PREVIEW: You Don't Have To Be Nostradamus To Predict This
Nick Hauselman is out but Jared Yates Sexton is back to hold down the fort and talk about the GOP's abandonment of Donald Trump, the 45th president's embarrassing NFTs, the possibly world-changing innovation of nuclear fusion and its impediments, and finally a dive into The New York Time's awful coverage of Sam Bankman-Fried's clothing.
This is a preview of the bonus Weekender edition, to hear the whole thing and support the show head on over to http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
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Hey everybody, welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates, texting.
So, I took Tuesday off, and my friend and partner Nick Houselman took over the mothership for the occasion.
Did an incredible job.
And now I'm taking care of the weekender, as Nick has his own stuff to tend to.
Like ships passing in the night.
I gotta tell you, I am so excited to get back Together, we're going to have a show on Tuesday.
It'll be the two of us.
Personally, I'm looking forward to that, but also bringing the year 2022 to a close.
I have to assume, like me, a lot of you out there are both maybe invigorated by the holidays.
It's always a good time for me.
It's always something that I always enjoy, but also What a year, man.
I feel like the midterm elections and everything that has happened around growing authoritarianism, worsening anti-Semitism, constant trauma being inflicted on us by the white wealthy and the powerful.
It's been a lot, and that's saying something, as the past six years have been a lot.
But again, before we get into the news of the day and the type of stuff that the McCraig podcast obviously focuses on, which is right-wing extremism and dealing with the actual issues of the time as opposed to ignoring them, just a reminder Be sure to take some time out for yourself.
Take care of yourself.
Focus on yourself.
Do some good self-care.
Enjoy your foods, your rituals, the company and love of others.
But also savor the victories.
We have made a lot of strides in the past year.
And we have fought a lot of different battles.
And we've won a few here and there.
There's some actual progress.
There's some actual movement in terms of things getting better.
And also a reminder that as things get better, sometimes there are difficulties that accompany those things.
So take those moments, freshen up, reinvigorate yourself, refortify yourself.
Cheers to everybody.
That's a cheers to everybody doing the hard work.
This Sunday at 8 p.m.
Eastern, I am planning on having the last Bourbon Talk political Q&A livestream of the year.
We'll celebrate some of those victories, celebrate the good things, as well as examining some of the harder things and getting to the hard work.
But I have a lot of hope.
For 2023.
It's going to be a difficult year, but we'll get into that.
So that'll be this Sunday at 8 p.m.
Eastern over on my YouTube channel.
If you haven't subscribed over there, go ahead and go subscribe.
That way you know when these things happen.
And also, of course, you might be listening to the preview of this show.
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Support this show.
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We do appreciate all of you wonderful, wonderful people.
The muckrake community is the best in the world.
We hear that from every guest and every interloper who comes through these shows.
They always appreciate you and think you're kind and bright and wonderful.
So thank you for all of that.
Now the exact opposite of the Muckrig community and everything that we are doing in this real and necessary work.
It is necessary now to take a look at a developing story with former President Donald Trump.
This is a situation that Nick and I have Talked about and previewed and predicted, even as everybody simply said that Donald Trump was going to most undoubtedly be the nominee in 2024, and that there was no chance whatsoever of anything shifting.
His stranglehold was too hard over the Republican Party.
We're now looking at a completely new landscape.
So there's a possibility, of course, of an indictment coming for Trump.
I've said before I'll believe it when I see it, as opposed to expecting it as a tenant of faith.
But what we don't have to wonder about is how his support within the Republican Party is shaking out.
And a reminder before we get into the numbers, and also, we gotta talk about Trump NFTs, the latest scam from Donald Trump, which is astounding, is what I would say, if it wasn't so predictable.
The numbers we're about to talk about come from a few places.
After the midterm, I wouldn't say losses, of course, because the Republican Party retook the House of Representatives and is within an eyelash of retaking the Senate.
I wouldn't say losses, but disappointing turnout.
There has been a sharpening of the Civil War within the Republican Party that I have dealt with in my research and talked about ad nauseum for a while now.
A reminder that there are several camps within the Republican Party at this point, as opposed to this supposed unshakable discipline within the party that everybody likes to pretend is there.
