Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the criminal referrals sent over to the Department of Justice for former president Donald J. Trump's actions in and around the events of the January 6th insurrection at the capital. This leads directly into analysis of the trial of Proud Boys involved on January 6th before breaking down the pending case Moore vs Harper and whether it could legitimize a corrupt political party's attempt at a coup.
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And man, it gets cold in certain parts of this country, man.
I didn't know.
I had forgotten.
It turns out that when you are not in Los Angeles, CA, it gets a little bit cold out in the rest of what we like to refer to as the heartland.
Oh yeah.
No one told me.
I mean, it was like zero, negative two in Utah.
I mean, I couldn't believe it, but it was refreshing when the sun was out.
I'll tell you that.
You know, I'm a big fan of it.
I like the crisp weather.
I want to wear my flannels.
I want to wear my heavy coats.
I enjoy it as well.
But man, it is it is cold out there, people.
Yeah.
Stay warm, please.
Stay warm.
And this is, by the way, the last regular edition of the McCrae podcast before the holidays commence in full force.
Happy Hanukkah.
Happy Christmas.
Happy Kwanzaa.
Everybody, we hope you're doing wonderful.
We appreciate all of you.
And yeah, this is sort of the lead up into the end of the year.
Things are still cooking.
Things are still happening.
And we hope everybody has a decent, safe holiday.
That sounds great to me.
I'm looking forward to having one.
And you know, my son's birthday is on New Year's Eve, so we always have a fun dual celebration, if you will.
I always enjoy those.
I always feel a little bit jealous of the people who get the holiday birthdays.
You know, but then they're not in school, so you don't get to have that whole thing, but then when they're young, you can convince them that all the fireworks are for them, which is nice, but it only lasts for so long, but still.
See, where I come from, you'd have to convince them that all the gunshots outside are for them, but that's neither here nor there.
By the way, speaking of tumult and all of that, we have to start, Nick.
The January 6th Commission finished up today.
We are, of course, recording this on December 19th, Monday.
They just had their last public hearing after an 18-month investigation, multiple public hearings, Presentation that was made for TV occasionally reached the level of, I guess, entertaining and compelling, and other times sort of got lost in the narrative, which we'll talk about in just a moment.
But the committee had some work to do today.
It voted, first of all, to refer colleagues Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan to the Ethics Committee for their refusal to Heed subpoenas.
But the big news, the big enchilada, Nick, is that former President Donald Trump was referred for criminal charges to the Department of Justice.
A reminder before we go through these charges that these are non-binding and that the Department of Justice was already investigating much of this.
Four counts, including inciting insurrection, obstruction of a government proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States government, and conspiracy to make a false statement.
Um, we got a lot to talk about here, but just initial reactions, Nick.
Um, you know, I feel like these referrals have no teeth.
Um, I imagine Merrick Garland will be like, say, uh, that's nice when he gets this piece of paper sent over to him, delivered.
Um, I suspect that, um, they already have all this information or they, there has been some sharing anyway, uh, at this point.
So, um, this, this really is, you know, if it wants to put any more, uh, focus on the Department of Justice, okay.
But like, this is really going to end up being Merrick Garland's thing and whether he's going to do something with it.
I suppose if you want to look at it as a government body in a reasonable fashion realizing that Donald Trump deserves to be indicted, then okay, just throw another log on that fire that he should be indicted and that we're just simply now waiting for that to happen.
Yeah, it's, man, it's hard to cover all of this stuff because, like you said, there is no teeth here.
This is all stuff that has been known for forever.
Anybody who has, you know, eyes and was watching on January 6th understood what had happened.
But it is a situation where We have to sit here and talk about the fact that a former president of the United States of America was referred for criminal charges.
And by the way, if there was one person besides Richard Milhouse Nixon who this was going to happen to, Donald J. Trump is the guy.
That is the one that you could see this occurring.
I mean, with Merrick Garland, Man, I don't know.
It's like Punxsutawney Phil.
I mean, we can sit here and basically look at all the leaks in the media and decide what we think he's going to do or what he's not going to do.
But this is actually pretty momentous.
The idea that this could happen, it would be a unanimous result, which by the way, speaking of McCarthy, thanks for not putting any of your loyalists on the committee so they could vote against this, I guess.
Good job.
Yeah, Jim Jordan, obviously being the guy that they refused to be part of it, right?
Let's not forget, Liz Cheney said, please, oh no, she said, you can have people on this thing, but not Jim Jordan.
Well, I think a lot of us, including impressionable people, would like to keep Jim Jordan from every proceeding possible.
Well, it would be really awkward, though, because he'd be on the January 6th committee and then having to be interviewed by the January 6th committee.
So that's kind of a weird thing.
To be fair, it'd be pretty hard besides Cheney and Kinzinger to find Republicans who weren't involved in this thing in the House.
You know, that reminds me of really quickly can we take a detour for about 30 seconds.
I got in trouble for drinking during in high school, and I was called the front of the disciplinary committee.
And there's students and teachers on the disciplinary committee, and one of the students decided to have the audacity to grill me on whether or not I knew it was legal to drink under age.
And I kind of wanted to say, well, it would have been nice if you told me that when you were giving me the shots at the party we were at.
So I just want to tell you, I don't know why that popped in my mind, but that would have been like Jim Jordan being on this committee, right?
Right now, I'm wishing so bad that you were on MSNBC telling a panel of people that.
That story right now.
I would almost pay for that, for Joe Scarborough to just be like, you know, I've been there too, my friend.
I would love that.
This is symbolic, much as the January 6th Commission has been.
I am of a lot of minds.
I've been critical of this commission from the very, very beginning.
It went along the lines, Nick, of a lot of what I expected it would be, particularly under the helm of Liz Cheney, who's used this as a seek and destroy mission against Donald Trump and the ability to sort of skew the narrative to the idea that Trump and his He's a little cadre of, you know, idiots that he keeps around him that they were the ones who caused this entire thing.
It has a time and we're going to talk about these paramilitaries and militias who are involved.
It has a time shine the light on them.
