want people to understand something.
These things don't just go away.
Like, tyrants do this all the time.
They'll crush you.
They'll stomp their boot on you.
But Nick, that just actually makes the situation worse.
It actually promotes the spirit of revolution and the spirit of things like liberalization.
I don't know.
Something really big is growing right now.
I hear you.
It's funny because, you know, if it's a war situation, you know, let's say the Americans would be the people who would come in in World War I, World War II, and put this out.
The Americans aren't coming to the rescue here.
They're not going to go into China and do much.
They're not even going to put sanctions on China, in theory.
If they wouldn't do anything against China for how they treated the Uyghurs, I can't believe that they would do much more in the face of this.
It's going to be all the Chinese people who do this on their own.
Certainly a country that size there is power in the numbers like that and so I would hope that they did something would happen or they can they can make effect change because you know we've heard by the way what would happen then like in North Korea like there could be a sweeping you know spring where people will suddenly read you know stand up to all this like and then we see in the movies but again You know, the people want the Second Amendment in America because they know they want to stand up to a tyrannical government.
There ain't no Second Amendment in China, so they don't have any way to protect themselves or fight back.
Well, there's a couple of things that are taking place here.
One, an interesting anomaly that I want to make people aware of, China is combating this right now, like there's a lot of crackdowns with police and guards and all of that and surveillance.
They're also flooding the internet and social media with porn and escorts.
Like they are literally, there's like an entire like internet operation right now that is trying to basically buy off the young male population that are frustrated through sex, which is crazy.
Like that's, that's like, that's like some really weird next level stuff that people need to be aware of.
The second part of this, and this is important when it comes to exactly what you're talking about, like the lack of weapons or whatever.
I brought up Foxconn.
Foxconn, again, is the main place for iPhone assembly.
It's the reason why your iPhone, which by the way, I have an iPhone too.
I'm as guilty as anybody else.
It's hard to be ethical under capitalism.
Almost impossible.
Foxconn is the reason why you're able to get a cheap iPhone is because it's near slave labor, right?
It's exploiting people left or right, to the point where they kill themselves so much that they have to install nets to catch them from killing themselves, right?
Here's the thing.
You know who doesn't get mentioned in these stories?
You know who doesn't get talked about in these stories?
Apple.
What happens if all of a sudden Apple becomes synonymous with a crackdown in China?
What happens when all of these products, and by the way, the Uyghur stuff, the stuff that's using for surveillance and the stuff that's being used to crack down on people, the United States, we buy it from them.
We use it ourselves.
If you start realizing that these are interconnected systems of power and oppression, if we can change the conversation from, oh my God, that's China's problem, to, oh, this is a global system of oppression and tyranny that is interlocked.
We are playing a role in it.
The reason why I have this phone is because those people are being hurt.
If we can start taking a look at that and breaking it down, The chances of change, they go up, you know, because it's not about the man in the street, the woman in the street who's trying to like stop a tank.
It's about, oh my God, we're all in this together, whether or not you're Chinese, American, Iran, any of it.
Like it's, it's something that we have to, we have to remember in this.
Right.
And we have to remember that the problem with sanctions a lot of the time, since we're talking about that, is if you're talking about capitalism and the weapons of capitalism, sanctions generally don't work.
They just simply punish the people that are in those countries as the people in power just corrupt, corruptly, you know, steal that money.
You know, but we do see it in different places.
Like, for instance, with Russia, we know that the Russian soldiers, because of what, you know, the world stance against Russia, they have no equipment.
They're all getting sick.
They have no medicine, you know, to take care of their soldiers, and they're going to start to die and be much more ineffectual on the battlefield.
So, there is that tool.
And, you know, ironically, this is what Trump, you know, was trying to do a little bit with his trade wars with China to make, you know, fairer deals.
But yes, you would hope that at some point Apple could say, you know what, we're just not going to make these chips in China anymore, and we will make, instead of $3 billion a profit in a year, we'll make $2 billion, you know, and we'll find another country that can do it, that will treat their workers better.