There are the McConnellites, neoliberal libertarian Republicans who are just interested in giving tax cuts to the wealthy and shredding the social safety net while creating a stranglehold over the judicial branch.
That's the old guard.
We also have an ascendant class of Republicans, including people like J.D.
Vance, Josh Hawley, the National Conservative Branch that we've talked about for forever, which wants to literally seize the means of production and cultural production and create a dictatorship of conservative reactionary powers.
J.D.
Vance is now using his newfound power to talk about the possibility of banning pornography because they want to create a fundamentalist state that controls literally everybody and rules through the lens of Christian nationalism and reactionary oppression.
In the midst of this civil war, both sides Agree that Donald Trump is yesterday's news.
Both sides see Donald Trump as having been an incredibly useful tool.
McConnell and the like, including Paul Ryan, who is now enjoying, I hope, a fitful retirement, saw him as a necessary evil, a buffoon, an avatar and figurehead for a movement of rubes that they have always looked down on, the Republican base.
And they thought that they could work with him and control him, which to an extent they did.
Neoliberalism absolutely flourished under Donald Trump as his entire administration was more or less run by the Heritage Foundation and other supposed free market neoliberal institutions and carried out what they wanted to do, which was the dismantling of the federal government.
The national conservatives, as we've talked about, used Trumpism as a starting point and then grafted on top of it their own authoritarian ideologies.
Using it almost as a vanguard to reverse engineer how they might best use Trumpian techniques and Trumpian openings for their own benefit.
Right.
The group that we haven't talked about in all of this are the MAGA Republicans, your Marjorie Taylor Greene's and the likes, who really don't have all that much power within the Republican Party.
They're sort of a subsection of the GOP.
They're with themselves, if you will.
They, of course, caucus with the Republican Party, but the quote unquote more serious Republicans are the ones who hold the purse strings and the power.
Now we're at a point where the entirety of the Republican conservative apparatus has more or less turned against Trump, except for these MAGA Republicans and the grifting ecosystem that surrounds them.
Which includes one fundraiser after another to take all of the money from the Republican base that they can possibly get.
Which includes, and we'll get more into this in just a second, any of the merchandise that they can sell, any of the baubles, any of the dumb shit that they can possibly unload onto these people, like so many collectibles.
That apparatus has been put over here, away from the halls of power.
Meanwhile, that McConnellite wing and the National Conservative wing are doing out their battle with the help, I should mention, of the Republican propaganda machine, which has completely turned on Trump.
There are, of course, a few smatterings here and there, people who continue to support Donald Trump.
But for the most part, the empire of Rupert Murdoch has completely gone after Trump and dismantled him in favor of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
You don't have to be Nostradamus to have predicted this.
Again, as I always say, it's not like I was going through entrails on this thing or I was gazing into a crystal ball.
It was obvious that this was going to happen.
When Trump was able to fight his way into the nomination in 2016, he won over the apparatuses of power that left the door open for him for fundraising and also going ahead and moving and shifting the base where they wanted them.
But now, they're ready to move on.
And we're seeing the very real results of this.
Some numbers that I want to get into.
This is a USA Today, Suffolk University poll.
Shocking, shocking numbers.
Of those polled, only about 30% of Republicans are interested in Trump being the nominee again.
That's, that's crazy.
I knew this was going to happen.
I knew that this was the path that this whole thing was going to go down.
That's ridiculous.
I mean, my God, 61% want to move on from Donald Trump.
In terms of who Republicans want to be the nominee, 33% say Donald Trump, which Staggeringly low number, considering everything that we've seen in the past.
Ron DeSantis, 23 points ahead of Donald Trump at 56%.
That's a plurality.
That's a strong majority have moved to DeSantis.
If the number was 10 points, if this was 43%, 45% on the DeSantis side, that would still make headlines.
For it to be 23 points higher than Trump, that is a seismic earthquake.
And what we are seeing with DeSantis right now And again, I hate to talk about this because it's really, really unfortunate, but...
Whoever is advising him and whoever is carrying out his policy and his shadow campaign, so to speak, they're nailing it for exactly what he needs to do.
What he has done since his reelection has been to go after Anthony Fauci, the COVID response, and to just continue to demonize the COVID operations, which does a couple of things, by the way.