I will say though, I am glad it happened.
I'm glad that it was taken seriously.
This could have had dirt thrown on top of it.
There are many, many problems in all of this, which we'll talk about.
What are your feelings about this?
After 18 months of work, this story is supposedly done.
It has been a twisting and turning thing.
And by the way, 18 months is too long for anything in the public eye in the United States of America, which is part of the issue of why this thing maybe hasn't had as much cultural capital as it had at the beginning.
But what are your thoughts about this as it comes to a close?
Well, I have no doubt that, like, the failure of the Republican Party to win as many seats as they thought they were going to win in the midterms is related to this.
I think that what they did and the soundbites they got out of this and the way where they were able to release it on social media, I think it really did help overall.
I think it did sway a certain section of the country to really kind of grasp the fact that this is this is a seditious conspiracy versus, you know, some tourists walking through the Capitol.
I think that that whole Remember for a while there, the Republicans were trying to sort of argue that and that has gone away completely.
I feel like we don't hear that is even attempted to try and explain away this anymore.
Now they're kind of trying to caveat stuff with, with, uh, well, they, they didn't really, uh, the cops let them in that kind of stuff is what you're hearing a lot more now.
So, uh, I think that that was probably the biggest thing that there was a shift and it did peel off a certain percentage of the people that needed to be peeled off.
And I think it results there.
There's a poll recently now that said, I think 5% of the GOP voters, um, want The GOP Congress to investigate Biden, right?
Like that whole thing and these are all connected.
So I feel I feel like that was successful the very least and at the very best if there is an indictment related to what the work they did, then that's the icing on top.
Well, we want a lot of silver bullet explanations on all these things, right?
After what happened with the midterms, basically everybody clamored over themselves to give their silver bullet explanations, which would, of course, push their own agendas and their own worldviews.
For some, it was, oh, it was Roe v. Wade.
For others, it was Biden calling out fascism.
For others, it was the idea that it was the singular terribleness of the candidates.
I think that this January 6th thing has played a role in it.
I think watching the GOP not only traffic conspiracy theories that most level-headed people understand are crazy, but also having this investigation show that there were things that happened on January 6th which were not only unforgivable, they were indefensible, right?
I talked about this When I ran The Weekender last week, and I really wanted to talk to you about it.
I don't know if you saw it.
Did you see this USA Today Suffolk poll of Republican voters?
Lay it on me.
It said that right now DeSantis, Ron DeSantis, has a 20-point lead on Trump for the nomination, and that 61% of all Republican voters want to move on beyond Trump.
I think that you could go ahead and say, yes, it has to do with midterm losses, right?
I think the Republican Party recognized that Trumpism and MAGAism isn't going to be palatable, particularly to some of the swing voters that they need to win some of these victories.
That is part of it.
I think that's obvious, and which is part of the reason why DeSantis is, of course, the heir apparent to Trump and why they want to transplant MAGA to him.
But this stuff doesn't help.
January 6th was an obvious crime.
January 6th was an obvious coup attempt that most people recognized.
It has been downplayed by a lot of liberal circles, a lot of pundits, a lot of politicians, a lot of people who just want to move beyond it and they don't want to get down to the core of this thing.
But I think that this has done a lot.
I think that Liz Cheney has done permanent damage to Donald Trump.
And I have a lot of criticisms for her.
I think that she steered this thing in a direction that was really, really problematic.
And again, we're going to address that.
But I will say, in terms of going after him, in terms of using this investigation against Trump, I have to say that it has yielded some results, is what I would say.
Oh, absolutely.
And, uh, and certainly, you know, she fell on her own sword knowing that this was going to be the result that she'd be out of a job.
Um, I, I feel like the GOP poll that you mentioned is, is purely practical, right?
They don't give a shit.
They would, they would, they'd vote Trump in again if they felt like he could win.
Right.
So I think that that's the narrative that's really been taken.
And still could.
And still could.
Yeah.
But I even think most GOP people would say, you know, I don't think Trump would be able to beat Biden again in a, in a, in a.
you know, national race.
He, he got beat by the most ever votes of all time when Biden got those in 2020.
So I feel like that's the whole key, right?
They, they want to win.
They know that somebody else like DeSantis will just do the same policies, but you know, with a little more discipline.
So I think that that's the key and that's, that's, what's frustrating about it, right?
They're not even going to be willing to say, well, that guy is a horrible president.
We should never have met him anywhere near the white house.
Uh, the list is long for all the reasons just to be like reasonable with it.
Instead, they're just going to be like, eh, well, we, we know he's just not going to win.
So we've got to find someone like, is it the same argument we had for choosing Biden?
Like, we knew he was the one guy who could probably just beat Trump, so let's just choose him, and we'll figure out things later.
Well, yeah, and I mean, it doesn't hurt things that, of course, that millions if not billions of dollars have now been spent with the right-wing apparatus attacking Trump and trying to move MAGAism beyond him.
I mean, all of that is absolutely from a practical Craven standpoint that you're talking about.
And Liz Cheney opened the door to it.
I mean, people keep trying to pretend that Liz Cheney is some sort of like a Democratic Party plant or some sort of like, I don't know, person that you can partner with.
She went in and did her job.
She laundered the Republican Party.
She completely put this on Trump.
Also positioned herself as the new leader of the quote-unquote respectable Republicans, which will either yield her some sort of power in the future or she'll be able to use as an independent or possibly going and becoming a Democrat, who absolutely knows, which would be its own problem.
But again, I gotta tell you, it's not all good and gravy, man.
Because on one hand, as I talked about with the people that I knew who worked on this commission, they said that it was completely obscured.
The people who paid the money, the people who organized this.
That is a massive, massive problem that remains, Nick.
And on top of that, The groups that actually made this thing happen, we're talking about like Turning Point, right?
They have absolutely multiplied their amount of money because they have shown that they were good soldiers, that they were capable of making these things happen, and on top of that, you were saying like the people who were able to sort of launder January 6th, it has diminished But the people who are willing to do it, the people who are willing to do these conspiracy theories and say that these people are political prisoners, Nick, they're drawing in millions of dollars in donations.