But there's no question that there's something happening in the world, across the world right now, with people demanding better treatment.
Yeah, and we have to say, like, isn't it notable that while we're talking about geopolitics, we're also talking about companies?
Because they're an integral part in this.
They are the connectors.
They are the people who are making the money from this.
Is Apple going to stand up for the workers in China?
Absolutely not!
It might hurt their quarter earnings.
Also, how about we ask Facebook?
Are you going to start lifting, like, the Great Firewall of China?
Are we going to make sure that all these tech people, like, aren't helping to crush people?
We have to change the conversation.
And along with this, I wanted to talk about, first of all, solidarity to brothers and sisters of Amazon.
In over 30 countries on Black Friday, they walked out and said, screw you, Jeff Bezos.
Good for y'all.
Starbucks, over 200 stores on Red Cup Day, the day they roll out these dumb Christmas cups, they walked out.
The workers are getting smarter.
The workers are getting bolder.
Thank God that they are.
Solidarity to them.
Another thing to put on everyone's radar, Nick, the rail workers.
We are inching up on one of the biggest rail strikes in the history of the United States of America.
We also need to understand that Joe Biden right now, the president of the United States of America, good old leftist Joe Brandon, is currently trying to make Congress enforce a deal on the rail workers that they don't want, that they have rejected, that doesn't include sick days, doesn't let them go to the doctor, doesn't let them miss a day of work.
This is going to be a showdown.
And these things, it feels like this thing is building momentum, Nick.
It can't be another Reagan and the air traffic controller situation, because that will cut it down, that will knock it down, and that will just hand over so many victories to the employers.
Yeah, it's funny because for a long time in this country you would have been grateful to have a job working for the railroad, right?
That would have been this job and you know you worked there for 50 years and then you get whatever, a pension.
Obviously through, you might even argue that it's more like through, you know, the cultural pop culture, you know, we've all been raised to aspire to things and nobody wants to do any of these jobs anymore.
So I think that the issue they're having with the railroads are they simply don't have enough people working.
So, you know, that's kind of why they're trying to say, well, you can't take off because we have nobody else.
They cut them down to the skeleton crew.
Okay, that's true.
Now, again, and that's the capitalism, right?
They will have to abuse as much as they can to maximize each worker's
uh you know hours so so it's a it's a it's a both but i would be suspect because the only solution you do to get more people to work is you have to raise wages if you pay more more people would want to do that job and this and out of covid of all the things that were horrible out of covid i think the one thing that we're getting here at least in the service industry which does cover things like railroad railroads too is that people are not going to fucking do this shit anymore for shitty wages and in the treatment they get Can I share with you one quote really quickly?
I talked about this the other day.
Bill Russell, who was the all-star senator for the South Dakota, and a stalwart and a huge presence in the civil rights movement, his father, he was born in the 30s, his father told him when he was growing up in Louisiana, if you take a job and they pay you $5 a day, give them $7 a day worth of work.
Now, that was something he prided himself on, and that's what people did in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s.
That was their pride.
That shit ain't gonna cut it anymore.
Nope.
No one's gonna give you that more work for what you're paying them for.
Nope.
I'm giving you the $3 special.
If we're gonna call it even.
Well, and here's the thing.
You know, we talk about on this show, and again, nobody else talking about this.
I can't believe that nobody else even discusses it.
When you read articles about the economy and about companies and about all of this, when you read articles about it in the New York Times, the Washington Post, you're reading the wealthy talk to one another.
They're navigating this, you know what I mean?
And the current thing that's coming out right now, all the rumblings, Nick, are that major companies, including tech companies, right?
They're all starting to, quote-unquote, reconsider requiring college degrees.
That's the big thing.
And by the way, if you're a college administrator right now and you're listening to the podcast, take a deep breath.
