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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how Biden wants to force railroad workers to accept poor working conditions, New York City Mayor Eric Adams is going to force homeless people into mental institutions, San Francisco is going full Robocop, and Kanye and Nick Fuentes are too far right for even Alex Jones.
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Hey, before we start this episode, and this is like true Jared and Nick fashion, let's just call it what it is, Nick has sort of kept a little bit of an eye on episode numbers, but we didn't realize until after we recorded this episode you're getting ready to listen to, this was episode 300 for us.
Yeah, you combine the Weekenders and the normal Tuesday episodes and this is 300 pretty much, unless there's a scattered one I missed on a hard drive somewhere, but hey, who's counting?
Yeah, we're calling this 300.
That's done.
So, I just want to say, this has been really fun so far, and let's do 300 or so more.
What do you say?
Oh, I'm in, for sure.
Yeah, thank you everybody for that, and I'm so glad that... I want to point out, I wish we would have recorded how much trouble we had figuring out the math.
Right?
Like, this is not a math podcast.
No, not for math people.
And we're not good at remembering to look at how many episodes we are, but we are good at being grateful, and thank you, everybody, for that.
So we're now going to go to an episode which I am just, like, pissed off the entire time.
I'm sorry, but that's what this Weekender episode is.
I'm just pissed off.
All right.
Well, love you, everybody.
Thank you so much for being part of this.
Absolutely.
Let's do it.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to Weekender.
Nick, I'm annoyed.
Well, it would be cynical of me to say, like, what else is new, Jared?
But, you know, what's happening?
What's wrong?
Why are you so annoyed?
I have to go ahead and tell people this.
I am just... This episode, straight up, annoys the shit out of me.
The things we have to talk about today, I'm so mad about all of it.
All the way around, there's so much blame to go around, Nick.
We got... Listen, I hate to inform you, the Democratic Party They're doing it again.
I don't know what to tell you.
We gotta talk about that.
We gotta talk about political misunderstandings.
Nick, I did not think, when we started this podcast, that I was going to have to talk with my friend Nick Halseman about Kanye West putting on a black mask, going on the Alex Jones Infowars Show with Nick Fuentes, and professing his love for Adolf Hitler.
I didn't think that was gonna happen.
I hate that it has happened.
What's only frustrating for me is that I wish I would have predicted that.
I mean, of course he was going to do that.
That was a no-brainer.
But the things we do for love, Jared, as the song goes.
I gotta tell you, it really makes you think differently about songs called Black Skinhead.
I'll tell you that.
It is a strange, topsy-turvy world.
Listen, this is what we do.
This is what we signed up for.
This is the service that we provide for people.
That's right!
Kanye, yay, went on Alex Jones' InfoWars show with Nick Puentes.
And Nick, how would you sum it up?
We're going to play a couple clips from this thing, but how would you even... Like, if a Martian landed, how would you describe this to them?
Well, I mean, I don't know.
The part of it is that, you know, we've seen this on Fox News sometimes where, like, Trump would say something ridiculous and you know that Hannity is trying to say, no, you don't really, you think this, right?
And they're just helping him to try and get to the right answer.
Well, we got Alex Jones is doing the same thing and he's really trying to get Kanye to say, you don't really love Hitler, do you?
And I think I never, I never got a chance to do my Alex Jones imitations.
I'm really happy, but.
So that was a lot of it, a lot of carrying water, desperately trying to get Kanye to not say what he was saying, but I don't even think it's, I don't think the guy is mentally ill.
I think he believes this stuff.
I think he's hanging around Nick Fuentes and it's wearing off.
I think both things are true at the exact same time.
I will say, speaking of Donald Trump, it's really amazing that even Donald Trump, and let's go ahead and set the stage here.
Donald Trump is an idiot.
Literally an idiot.
Like this is a person who is not intelligent, who is not serious, who doesn't think about what he says.
He will tiptoe up to the edge of saying some really god-awful ugly things and will occasionally say them.
Donald Trump isn't going to go on Alex Jones.
Donald Trump isn't going to, I mean he has, but I mean he's not going to go on there and talk about how he loves the Nazis.
He's not going to go on Fox News and talk about how he loves Hitler and all of his inventions.