I mean, the grift continues on.
Turning Point, last number I saw, had increased its fundraising by somewhere in the area four to five times since January 6th.
You know, part of me, it makes me really wonder how how how real those numbers are, right?
Because it just doesn't seem possible that especially because a lot of the base are poor people are not wealthy.
And, you know, and we know that there's a pension for people to, you know, send them whatever check they have, which they can't afford to, but they'll give that money to like the church, for instance.
Yep.
So we know that that happens there, but it does, it just makes, boggles my mind that they can raise that much money.
Now that said, Turning Point probably has a lot of sort of college age kids, and that's also frightening because I suspect that the number of these young Republican college-y people are probably growing too, which is very frustrating.
But so they're obviously in the small donor class, there's got to be ways that they're maximizing that.
But I do want to say something about January 6th, which we need to make sure they get as much credit as possible.
And that is the structure of the hearings.
And the way they presented everything was impeccable.
And that is what they should be going forward.
Because remember how it normally is, right?
Each senator or each congressman is going to get five minutes to sit there and talk before we can get anything done.
And they'll spend all that time talking about themselves and trying to get soundbites they can use for a campaign.
So how they did it here was compelling.
It was dramatic.
It was enthralling.
All those things.
And they used multimedia in a very powerful way.
So I can only hope that going forward, it doesn't matter who is in control, that they use that framework because it just is much more effective than letting them blather on and on one after the other and never get anywhere.
Yeah, and just a little bit of free advice for the Democratic Party.
Your messaging is shit.
And it's always been shit.
And it's always looked like shit.
And it's always sounded like shit.
If you want to go down this road, go down this road.
But they have to work on some substance.
You know what I mean?
Like, this thing had its own compelling nature to it.
We talked about it.
We told everybody this is going to be a television show.
And it was.
It's not a coincidence that it lasted through the summer almost as a replacement drama, right?
It was really effectively done.
But also, again, 18 months.
That's too long.
It was too long.
And the results that they got were often impressive.
But at other times, because of this media landscape, they felt old and they felt stale.
And by the end of this thing, I mean, like this thing, It's a criminal referral for the former president.
And Nick, we're all sitting here, we're like, yeah, I mean, absolutely.
I mean, he just got convicted of tax fraud with the Trump org, you know.
By the way, speaking of fraud and Trump, Nick, I wanted to talk very quickly going off that.
First of all, did you have a chance to see the Trump NFTs that got sold?
I did.
They are terrible.
They are absolutely terrible.
But somehow or another, and I covered this also on The Weekender, they sold out.
And not only did they sell out, they raised roughly four and a half million dollars, which I want to talk about in just a second.
But also they've already quote unquote doubled in price, which I assume has to do with the fact that they sold out.
You just brought up who who is funding this stuff and all of that.
Like, obviously, there are people who are going to buy this.
I brought up that my family loves collectibles.
You know, they love the knickknacks.
They like having them on shelves and all those old boxes of Wheaties and old Pepsi cans.
They have NASCAR drivers on them.
Those are not the people who are buying NFTs, Nick.
And this, to me, seems like a pretty good possibility of some money laundering.
And obviously, Trump went along with it.
And this is a person who's getting desperate, and we'll talk about his campaign or lack thereof.
This was, I thought, pretty blatant.
Well, you know, it's funny.
We can talk about this for a few minutes, because I was I dipped my toe into the crypto market for about a year, you know, and probably like what, 2018, 2019, and got out like, you know, a few months before it has cratered and never come back.
So, you know, there is this notion and we're seeing reporting even that people are starting to realize after they spent this money, like, wait a minute, it's This is what it is.
I don't actually get anything.
It's just a digital version of this.
Which, by the way, why Marvel or DC isn't going to sue them?
Because, as far as I remember, one of them is him, like Superman, right?
That's... that's... it's too close to the Superman.
Like, I don't understand how they're gonna... They're just bad!
They're just bad!
And so there's no question.
Now, by the way, they have a limit of I think you can buy 99 of these most, which is the limit in terms of I got to try to find what the law is.
But there is a law about how many things that turns it into something bigger in terms of whatever law you're going to break.
If you allow someone to invest more than ten thousand dollars into a scheme like this.
So they knew what they're doing.
Right.
And they understand that, like, hey, get some of your buddies.
They can just funnel us a bunch of money by buying some of these things.
And we don't have to actually, you know, the trace, you know, the knowledge who it was.
So this is a scam.
I think there's going to be an investigation into it, too.
Well, I mean, there should be.
There absolutely should be.
And I got to tell you, the crooked fundraising that this guy is involved in and everybody around him... I'm sorry, I'm not the only person who watched the World Cup final yesterday and was paying particular attention to Jared Kushner hanging out with Saudis and Elon Musk.
I mean, it's a continual churning out of this corruption.
I do have to ask you, though, Nick, and this is, I think, pertinent with this January 6th referral, Is Donald Trump really running for president?
Oh, just, just wanting to get some more money?
I don't know if he is.
There's nothing happening.
There's no actual sort of a momentum here.
It seems like, it seems like this is a great grift for him.
I mean, obviously you need to have all these, you know, people continuing to give you money to pay for your legal expenses, but also to float your debt.
Like, doesn't it seem like this is mainly just a grift at this point?
Yeah, but I don't know.
I think you get the wheels going and it just sort of happens.
I think he's running.
Yeah, unless, I mean, obviously it would have to be some weird excuse why he doesn't run, right?
Like something else that would come up.
Like he's in solitary confinement?
Yeah, that might be it.
I don't know.
I still, I never really entertained the thought he wouldn't run.
I think that it's all the same.
I think running, being president, grift, it's all this one thing that he can do.
Maybe he feels like he can grift even more and he can be protected at that point.
As a president, so I think if he probably feels like he can delay whatever the issues are, it's going to be his legal issues until the election.
And if he wins, oh, hey, look that all those all the criminal stuff goes away.
So I think that might be what his thing is.