It'll be OK.
Stable yourself.
You're going to be all right.
Right.
But this whole thing is about the fact that power in this labor market, Nick, is not on their side.
They need cheap labor.
And by the way, we've talked about this economy as a house of cards.
Like, it's such a grift from top to bottom, and they're trying so hard to maintain any power they have while trying to keep the tower up.
Like, they are going to try literally anything, whether it's raising interest rates.
They can't raise them anymore, really.
They've basically blown up free money in this country and almost caused a recession, possibly caused a recession.
The inflationary stuff is out of control.
They've even tried shrinkflation, which is offering you less for more.
I mean, they don't have a lot of cards left.
The only thing that they have to bring this thing full circle, Nick, anti-Semitism, white supremacist conspiracy theories, authoritarianism.
Those people are coming to get us.
We have to hurt them.
We have to come together.
We have to work out of a patriotic duty.
That's the only card that these people have left.
They're on the ropes.
It's like watching a boxing match and somebody is punch drunk and they're just throwing wild haymakers.
That's what capitalists do when they're in trouble.
They get wild and they get desperate and they start, I don't know, buying Twitter and saying a bunch of hate speech.
That's what happens.
I got a bigger circle to complete here.
We see the Amazon workers that are striking chanting, we are not robots.
Yep.
Now you know that Jeff Bezos is listening and he's scratching his chin and going, hmm, that's a good idea, which they're already doing anyway.
He must make something that works.
Yes, which then connects to my idea about we should just have robots for the politicians that are stamping those, you know, whatever you want and you put together as an algorithm and boom, that's what we're moving towards in this future.
But listen, the bottom line is, you know, companies Don't normally have workers that want to unionize when they treat them like human beings, right?
That's usually, you know, they don't usually have to deal with that because they treat them normally.
And it's the ones like Amazon that don't let them get bathroom breaks and they don't give them any kind of breaks at all.
They die on the ground!
They die on the floor and they make them keep working around their dead colleague.
That's what they do.
That's untenable!
You can't keep doing that.
Yeah, I mean the best case scenario is like the I Love Lucy episode where it just never stops and they can barely, they can't keep up.
That's the best case scenario and the worst is yes, we've heard.
I mean, was that verified by the way, that story?
About like somebody dying?
Yeah, that absolutely happened.
The guy died on the floor while they were waiting to go.
Dude, they make people take Ubers to the hospital.
Yeah.
I mean, they treat people worse than dirt.
They treat people worse than you could ever possibly imagine.
And you're exactly right.
They have everything.
But that's the problem is capitalism says, if you're making record profits, guess what you've got to do next quarter, Nick?
You've got to make more profits!
And how do you do that?
You cut things down to a skeleton crew.
You work people harder.
You increase quotas.
This is not sustainable, and people aren't going to keep putting up with this shit.
Nor should they!
They shouldn't!
Right.
If you can't run your business while treating your employees like human beings, then you shouldn't be running your business.
Bye-bye!
Bye-bye to your business.
That's it.
How's that for capitalism?
I love it.
I love all of it.
Listen, I'm going to be honest with you.
I told you this before we started recording.
I was in a pissy mood.
I was mad.
I had to deal with the DMV today.
I had to go to a courthouse.
I was fit to be tied.
Now I'm mad at everything else.
This is great.
Oh, I thought maybe you'd feel a little bit better after that.
No, I feel great.
I feel good.
I'm reborn.
I'm pissed off at these people.
All right.
All right.
Well, that's good.
All right.
We're going to end it on that.
We're going to come back on Friday.
Burn it all down!
When that question came in for the weekenders, like, tell me about the rail strike, Nick.
I was already hot.
I was already like, shut it down.
Go ahead and take us out, Jared.
The McCraig Podcast is calling the rail strike.
It's the end of freight in America as we know it.
There's not going to be a Christmas.
All right, everybody, we will be back on Friday.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me SMH.