One, it goes ahead and highlights how he stayed away from the conventional worry of it.
Florida's doors are wide open, basically sacrificing God knows how many Floridians.
It also goes ahead and creates this culture war idea, which is this is somebody who will use his power to get results.
This is somebody who will go ahead and litigate the culture war ideas.
It shows that he has the possibility of using power in the way that Republican voters want him to.
But also, it doesn't take a genius to remember who was in charge for the beginnings of COVID, particularly as we were having the most vicious debates about what to do and whether we should stay open or not.
Donald Trump.
Donald Trump.
And you get into this and you get into vaccines, which of course were innovated during Trump's presidency.
I mean, DeSantis is playing his hand really well.
And he's not going after Trump directly.
He's allowing people to connect the dots.
And I think DeSantis probably long term would rather not criticize Trump.
And again, would rather not be on a debate stage with Trump.
Handling this in a really expert way, unfortunately, which again, Is it necessary to restate just how dangerous this person is?
DeSantis is a really, really dangerous person.
In related news, I'm recording this on Thursday, December 15th.
Last night, Trump posted social truth, whatever it is, that he was going to have a major announcement.
The next day.
A lot of people thought that maybe he was going to announce that he was going to go ahead and cancel his campaign, which has just been an abysmal slog so far.
There's no traction in it whatsoever, and as we've talked about, doesn't seem like he actually wants it all that bad.
He just kind of has to do it.
The shark eats because that's what the shark does.
The announcement came out today, and let's just say it's not great.
This is from Trump's post.
Major announcement.
My official Donald Trump digital trading card collection is here.
These limited edition cards feature amazing art of my life and career, which is kind of funny, by the way, because it's a bunch of really bad drawings of him with muscles and dressed up as an astronaut and like cowboy.
I guess that's his life and his career.
Collect all your favorite Trump digital trading cards.
Very much like a baseball card, but hopefully much more exciting.
Go to collecttrumpcards.com and get your cards now.
Only $99 each!
We're in that phase of this situation.
And let's hear from the former president.
Hello, everyone.
This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington, with an important announcement to make.
I'm doing my first official Donald J. Trump NFT collection right here and right now.
They're called Trump Digital Trading Cards.
These cards feature some of the really incredible artwork pertaining to my life and my career.
It's been very exciting.
You can collect your Trump Digital Cards Yeah, that doesn't sound like very much for what you're getting.
The best parts, my official Trump digital trading cards are $99, which doesn't sound like very much for what you're getting.
Yeah, that doesn't sound like very much for what you're getting.
I want to say, first of all, as somebody who grew up in a world where my family was just absolutely bilked out of so much money on collectibles, things that were going to gain in value and prestige, including things that were going to gain in value and prestige, including everything from like Beanie Babies to like Pepsi cans with Jeff Gordon on This is tailor-made for his base.
And also, it's so laughable and embarrassing.
But we cannot lose sight of who Donald Trump is and what he has done and what damage he has wrought and what he has made possible.
The patheticness of this, the sadness of it, the embarrassment of it, it only conceals the fact that this has been such an incredibly damaging, hellaciously awful movement that puts us all in danger.
But it's also who he is.
Of course he's going to have more griffs.
Of course his presidential campaign, with air quotes, is just going to be an opportunity to make more money, and an opportunity to take care of himself, and an opportunity to squeeze every last cent out of these people that he absolutely despises.
It's important to remember that it is both an authoritarian movement but also a grift.
Because America is a grift.
And America is full of grifts.
And when you take a look at all of this, what is obvious?
Is that this thing is just getting more and more craven with every second.
And while idiots like Donald Trump peddle these useless and pathetic wares, there are incredibly dangerous people who are using him and the movement that he has headed for their own nefarious purposes.
It's all things at once.
And to look at this is just an absolute indictment of American culture and what we've become and what it is that we're fighting and why we're fighting it in the first place.
I mean, good God.
This is going to be something to watch.
This is really going to be something to watch.
And now, in the complete opposite of Donald Trump's really, really pathetic, awful campaign and attempt to bilk every cent out of these poor people, we've got to talk about the exact opposite, which is