But I wonder, I wonder how much and if I'm thinking about the theme of this show today, it appears to me that maybe things have gotten more serious and it's time to move beyond the clown.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, when he was getting ready to unveil these NFTs, which, what an unveiling that was.
Really, truly, because he had made, he was going to make a major announcement.
Nick, I was following people, I was like in these chats and in these forums, they literally thought that he was going to suspend the Constitution of the United States of America.
They thought that he was going to announce it was time for the storm, to literally go house to house, finding traitors and the satanic cabal, and hang them from street posts.
That's what people literally were waiting on him to say.
And then he's like, they're like baseball cards, but better.
This is the thing that he gave birth to, this movement that he gave a cohesive gravity to, and again, It was like he went out there, he tested the defenses, he tested the institutions because he was shameless but also reckless, and he showed people how much space there was for someone like him to operate.
It feels like the system doesn't want him, right, which is one of the reasons why he's starting to face criminal repercussions, why the heat is getting hotter on him, but also It feels like the Republican Party and their donors at this point are just like ready to go ahead and harvest what is, you know, being sown here.
And it does not feel like Trump is necessarily the guy who's going to do that.
I mean, he is inherently authoritarian, but I don't know if he's the one that is going to lead this movement into the future.
I think that's becoming more and more obvious.
Right.
Well, I mean, certainly on polls that we're seeing now, he's not going to be that guy.
He won't survive a the primary against Sanders in theory.
So.
So, yeah.
But but it's yeah.
And you're right.
It's not going to stop him from grifting as much as he possibly can.
And then beyond that, too.
I mean, you're right that that all this stuff is the grift is there.
He's got the machine going.
And let's not let's like, you know, capitalism itself generated the NFT boom.
Yes.
Right.
It's only worth something if you think it's worth something.
And it's there isn't much difference than the mugs that you probably have in your family in Indiana.
You know, they have behind a lit up glass case, whatever they have.
You know what I mean?
Or those those glasses from McDonald's with Star Wars characters on them.
Like there's a there's if there's a value that someone wants to place on it, then that is worth something.
And that's what's going on here.
Even though the NFT thing with Bank of Megman Freed is, you know, obviously a sham in and of itself.
It kind of exposes the whole NFT market as a sham.
The bottom line is the fundamentals were there.
People were willing to spend money to get a digital version of whatever they wanted to have.
Hey, the corners don't get folded over.
You know, if you want to collect comic books, they always get ruined.
Someone spill something on them.
That won't happen anymore.
You now have a perfect, pristine version of that.
And so I'm always been a little bit torn by this because I get it.
There's nothing tangible in your hand that you can own and see, like a baseball you caught as a home run.
By the way, did you see that whole thing, the Aaron Judge thing?
Aaron Judge, who breaks the home run record for the American League, offers the guy who caught three million dollars.
He goes, no, I want an auction because I'm going to make more money and ends up getting a million and a half.
Probably Aaron Judge probably bid on that and saved himself a million and a half bucks.
So at any rate, that is the whole thing.
And it sort of speaks to where we are and where we're going into the future about what we value and what we place, you know, how we want to use our money, I think.
And that, you know, explains perhaps why he's able to raise so much money.
Well, and think about this.
It's passive income for Trump, right?
Like, I mean, literally, like, Trump doesn't, he doesn't read briefings.
He doesn't hold meetings besides having the opportunity for people to come kiss his ass and suck up to him, right?
It's not like running for president involves anything for him.
Like, he might have to go to a rally, but that's also feeding his ego.
So it's almost like, let's say, you know, you're Michael Jordan.
Somebody comes in and says, hey, Michael Jordan, we're going to offer you $5 million to be on a Wheaties box.
Okay, great.
That's awesome.
Do I have to do anything?
Well, maybe we'll take a picture of you holding the box.
Oh yeah, let's do that.
Absolutely.
For Donald Trump, the passive income of running for president, it's too much to turn down.
There's no reason for him to do that.
Think about this NFT thing.
Literally, he probably wrote, like, he I didn't even write the post that announced it.
You know what I mean?
He did a video that it was obvious that like it wasn't like they did a lot of takes of it.
You know, and he came out and he said, I'm probably your favorite president.
I'm better than Washington and Lincoln by this bullshit.
And people were going to.
And on top of that, it opened the window to the possibility of probably laundering some money, probably from places like Saudi Arabia.
So running for president for him, On one hand, it's passive income, but also, Nick, it opens the possibility of repercussions.
It opens the possibility that he is going to be held liable for the crimes that he has committed because he wouldn't go away.
And that's the problem with greed.
It doesn't stop.
There's no number, you know, there's no number you could write on a piece of paper to Donald Trump that said, here's the amount of money to just stop.
Right?
To just go enjoy your family, go enjoy your kids, go enjoy your grandkids, go bask in the Floridian sunshine.
There's nothing in there.
There's no dollar amount you could put on because in his wretched, poisoned mind, he could always make a dollar more than that.
Or, probably thinks that he could double it.
Right, and bask in the undulation and adoration of fans, right?
That's the little piece that we can't ignore, is that he loves that part of it.
You know, there's a report today, he comes down in Mar-a-Lago, gets a standing ovation when he walks into the dining room, He's literally a zoo animal, by the way.
He's what it is.
and then they give him another standing ovation when he's done and he leaves.
Like he doesn't want to lose that.
He loves that part.
Right.
And that goes away if he's not, you know, in the limelight in, you know, running president, all that stuff.
So that's, that's literally a zoo animal, by the way, is what it is.
I mean, what you just described.
And by the way, I've seen, I always enjoy seeing the hippo at the zoo, see him swim around a little bit, see him eat a watermelon and then go back into his cave.
Like, that's what's happening in this situation.
But the problem, and here's something that's happening on the side of this, so the January 6th Commission, it meets, it has all these criminal referrals, also we're starting to see the prosecution of a lot of the people who helped carry out January 6th.
Not the people who paid for it, because we can't hold them accountable.
We have to go after the goons, right?