This is a special level of hell, is what this is.
And I think he's both unwell and also, at this point, there's nothing you can do here.
And you know what it makes me think of?
I was thinking about this as I was getting ready for this show.
Nick, are you a David Bowie fan?
Yeah.
A lot of people don't know this about Bowie, but there was a period in Bowie's career where he called himself the White Duke.
And he spent a lot of time cosplaying as a fascist and going around throwing up fascist salutes and making like fascist art and all this.
This isn't even that.
You know, that's like indefensible in and of itself and we just like we don't we pretend that didn't happen.
This here is I don't think I've ever seen somebody Emulate themselves in public like this, and it didn't involve a gas can.
Oh, this is a guy who sits around with his buddies saying this stuff.
That's what it comes out as.
This is rehearsed.
This isn't a thing he's just off the top of his head saying.
These are things he's been preparing and what he's been talking about privately, probably.
And so it's like, oh, what's the big deal?
I've said it enough times to my friends, I'm just going to say it out loud here.
It's really strange.
I think I was just thinking about this earlier as I was walking around around L.A.
and it just needs to be said I know I tried to make the point last time but the notion that like there's this Jewish mafia or the Jewish cabal like you could go and you know to the head of a studio that guy has to be Jewish and you go to the head of a you know another record label and that guy has to be Jewish but there isn't any collusion based on religion that is controlling and making you lose money or have bad you know I think that's the key that he can't seem to understand.
And the only way, like a conspiracy theorist would, to handle hard times is to create these connections that are not there.
And that is really the key.
The Jewish part of this has nothing to do with the fact that he's losing deals or a doctor misdiagnosed something.
And that's what he can't seem to distinguish.
Yeah, and you know, what you're talking about in terms of those accusations and what he's saying, we're again talking about him being on the set of Alex Jones' Infowars.
We're talking about Nick Fuentes over here.
We played a bunch of Nick Fuentes clips on Tuesday's show.
Nick Fuentes is even smart enough to dance around this stuff, right?
He's obviously an anti-Semite.
He's obviously a neo-Nazi.
He has genocidal, Holocaust-denying parts to him.
Alex Jones has spent his entire career talking about the New World Order and denying that he is an anti-Semite.
He has people call his show constantly and they're like, Alex, why don't you talk about the Jews?
He's like, well, there's a lot of good Jews.
He's always played these games.
Even Donald Trump can play these games.
Kanye West cannot.
And one of the things, we've talked about this before, you could always tell sometimes with Donald Trump who he had been talking to and what ideas had been filtering through him.
What Kanye West is doing right now and what we're getting ready to hear from him, this is what the far right talks about, but they know how to go out in public and not say this shit.
He is giving you a pure, unvarnished look at what these people truly believe and what they say when they're behind closed doors.
That's the best point you just made because people might want to turn this off right at this point saying, ugh, we don't want to hear about Kanye anymore.
But that's the whole point.
That's not what this is.
Yes, that is the point.
It is.
This is a mindset that is growing and taking over and being normalized.
You look at the comments on a lot of the people who are sharing these clips on Twitter even, which is slowly becoming that cesspool everyone's worried about.
And you have people saying, yeah, like, oh, he's not really talking about him.
Roll that awful beam footage, man.
like the things about Hitler.
And it's like, what are you doing here?
But is it time to, should we give the-- - Roll that awful bean footage, man.
Just do it. - I don't think Hitler was a good guy.
I get the Hugo Boss uniforms amazing, but I mean, just because you're in love with the design, you're a designer, can we just kind of say, like, you like the uniforms, but that's about it.
No, there's a lot of things that I love about Hitler.
A lot of things.
Dude, if you find yourself at work, And you're trying to get someone who says that they admire and like Hitler to, like, walk it back?
You need a new job!
You know what I mean?
Like, if you are making money and you find yourself trying to guide someone back and be like, oh yeah, the uniforms were beautiful!
We all know that!
But, like, really?
You're not really in support of Hitler.
You have done something terribly wrong in your life.
I just want to say that about Alex Jones.
Oh, or with Kanye, when you find yourself to the right of Alex Jones on something like Hitler, you've got some problems that you need to work on here, because that is as extreme as you can possibly be.