We have to go after the... I used this expression the other day, and I hope that you find this more familiar than other people.
It's like when you... Remember when you'd watch the old Batman show?
You'd watch the Adam West Batman, and, like, the Penguin would be in town, and he'd have a bunch of, like, henchmen who were dressed like him, but they were also, like, fodder for getting beat up.
You know what I'm talking about, right?
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, these are the goons, these are the henchmen, and they're the ones who are going to get their ass beat by Adam West and Robin, right?
And in this case, I mean, we've already seen the Oath Keepers, including the leader Stuart Rhodes, who now, by the way, was not just found guilty of sedition, but stands to spend 60 years in prison.
The Proud Boys are getting ready to go to trial, including many of their members who have already pled guilty, including Jeremy Bertino.
This is the group that led the revolt, but also, Nick, They're starting to gain purchase and power even though they're being held accountable, almost because they're being held accountable.
They're gaining new members, they're gaining money, they're gaining more and more influence, and we're seeing around the country an escalation of violence, an escalation of targeting.
We've even seen potential domestic terrorism being carried out.
What's your take on these groups who were quote-unquote being held accountable, but obviously not necessarily in the way they need to be?
Right.
Well, I think it's really, really important that they didn't go for like trespassing or whatever, some really, you know, lame charge on them.
Because, you know, these are the guys that were in military formations going through the crowd up the steps.
We saw that and had a real, there's a lot of evidence that there was a lot of planning going on before this.
And they're going to argue that there wasn't, right?
They're going to argue they just got to overcome by the moment.
But that's not true.
That's not true.
Yeah, and it's just plenty of evidence that they're not going to be able to dispute that they had, you know, weeks upon weeks of talking about this.
And again, Trump's rally with Ildi Wild was that thing.
Now, we also know that they've been in direct contact with guys like Roger Stone.
And we know Roger Stone was in direct contact with Bannon and Bannon in contact with Trump.
So, you know, they're smart.
Trump is smart in how he can, you know, wall himself off.
He can say he never had direct contact with anybody in the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers.
Clearly, there was an arrangement going on.
And by the way, the biggest part of the plot, I think, was they needed as much chaos around the Capitol as possible.
That was like the baseline thing they needed to do before anything else happened.
And this is what the result was.
I mean, that's how they coordinated all that.
And that's why they need to be able to somehow, you know, Get it to Stone, get it to Bannon, and get it all the way to Trump.
That's probably what's been taking so long, if they want to try and indict him on this, because that's a tough one to prove.
I would be remiss, by the way, if I didn't point out that Trump literally gave the Proud Boys directions on a debate stage.
I mean, we've talked about it so often, how much Trump gets away with by simply saying it on television, right?
And everyone's just like, oh my God, that's like way too obvious.
There's no way we can hold that accountable.
I mean, it's an incredible grift if you can get it right.
Yet these people, They took advantage of something we've discussed in depth, which is the situation at January 6th was ripe to be taken advantage of.
They needed to sow a certain amount of chaos in order to radicalize a lot of what they called normies, right?
Normal people.
Well, So-called normal people who were coming to January 6th after Trump told them to and after many of his wealthy donors paid for them to and also paid for it to be advertised and paid for the algorithms to tell people and paid for the transportation and the planning.
They needed to get people there.
They needed to take advantage of the radicalization and turn so many of them into willing insurrectionists.
Which, by the way, is part of a larger conspiracy.
Right now, they are being charged and held accountable for conspiracies within their certain groups.
We're still allowing the larger structures to go unpunished and to basically go completely under the radar.
And those same structures are going to continue to grow.
And because these people are being focused on, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, they are going to have, and it's hard to talk about this and weird to talk about it, their branding gets better.
It's the same reason why someone like a turning point all of a sudden makes a ton of money.
They become the faces of a situation that may not have happened, but they showed the ability to do it.
And you want to talk about grifting, there's always a certain point where you kind of question, Are you really willing to go through a potential revolution?
Or are you just playing revolutionary?
You know what I mean?
They showed they're willing to do it.
Yeah.
They were willing to try and overthrow the government of the United States of America.
And for people who are interested in destroying democracy, that's invaluable.
That really is.
It shows that the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers have at their core an honesty or an authenticness that they're not just playing around.
They're not just pretend revolutionaries in that case.
They're going to try and push the envelope.
As a result, they're going to get more money.
They're going to get more recruits.
Hilariously, their defense is going to be that there is a men's group, a men's drinking group, that hangs around and talks some shit and then they will go, let's go visit the Capitol on, you know, in January, let's say, you know.
So they're going to try and dial all of that down in their defense to stay out of prison for 20 years.
And so that's interesting how they're going to, because If that's their defense, then the prosecutors are going to have to bring in all the other evidence to testify of how often they were meeting, what the meetings were like.
You know, there were FBI informants most likely in these groups.
Yes.
You know, I suppose they're going to testify.
And again, that's another danger because now you start thinking that, oh, it was the FBI that entrapped these people to do these things, which I don't, I didn't see much entrapment, at least in the videos on January 6th.
Well, hold on.
I want to respond to that because you can both be entrapment and also be sedition.
The FBI is involved in everything constantly, which is one of the reasons why they grasped on that conspiracy theory.
It was the exact same thing during the War on Terror.
There were plots in the United States of America for, you know, this sort of terrorist actions.
Many of them were provoked by intelligence agencies and the FBI.
They were still there.
There's still something that we had to deal with, but The FBI is just filthy in these groups, and some of them are on assignment, and some are not.
And the Department of Homeland Security is riddled with these people.
So it is both, you're right, it is both a conspiracy theory, but also just unmitigated truth that intelligence communities and these federal bureaus are absolutely a part of this and absolutely have an issue with it.
Well, you love to always point out the funding part of this whole thing.
And I'm wondering if there's a connection between the lack of inspection of how January 6 was funded and just even the notion of not not allowing congressmen and women to invest in stocks.
In the sense that there's this whole network behind the scenes of money that they don't want to disrupt at all in any version of this.
So if they end up exposing how it worked for January 6th, then it spills into, well, how are you making all this money in other ways?
And we shouldn't do that.
There's this whole notion, and it's weird because in 2022, you'd think that the Newt Gingrich method, which was we're going to break that old boy network and expose anybody we can of any kind of fraud, you'd almost think that that's what the status quo is now.
But instead, there's still the money, right?
Some weird thing where, like, even Nancy Pelosi herself won't.
They've started it, right?
There was going to be a law that prohibited Congress people from investing in stocks.
And it just completely and utterly died after one little announcement.
It's really strange to me that that's the one thing that's the leftovers from a distant past, I suppose.
Well, and you look at these groups, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, any of these disparate militias and paramilitary groups, which have arsenals now, they have training, they have organization, they've been put in touch with international authoritarian right-wing movements.
It's not that they're like holding GoFundMes.
You know, it's not like they're, like, having bake sales.
They're, like, going down to the local elementary school, and they're like, buy our brownie bars.
We want to take over the government.
Like, if we were to expose the dark money that takes care of all of this, a lot of these things would die on the vine, right?
Because they need...
A lot of the people who fund a lot of this stuff, they need the covert representation of their actions.
They need to both own the government, which you would call legal, technically, and you also need the extra legal, right?
Because none of these people want to leave anything to chance, right?
That's the way it always is.
You want to hedge your bets at all given times.
So you're exactly right.
They do not want to crack open that nut.
They do not want to see what's happening on the inside.
I will tell you, um, man, I'm treading very dangerously close to giving up sources here.
So I'm gonna, I got excited, Nick.
I got really, really excited for a second.
I had to pull that back a little bit.
I would say, That within the January 6th Commission's report, which is going to be pretty big, it's going to be pretty loaded with a lot of information, my guess is less than 10% of that report is going to concern the dark money that helped fund groups like Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, plus also the Trump and also the legal parts of this.
My guess, though, is it's going to be in there.
It's going to be the beginnings of a trail.
And I would say that because I've talked to a few people who are intending to try and write this thing in such a way as to lead a trail.
The question is whether or not anybody cares.
The question is where anybody wants to listen.
Because a lot of the people in the media who should be following this, they work for some of the people who would fund things like this.
Or they get money in advertisements from people who would fund certain things like this.
The political class is lousy with their donations.
and they work hand and fist with them.
So yeah, if you could start to crack open the corruption that you're talking about, you could start to take some of these things out of the equation.
I'll tell you over the next couple of years, it would be fantastic to not have these militias and paramilitary groups.
I don't know, Nick, taking down energy grids or going in front of drag time story hours and threatening people with AR-15s.
It would be fantastic.
It would be awesome.
And to keep another January 6th from happening, that would be necessary.
But there are mostly the people in power and mostly the people who should be covering this and investigating it.
There is a lack of desire to actually go after those people.
And the other point I think you're making under the surface here is that the worry has to be that the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers link up.
Yes.
By that linkage, we get January 6th.
And so the more groups that do this, the more dangerous it becomes.
And that's really the other issue there, where back in the day, they were very fringe.
They didn't really connect with each other because they didn't have the internet, for instance.
And now they do.
That is what is concerning, because now, you know, a hundred guys in the woods drinking beer and shooting firearms, you know, suddenly that becomes a thousand, right?
Heavily armed.
Then that is the thing.
It's like everybody still thinks about this as if, These paramilitary groups are just a bunch of good old boys out in the woods in like rural Michigan.
You know what I mean?
Like a bunch of guys who are just, like you said, drinking a bunch of beer, rigging up dynamite or whatever, doing their thing.
But the really frightening thing is how much of the infrastructure of the federal government is now involved in this.
We're talking about law enforcement officers, but we're also talking the Department of Homeland Security.
It needs to go away like we have created a monster with those people and they are just they are not only reactionary, but they are on the other side.
So if you want to take a look at a January 6th, There's a difference between seeing a bunch of Proud Boys, which, like you said, started out as like a drinking group, a bunch of Oath Keepers who are former military people, right?
Now, all of a sudden, you're talking about these ranks swelling.
You're talking about law enforcement or you're talking about federal authorities looking across the line, and they're not looking at a bunch of people, a bunch of hillbillies out in the woods, Nick.
They're looking at their friends.
They're looking at their colleagues.
And that's when these sort of revolutionary actions start to take off, is when you look into the eyes of someone across the way and you feel like they're part of your struggle.
And that's the direction that we're heading in, unless we end up heading this thing off at the pass.
And you mentioned why they're not covering this in the media.
Well, we have to talk about this for at least a second is that some of these media members are now being banned on Twitter and they can't get their message out.
You know, as we saw this past weekend, Trump, sorry, Musk had a little bit of a bender and it's all connected because you already mentioned that you saw Musk with Jerry Kushner in Qatar watching the, that's where it was, right?
It was in Qatar.
What's the soccer thing?
World Cup.
By the way, I walked in at like 88 minutes in.
It was perfect.
I sat down, I watched the end.
It was the most ribbiting thing I've ever seen.
I love it.
I just love the biggest sporting event in the world.
You're like, you know, the thing with the ball.
Yeah, world something.
So but but I found it there's all these things are a confluence of events because we know Kushner got the $2 billion, $2 billion for his grift in the White House, and then they rewarded him for no reason or unmeritoriously.
But you know, now Musk is doing a poll saying maybe I should step down and being the head of Twitter.
And you know it's because the Saudis are the biggest investors in Twitter that helped him buy it.
And they're upset that this whole thing is falling apart.
And they're telling him he needs to go and stop doing what he's doing.
But meanwhile, if you criticize him and, you know, he made up a whole story about how someone was, you know, he got doxxed and the mother of his child was accosted or whatever.
None of this makes any sense.
This is all about him trying to shut it down.
I suspect he did it right before the election thinking he could have more of an effect on the midterms, but didn't quite get there.
And so these are all related.
Now I feel like the guy with all the things in the back on the wall with the strings connecting things.
But this one, I think, is not a hard conspiracy to follow.