And even the fact that Alex Jones wanted to make it about the uniforms, and Kanye designs clothes, and so that must be what he's connecting to, is so awful.
Awful.
And again, it's normalizing just the imagery of the swastika and the armband, and that stuff that we've seen.
Fuentes, Do, and not be very subtle about that part of it either.
The visual of it, and that's where it's like, how close are we to seeing more of that and seeing people walking around?
We did, we saw somebody dressed like a Nazi the other day.
He'd walk into a, you know, a restaurant, they had it on video, and he probably thought it was like maybe even a joke.
And that's the worry.
Every year that goes by, the farther we get away from World War II, the farther we remember, the less we remember about the atrocities, the more normal this shit becomes and it can happen again.
And I want to make a prediction, because I watch way too much of Alex Jones' show for research.
Like, sometimes he opens up the phone lines to people, and again, these are the people who are like, Alex, I agree with you, why don't you call the Jews out?
You know?
He's not going to open up the phone lines for a couple of weeks.
Because his entire thing depends on sort of tiptoeing that line.
And if he opened up the phone lines tomorrow, they'd be like, I agree with what Ye said.
Like, why haven't you been saying this?
The fact that there are people like him and Fuentes who are out there doing this, it normalizes it.
It makes it part of the discourse.
And the same thing is happening, of course, with Elon Musk and this whole cadre of people on the right who are making this like a continual sort of churning this into normality.
This is not just a freak show.
I understand that that's what this feels like.
But this right here, it's almost like you can see in Kanye sort of a patient zero kind of a thing.
This is a person who isn't well, but also has their own prejudices and narcissism and all of this stuff.
This contagion has reached him.
You know what I mean?
Like, it has gotten to him.
You can see what it is and what's happening.
He's not going to be the last person who's going to do this or feel this.
It is now out into the zeitgeist and the bloodstream.
And what's disgusting about this in terms of the right, even the mainstream right, is that this is a free speech issue for them.
And it's that magical binary thinking where like masks don't work at all if one person is going to get COVID after being in a room for three hours unventilated with someone who's composite.
Or, you know, guns.
You enact a couple of nonsensical laws to, you know, keep semi-automatic weapons out of people's hands and that's like the entire Second Amendment is going to be destroyed in one stroke.
That magical thinking happens here too where Well, if you stop letting a guy spread hate speech and spread Holocaust denialism, then you're just ruining freedom.
No one can say anything.
You won't be able to tell people that you like pigs.
You know what I mean?
That's what they think is going to happen here.
And their desire to protect this right to distribute misinformation and hate is disgusting.
It really is something that they must know deep down inside is loathsome.
Now, we've already heard Kanye say that he loves Hitler, and a lot of things about Hitler.
That'd be bad enough.
That would be bad enough, but hit him with a little bit more.
I see good things about Hitler also.
I love everyone, and Jewish people are not going to tell me, you can love...
You know, us, and you can love what we're doing to you with the contracts, and you can love what we're, you know, what we're pushing with the pornography, but this guy that invented highways, invented the very microphone that I use as a musician, you can't say out loud that this person ever did anything good, and I'm done with that.
I'm done with the classifications.
Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.
First of all, if you ever say, especially Hitler, and it's not just, you know, people, people sometimes are awful, especially Hitler, you did something wrong.
Second of all, what Kanye just did there, and I want to go ahead and I want to pull back the curtain on what Fuentes has been saying to him and what Candace Owens and all these far-right people have been saying to him.
This is important, and this is the basis of Nazism and fascism, Nick.
The answer in all of this with authoritarianism is You know, sometimes people do things that are really awful, and it hurts a lot of people.
But it's for the greater good.
It serves Western civilization.
Look what we have!
Look around!
Sometimes they make the trains run on time.
And that takes us back to something we talk about a lot, which is, the right believes that they are realists.
Right?
They believe that they are the ones who understand that sometimes you have to break some skulls and crack some eggs and hurt some people in order to keep this thing going.
What he just said here in terms of the inventions, and I almost guarantee you Fuentes told him these things explicitly, right?
This is the idea that Adolf Hitler was an agent of Western civilization and progress, which is, for everyone keeping track with their bingo cards at home, Neo-Nazism.