Man, I feel so bad for Elon.
If only he had the money for personal protection.
And if only he had the resources in order to make sure that even though he's one of the most famous people in the world, he has safety.
I feel so bad for him.
Also, on the poll in terms of who should step down, my immediate thought was, it's a trap.
And obviously, he is going to keep track of everybody who said that he should step down.
That is a very ready-made enemies list.
I'm sorry, but it just... You did not vote, I'm assuming.
I'm not going to answer that one way or another.
All right.
But I also, I, yeah, I voted before I thought of it.
I immediately just, oh, and I was like, oh, I'm screwed.
But also, like, you have to understand that, like, even someone like Elon Musk, you're exactly right, has to run from a bone saw every now and then.
I mean, as we saw with Bankman Freed, you start biting the hand of wealthy people, that's when the hammer comes down, you know?
Yeah.
And the whole thing is such a massive mess, and it obscures so much important stuff that we need to talk about, and it just becomes this passion play where the media has to continue covering it.
Meanwhile, they're not talking... I'm sorry, but dark money, it's not a sexy thing to talk about.
It just isn't.
Like, you know, we talk about it on this show and we talk about the implications of it, but, like, that's a hard thing to fill up a cable news hour with.
That's a hard thing to, like, you know, just go after and go after and go after.
It's become so ingrained.
I want to talk to you about this.
It's more versus Harper case in the Supreme Court, which it's now coming out over $90 million in dark money has been poured into this push.
More Harper, of course, is the North Carolina case in which they're trying to get independent legislature theory passed through the Supreme Court.
For those who don't know it, independent legislature theory is the idea that basically every state on its own merits can kind of run its own elections the way that they want without basically any sort of federal oversight.
The background to this... Nick, this is fun!
This has its origins in the election of 2000 and a little Supreme Court case called Bush v. Gore in which William Rehnquist Just went wild and just started basically creating new constitutional ideas that there's absolutely no background to and could possibly be like an almost fatal blow to democracy in the United States.
90 million dollars.
It's almost like the wealthy and this dark money phenomenon, it's almost like they're very, very interested in destroying democracy.
Well, it's almost like Supreme Court justices are going to holiday parties at these people's houses who are funding the $90 million.
No, there's no way.
There's no way that happens.
Right out in the open, too.
They don't give a shit anymore.
Well, it's funny because these people were railing in the 2000s about the activist courts out there.
And the only reason why they're activists is because they're making decisions they don't like.
That's it.
If they make them like they want to, they're not activists anymore.
They're doing what they're supposed to be doing.
But there's so much precedent right now for the federal government overseeing elections.
We also saw in 2010 that Roberts decided that you didn't have to have the same kind of protections anymore for the southern states, even though as soon as they get rescinded those the southern states started implementing the same bullshit laws they had tried before to disenfranchise black voters.
So the idea that you have these originalists who would willingly on the Supreme Court, they would they'd willingly take away some of their power, right?
They're going to say we can't weigh in on these states elections anymore is crazy because there's hundreds of years where we they have done that and it's clear the founders realize this because remember A lot of the states didn't want to be part of the United States, right Jared?
They needed a lot of assurances before they decided to join this fledgling experiment that we have.
Can you remind me why states' rights is really code?
What's that code for again?
Slavery.
Right.
So you have to realize that even though we're far away from having slavery legal in this country, it still is in the background, right?
It's still there.
Is it ridiculous that in 2022, why else are they wanting control of district shapes, right?
It's because they're still trying to do districts that are disenfranchising people of color.
They're still trying to do it.
And we have a Supreme Court that's not only originalist in an idiotic way, but they're helping.
It's crazy.
By the way, this isn't just like regular sort of like leftist talking about white supremacy in the abstract.
North Carolina, they have the goods on how this redistricting happened.
And I'm talking about the people who did it in the first place.
It was very obvious that this was done to disenfranchise black voters.
That all of this had a very, very specific white supremacist background to it.
There is a lot to talk about here, and we're still unsure exactly what's going to happen in this Moore v. Harper case.
We also know that some of the greatest hits are happening here.
The Claremont Institute!
John Eastman!
You know, we're talking about some of the biggest assholes who have tried to use MAGA and Trumpism to, you know, create their own elitist, reactionary, oppressive society.
We don't know where this is going.
We also know that so far in this conversation, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, those wonderful, wonderful jurists, that even they have expressed, and who knows if they mean it, who knows if they're simply trying to gesture in one way or another and cover their asses, they have expressed concern about the possibility of independent legislature theory.
I was talking about this last night, Nick, If you just start saying that states can do whatever they want and basically can't have any review, that's like unlocking the nuclear bomb.
You know what I mean?
That's basically like, well, what happens in a blue state?
Do we just basically create a United States of America with an electoral college where every election basically comes down to one state that flip-flops its legislature from one election to the next?
Because I have to tell you, that's not a great strategy.
You know, like if you are going to go down that road where you're basically creating permanent monopolies in terms of parties, that's a mess.
But I will say, if you look back on Bush v. Gore, I'm sure you remember this too, when they handed down that decision, Bush v. Gore, when they stole the presidency from Al Gore on behalf of George W. Bush, the respectable Republicans, they said, this is a one-time only deal.
You cannot use this as precedent.
And why did they do that?
Because they didn't want an election stolen from a Republican.
In this case, if I had to put money on it right now, I would say that this would be another one of those situations where you go ahead and you push a version of independent legislature theory that has been tested and it has been focused in order to try and have the maximum amount of power swayed and still have the ability to win over certain states.
I don't know.
What are your readings on this?
Well, just in case it's not clear what exactly we're talking about, basically they're trying to say a couple different things.
They want to take away judicial review completely from the size and shape of the congressional districts in each state.
That's the big one.
And, you know, the issue here isn't necessarily that that could happen because in North Carolina, they struck it down.
They said you have to redraw these.
This is ridiculous.
But here's the interesting thing is the people on, let's say, our side of the thing, it's saying, of course, you need a judicial overview.
Well, what happens if a state Supreme Court agrees with these ridiculous lies?
And we've seen that, too.
That's really what's interesting about this is that we like, you know, there is there is a really hard way to figure out how we're supposed to do this, because even if we want like the Supreme Court to be able to weigh in, guess what?
They're going to probably uphold any of these gerrymandered districts that are horrible anyway.
So, um, it's, it's really concerning in a lot of different ways that you take away the judicial overview of these, uh, oversight of these things.
But then again, I can guarantee you there's plenty of States that have a State Supreme Court that would allow them to do this.
So we are in trouble here, but this is why the Republic is in trouble because, and it's always what the beginning of fascistic, uh, governments is when the judiciary becomes a real problem here.
And that's where we are.
Well, and by the way, authoritarians and fascists, they love making their authoritarianism and fascism legal.
Right.
They love it.
That's what they do.
They go ahead and they cook up whatever they need to go ahead and give themselves legal standing to carry this out.
That's one of the, kind of one of the grossest parts about all of it, is they go ahead and they make it legal.
You know, they'll do it by breaking your arm and holding your family hostage and through, like, you know, really, really dangerous means.
But they go ahead and they make the crime legal.
And in this case, we have a stolen Supreme Court.
We have a judiciary that has absolutely been taken over again by dark money.
I mean, listen, you don't spend $90 million if you're not expecting to get an incredible return on it.
Right, which is the thing.
They want to dismantle democracy and make it possible where you have these states that are never ever actually challenged and you, I don't know, you gain like a 40% chance in the next presidential election like over where you were in the past.
I don't know where this thing is going.
I know that it's horseshit and I know that there's actual no legal standing for this thing, but it's also a question of how this conservative court that was stolen for this express purpose, whether or not they're going to go ahead and deliver this Or if they're going to let it build over time.
I think that's one of the bigger questions.
I believe they will.
They have enough votes, I think, right now to pass it and allow the states to do this.
Now, the other part of this Moore v. Harper is the electors that the states get to choose.
And obviously, the rule now, the law is that they have to represent the will of the people based on a popular vote.
Well, not anymore if the states get to, without any judicial review, choose whoever rando they want to if it's controlled by a GOP.
That is a huge bigger problem.
And we know that this is part of the plan from January 6th because they created a bunch of fake electors from several different states and they actually sent them in.
I think some of those guys are going to get prosecuted, I think.
And that would hopefully dissuade that from going further.
But I have to imagine if the Supreme Court rules in favor of Moore v. Harper and allows the state legislatures to only control electors, then whoever gets indicted for what they did in 2020 maybe gets let off on that because they changed the law.
Either way, there won't be anybody to dissuade them from doing it again in the future.
And that is probably the bigger part of this, much less, you know, congressional districts change, they move all the Yes.
That's exactly right.
and not all that stuff every 10 years based on the census.
But when you were talking about electors who are not going to listen to the will of the people, now we're really into fascistic stuff.
And again, like I've been telling you this for like the last year, authoritarian governments happen democratically.
Yes, that's exactly right.
And this in this case, I don't know.
There's a lot on the board.
There just is.
I mean, the question is, how bold do they want to be and how fast do they want to unfurl this thing?
I think 2023 is going to be an integral year.
I really think that what is starting to come out, not just in terms of like rulings like this, but where the pieces get set up on the board for 2024.
And it's going to be, I don't want to say quiet, right?
Because obviously we don't live in a quiet world.
But I do think it's going to quietly, probably come together in a way that a lot of people aren't expecting.
I don't know.
What are you thinking about 2023 so far?
Um, I think we kind of, we're in between elections, right?
Before 2024.
I don't know.
I kind of feel like it's, well, I think we're going to be dominated by the Trump stuff, by the indictments and all that stuff.
I think that's going to end up being the thing that we talk about more than anything else.
And, uh, and probably more Musk bullshit.
And I think politically, I think it'll be sort of this weird, you know, um, downtime for a while, uh, before everything ramps up for their presidential election.
So, um, I, I think it'll be an interesting time, but also probably politically a little bit calm.
I completely disagree.
I think next year is going to be wild.
I think it's going to be a pretty big free-for-all.
Well, give me specifically which issues.
I think Congress will be pretty quiet, but in terms of the pieces on the board coming together, I think you're going to be watching like the oligarchs like Musk are going to be getting absolutely wild.
I think you're going to see a lot of disturbances in terms of populism versus fascism.
And I think that this, not just the Ukrainian thing, but like the building sort of Discontent around the world is going to lead to a lot.
I think 2023 is going to be pretty wild.
I think this more Harper thing is going to be a part of it as well.
Yeah.
OK, I can see all that.
I just feel like there might be a delay, like, you know, once by the time the decision comes out and they actually have an effect.
But I agree with what you said there.
I said Musk is going to dominate the stuff.
I think the Trump stuff is going to dominate.
We'll probably have some interesting stuff or maybe maybe Trump to Sanders.
They're not they're going to dance around each other and not really get into the ring.
Yeah, I think they want to delay that as much as they can, which is too bad, because that would be good theater.
Be careful what you wish for.
What I do wish for, am I the only one, like, I'm hoping that the video leaks of, like, the January 6th committee rap party, I want to see, like, Liz Cheney doing shots off of someone's, you know, whatever, like, you know what I mean?
Like, I feel like that must be, that's gonna be a wild one.
I gotta tell you, I don't think that that committee likes each other very much right now.
I think that the struggles over how this stuff has been presented and how it's going to be dealt with, I think there are a few people in there who are getting along pretty well, and then I think there are other contingents, and again, I'm not going to give out my sources here, are pretty pissed off today.
Yeah.
Well, you know what happens when the band starts playing and they, you know, they, you know, start doing some shots together and the liquor is flowing.
Like, you never know.
You never know.
So I'm waiting for that footage to leak.
All right, everybody.
So we're gonna we're gonna come back on the weekend or this Friday.
Thank you again for all of your support.
You're the absolute best.
Again, wishing you and yours just a fantastic holiday.
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We appreciate you so much.
But if you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?