And that's how they go ahead and they hold in their mind the idea the Holocaust didn't happen, but the Holocaust did happen at the exact same time.
And, I mean, let's just say, let's just, you know, get into the weeds here for a second.
He thinks that a guy who was in power in the 30s invented highways.
That's so stupid.
And he also thinks, and by the way, there's no doubt in my mind, he uses a German mic, okay?
And there are mics made in Germany that are very good and high quality.
So I think in his mind, he assumes that must mean because Hitler Somehow invented that I I mean I don't even want to give him the benefit of even looking that up because I have a feeling You know there might be something about what they developed in World War two.
It's not Hitler who did that He's a fucking painter from Austria who has no idea about these things anyway bad painter by the way Let's set the record straight on bad painter Well, yeah, and Manson was not a good folk singer either, so, you know.
At any rate, it's just... but that's the kind of thing that would... people get hooked on that.
Oh, yeah, Hitler invented the highways, man.
He's cool.
Like, oh, he invented the microphone that Kanye records with.
He had some vision there.
Like, that's what happens.
The normalization of this bullshit.
Nothing about Hitler should ever be celebrated.
I don't care if he had good paintings or not.
Everything should be shat upon.
A thousand times over with anything he produced.
Well, Nick, at least he's not denying the Holocaust happened.
Oh, did we miss that part?
Do I have to keep playing?
Because he is denying that the Holocaust happened.
He is going ahead and Holocaust denying.
By the way, Maybe that's the pinnacle of being on the far right.
You go on Alex Jones' Infowars and you deny the Holocaust while saying you love Hitler?
Maybe that's like going out on top.
I don't know.
Maybe it's better to burn out than fade away.
I don't know.
Yeah.
But again, hanging out with Fuentes, we already heard what Fuentes was trying to do with the cookie metaphor, and that's exactly what the Holocaust denier is trying to do.
I don't even want to get into that.
We played that thing from Fuentes.
You don't want to hear Kanye saying this, I don't think, do you?
Nah, let's pass on it.
Because let's just ... You know what?
Go ahead and play this thing.
I like Hitler.
I don't like Hitler.
And I know you're trying to be shocking with that.
I'm not trying to be shocking.
I like Hitler.
I do not.
The Holocaust is not what happened.
Let's look at the facts of that.
And Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities.
Can we just point out, we played that for Winchester's clip on Tuesday.
That's where this is coming from.
The people on the right are constantly going to Kanye and they're like, oh, you don't have to worry about that.
Worry about this civilization over here.
And by the way, it's almost like joining a secret society.
When you join, you don't learn all the secrets.
And by the way, when you reach the top of the neo-Nazi chamber, they're like, hey, by the way, the Holocaust did happen and I wish it would have been more.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I talked about this last time.
It gets repulsive.
And again, it's exactly the time, as we get to 50, 60, 70, 80 years away from World War II, where this stuff naturally dissipates and we forget what happened.
And that's the problem.
And hopefully that doesn't happen.
I want to be very clear about something before we move on, because it's important.
There should be no end to the Republicans and Fox News pundits and personalities who should be spending all of their time right now, not just denouncing Kanye West, but apologizing for platforming him with any of these ideas, calling him a hero, saying it was somebody they should look up to, a free speech warrior, any of that.
The fact that the GOP had the balls To go and delete their tweet that said, Elon Kanye Trump.
The fact that they couldn't just wear that like a scarlet letter for the rest of their miserable, worthless lives.
I mean, it is so disgusting.
And that this could happen and it's going to be treated very much like a sort of a weird thing that occurred.
And can you believe it happened?
And that the right doesn't have to wear this around their neck every day for the rest of their lives.
It's repulsive.
Well, when you have a party that doesn't really feel shame.
You know, and we've seen that with Trump, you know, then there isn't anything that would make, you know, compel them to speak up, right?
It's deafening how loud the silence is from everybody, you know, distancing them.
I haven't seen the tweet, I haven't seen the clip, you know, whatever that's going to be from next week until it's hopefully blown over for them.
Yeah, and the fact that a big enough part of their base likes to tiptoe in these waters anyway, it doesn't matter.
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